Amid racist tumult in Kansas and D.C., a chance to rebuild with open eyes

Yahoo

26-03-2025

Members of the Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington, D.C., in the 1920s as the revived group flexed its political muscle. (Library of Congress)
Extremists in our Statehouse and in Washington, D.C., have busied themselves with rolling back decades of civil rights gains.
In Topeka, they quashed legally cast ballots by eliminating the three-day grace period and admitting that if they'd had their druthers, they'd eliminate all early voting.
In the nation's capital, extremists have attacked Navajo 'code talkers,' the Pima Indian soldier who took part of the iconic photo of American forces planting a flag on Iwo Jima, and baseball barrier-breaker Jackie Robinson.
The president's administration has lifted a ban on segregated facilities for federal contractors and has deleted more than 90 links to Congressional Medal of Honor winners of color. It feels so very bleak.
But as ugly as this seems, it also means the charade of societal equality for people of color is mercifully over. It is now clear that a majority of Americans either harbor racial biases or don't consider them serious enough to actively oppose. The question is settled. We can stop pretending. These most recent actions demonstrate that the racism they claim does not exist, really does.
These developments upend more than 50 years of denials about our racial caste system.
Back in 1968, President Johnson's Kerner Commission wrote this in a groundbreaking report: 'White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.'
A carefully orchestrated counter-campaign of deny, delay and deflect followed.
We caught glimpses of it in Lee Atwater's infamous 1981 interview about Nixon's 'Southern Strategy,' the plan by which Presidents Nixon and Regan converted Dixie Democrats.
'You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N*****, n*****, n*****. By 1968 you can't say 'n*****' — that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites. … 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N*****N, n*****.' '
A common strategy from these extremists is attacking their opponent's greatest strength, and in this case, it's the hundreds of years of history demonstrating that the nation's founders used race as one of its organizing principles. It is a tacit admission of what that side fears most — truth.
This remains manifestly true, but the current administration continues the ruse.
'We have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and, indeed, the private sector and our military,' the president said during his recent speech to the joint session of Congress. 'And our country will be woke no longer.'
So, the victims of hundreds of years of tyranny are the tyrants?
Black median household wealth stood at $24,100 in 2019. White median household wealth stood at $188,200. Black unemployment has remained roughly twice that of the white unemployment and expectedly, Black people remain disproportionately impoverished.
Diversity policies represent mere remedies for historic inequality. Ending them assumes the society has achieved social equality. This is ending the remedy without addressing the central issue of inequality. It leaves the unfair system untouched so that those who've always had an advantage maintain their edge and punishes those already behind.
How can 60 years of half-hearted equality efforts address 335 years of enslavement and segregation? They can't. That span lasted from 1619 to 1954. Racists killed Emmett Till the following year. The Montgomery Bus Boycott also began in 1955.
This is like debating climate change. We know it exists, but powerful voices need it not to, so this odd dance around the truth continues.
Wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in his latest book, 'The Message,' 'Some people's credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want.'
A cruel pettiness remains a part of this dance.
In the past, towns passed laws saying Black people couldn't play chess or checkers with white people or that Black drivers couldn't pass white drivers in traffic or use the same pay phones. Today, it is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatening to drum Black people out of the military because of razor bumps or pseudofoliculitis.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to this sad realization near the end of his life after years of fighting for equality. King said he'd taken many white people at their word that they wanted to end discrimination.
'White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap,' King said in his last book, 'Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?' 'Essentially, it seeks to only to make it less painful, less obvious, but in most respects, to maintain it.'
When I led the Kansas African American Museum, we received the donation of a Ku Klux Klan robe and mask (more than once), found by family members of a deceased patriarch. The family would not fill out the provenance documents. They didn't want any lasting connection to their horrifying finds.
We eventually put the robes on a mannequin for an exhibition on racial terror. A guest, there for other business, left shaken by the display. I decided to never put it out again.
The guest said that as a boy in Mississippi, his father left him in the car to run a quick errand as Klansmen gathered nearby. His father gave him a haunting command.
'Don't look them in the eye.'
By staring too long, they may think you know them and then, they start reaching for torches and rifles.
This represented the real power of the so-called 'invisible empire.' With faces hidden, people never knew if the judge, or the policeman, or their doctor held membership in the Klan. This is how racism has operated, under sheets of denial.
But now that the pretense that racism doesn't exist has dropped, we absolutely must look these people and practices in the eye. The nation has an opportunity to vomit up all the bilious myths and stereotypes that continue to threaten our stability as a nation.
We no longer have to pretend. This is no longer a theory. It's out in the open now. We don't have to hide.
And there's an incredible blessing in all of this — if we face it.
Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.