Marchers with signs at the March on Washington, 1963. Photo by Unseen Histories, Unsplash
Marchers with signs at the March on Washington, 1963. Photo by Unseen Histories, Unsplash
We cannot profess to be anti-racist and be silent right now. We either need to find and raise our voices in opposition or admit that we really aren’t all that interested in equality.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
You realize what’s happening right now, don’t you?
You have to see it at this point, right?
I mean, they’re not hiding it anymore.
This repugnant, racist President, his white supremacist party, and the soulless bigots he’s polluted the highest Court of our nation with aren’t even trying to pretend this is anything else but the desperation of morally inverted human beings who realize time and progress are coming to swallow them up.
They’ve read the writing on the wall ever since November of 2024. They’ve seen the changing demographics of this nation. They’ve witnessed the wild swings in the state and local elections away from them and their Draconian fever dreams. And they see the plummeting approval ratings of a deranged, lame duck President whose narcissism, recklessness, and incompetence are collapsing our economy, terrorizing vulnerable people, alienating our allies, and throwing the entire planet into chaos.
These dying white dinosaurs see the asteroid of humanity’s evolution coming for them, and in a naked act of panicked self-preservation, they are firing off one final Hail Mary salvo to try and stave off political extinction.
Republicans are furiously dismantling the provisions and protections of the Voting Rights Act for one reason: they assume that white voters will save them.
They believe that if they can silence the voices and the votes of Black people in this country, they will be able to drag this nation back to Jim Crow segregation unabated. They are banking on the hypothesis that if they legislate and gerrymander historically racial minorities out of the electoral process, they’ll have no remaining obstacles to a pre-Civil-Rights-Movement United States. It turns out the alleged “greatness” MAGA has been pining for over the past ten years is a gated community of ignorant, phobic white people.
The Republican Party is going all-in on the assumption that people who share their pigmentation also share their corroded hearts; that we will amen their repulsive aspirations and cosign their depraved delusions.
And we’re going to have to be the ones to reclaim this nation for the disparate multitude it was always supposed to belong to.
This existential crisis facing us is not a Black problem, or a Latino problem, or a brown-skinned immigrants problem. This is a decent-white-people-who-are-sick-to-their-fuckin’-stomachs-of-white-racists, problem. The rights of people of color must be the hill we take and are willing to die on, lest our fragile, imperiled Republic dies instead.
These unapologetically racist machinations and shameful civil rights regressions authored by our low-melanin brethren, as alarming as they are, are an invitation to the rest of us. We have a golden moment to declare our conscientious objections to their uncivil war on people of color, to forcefully and permanently bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, and to send these sneering supremacists back to the hell that they came from once and for all.
And this all must be done now. We cannot squander time navel-gazing, engaging in prolonged lamentations, or trying to predict how bad things will get. We need to throw ourselves into the trenches of local politics. We need to leverage our social circles, economic resources, and social media platforms to denounce white Christian nationalism. And perhaps, most importantly, we need to get into the faces of the white people in our orbits and let them know that these are the moments to declare who they truly are.
We cannot profess to be anti-racist and be silent right now. We either need to find and raise our voices in opposition or admit that we really aren’t all that interested in equality, that our activism has been performative, that our convictions aren’t worth much to us.
Because there will be costs to this work, white friends. We will face separations in our families, disruptions to our social circles, disconnections from our church friends, and relational turbulence we’ve never experienced. There will be financial repercussions, the loss of opportunities, and the dissolution of partnerships. We may face the emotional and perhaps even physical violence of people who look like us but bear no internal resemblance.
We’re going to lose something as we confront the racists around us, but it’s a hell of a lot better than losing our Democracy or our souls.
The Republican Party believes that other white people will save them.
Instead, we must be the ones to defeat and destroy them.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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