One of the lessons taught to me was that “God don’t like ugly.” When we would screw up our faces and frown, or pout, or say mean things to or about each other, she would admonish us, reminding us that God saw and heard everything and that God didn’t like …ugly.
If that is the truth, then God must be horribly disappointed with white supremacist thinking and acting. In the quest to hold onto their power, adherents to the principles of white supremacy have stepped on and over people for decades. Black and brown people have been the obvious and most mentioned targets, but so have women and others whom the power structure has decided are not worthy to be treated with respect, dignity, and fairness.
In his book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, author Edwin Black notes that “throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized.” (p. xv)
The goal was to create a “superior Nordic race.”
Not only one’s race or ethnicity deemed to be grounds for sterilizing them or worse, those who were poor were also believed to be genetically defective, something that the scientists working to find the way to make the superior race thought so troubling that they thought it their duty to figure out ways to keep them from passing on that particular deficiency to further generations.
From the beginning, white supremacist ideology and the practices and policies which it birthed was devoid of morality. In spite of believing that they were sent to the shores of America to create a morally superior nation, their white supremacist mindsets created instead a society which sought to destroy those whom God had created, and with their destruction, the capacity to treat others as they would like to be treated – a Biblical principle. The most religious, ironically, too often led those who put their cultural beliefs in front of moral standards set by the very Bible they professed to follow.
What we see is an eruption of latent hatred which is a direct byproduct of white supremacist thinking. Led and stoked by the rhetoric of the current administration, those who believe in the rightness of white supremacy are assaulting and insulting any number of people who don’t fit their idea of what a “superior race” should be.
White supremacist thinking dissolves the capacity, it seems, to be civil, polite, and respectful of other human beings. The image of the president throwing paper towels to people in Puerto Rico after the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria is an image which sticks in my mind. Calling African countries “shithole countries” is yet another, and debasing Rep. Elijah Cummings is only the most recent example of the arrogance of thought which white supremacist thinking has created.
The conditions in the detention centers on the nation’s southern borders are yet another example of the moral bankruptcy of white supremacists, an action which in this country is not new. The Japanese were thrown into detention during and following World War II, and long before that, Native Americans were methodically murdered by whites who believed they had the moral right to do it, and later, believed they were within their rights to tear little African children away from their parents as greedy capitalists sought to purchase human beings for their own economic gain.
Recently, a Conservative talk show host, irritated that Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel to protest the treatment of African Americans in this country, expressed her further disappointment when other athletes publicly supported him. Her white supremacist arrogance led her to say to LeBron James and others, “shut up and dribble.” (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/19/587097707/laura-ingraham-told-lebron-james-to-shutup-and-dribble-he-went-to-the-hoop) White supremacist thinking includes thinking that those who are oppressed should be grateful for whatever they get in this country. There is no morality in that mindset.
It’s all very, very ugly.
White supremacists are morally bankrupt because they have lost the capacity and perhaps the will to feel the pain of other human beings. When a 10-year-old black child was arrested because he threw a ball during a game of dodge ball that hit a white child in the head, I shuddered. (https://www.theroot.com/dodgeballwhileblack-10-year-old-black-boy-charged-wit-1836807365.) The charges have been dropped but the damage to this child has already occurred.
One has to be morally bankrupt to not care about the plight of the poor and “the least of these,” whom the Jesus of the Christian Bible tells believers to support. There is little concern for the poor by those who believe that the poor are inherently defective and are in the way of the creation of a master Nordic race.
White supremacy has been a poison in America since its inception. It was “baked into the cake,” as some have said, and one of the ingredients is moral decadence. We see white men in power now doing all they can to hold onto that power, at the expense of the lives and well-being of the masses. A country where the masses are ignored is not a country which will ultimately survive.
Not even America.
God don’t like ugly.
A candid observation…
Candid Observations 