By Rozella Hardin
Editorial Director
It seems that we are fighting the Civil War all over.
All at once we are touchy about our color, about history, our past, and our roots.
Consider how much things have changed. Remember Robert Byrd? He was the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and a liberal Democrat. He was also a member, in his younger days, of the Ku Klux Klan — an officer. He was a Kleagle and an Exalted Cyclops.
Remember Hugo Black? He was also a liberal Democrat serving for 10 years in the Senate and 34 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. He also joined the Klan in his younger days and never exactly apologized for doing so. “I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes,” he once said, by way of explanation.
All that was back in the days before racism had come undone as a core feature, if not a basic requirement, of being white in America. The fact that this has changed is worth acknowledging.
What begins to emerge with increasing clarity is how little this country has atoned for its past. No, a shrug and an apology aren’t quite enough.
The governor of Tennessee wants to remove the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Tennessee Capitol Building. Forrest was a Confederate general and slave owner. We can remove the bust, but we can’t erase our history.
Right here in Carter County, we had slave owners, and our town was divided over civil rights. The Civil War even divided the Methodist Church. We had a Southern Methodist Church and a Northern Methodist Church, and it was not until the 1930s that the two congregations came together as one again.
But it isn’t just about blacks, it’s all races and colors. Just this week the President of the United States told four ladies of other nationalities — all serving in Congress — to go back to where they came from.
It seems that if you are not white, you don’t belong in this country.
What we need to remind ourselves is that these four women were elected by people in their districts to serve in the U.S. Congress. They may look differently, dress differently, talk differently, and even think differently, but they are Americans.
We may not agree with their thinking, but many of us don’t always agree with President Trump, nor do we with Nancy Pelosi and many of the Democratic candidates running for president, nor even with our own congressman on some issues. There was a time where President George Bush was not well-liked, nor was his father, George H.W. Bush, but we think they served our country well and gave their best.
The undoing of American racism has been a long, fierce, painful process, and we’re hardly beyond it. From our prison complex, to police shootings, to voter purges aimed at people of color to Muslim bans, border cages and the brutal thuggery of ICE, racism still rules. Standing in moral judgment of the past won’t, in and of itself, heal the harm we’re inflicting on the future.
As long as we look at the color of people and allow it to define who they are, we will be a divided people. We must not allow the color of a person’s skin nor the country they came from define who that person is. We are Americans — free Americans, free to act differently, dress differently, worship differently, and think differently. But, that does not make any of us bad. It is what is within our hearts that makes us good or bad.