by Ernie McCray
Racism is showing itself
during these most worrisome times
in a form
I’ve never seen until now.
I mean it used to be
that white supremacists
would do harm every now and then
to some Black or Brown folks
and non-white immigrant folks
and then there would be a lull
in their racial shenanigans
and society would plug on.
But those days are surely gone
because nowadays
racism is all up in our face,
all day every day,
in full view,
a mainstay on social media
and TV
and on podcasts
and on the screens of smartphones
and in print,
mainly due to a Grand Dragon kind of president
who spends a great deal of his time
shucking and jiving and lying
about undocumented immigrants
being animals
and then deporting them to countries
they’ve never been
where their lives are in danger;
tampering with African American’s voting rights
and histories
whenever and how ever he can;
attacking anyone, no matter their color,
journalists,
and bloggers,
and educators,
and protestors,
and lawyers,
and comedians
who dare to openly speak negatively of him.
And then, when you wonder
if his political sins would ever end,
he makes a martyr of a victim of an assassination
who is as racist as they come,
a bigot who attracted millions of young folks
to the “MAGA” world’s style of
neo-nationalism,
deeming him as a “Great American Hero”
worthy of the nation’s flag being flown half-staff
in his memory,
and a Presidential Medal of Freedom
in his honor.
But there’s something
white supremacists just don’t get
when it comes to what they’re up against:
the reality that
the people they’re trying to dehumanize
and eliminate
are moved by love,
by a light inside of us
that won’t allow us to ever give up
in the struggle
to make right a country’s wrongs,
a spirit of overcoming that was passed down to us
and will be passed on
to future generations.
Such a legacy of hope
ensures that ideals of anyone being superior
to other human beings
can never win.
As Martin Luther King put it:
“The arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends towards justice.”
