What and Where is Home?? “Americans obtained every square inch of land they now occupy at the expense of Indigenous Peoples. Similarly, Minnesotans obtained every acre of Minnesota at the expense of Indigenous Peoples…paying approximately a penny per acre for a 35 million acre cession.” (fromWhat Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland.)
The DIsmantling Racism Working Group Justice Night 2009 featured the film Traces of the Trade. In the feature documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine cousins retrace the Triangle Trade and gain a powerful new perspective on the black/white divide. We highly recommend this film.
Despite nation’s strides, hate groups grow in number
By Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist
There are now 926 hate groups in this country.
Take a second and consider that number. It represents an increase of more than 50 percent since 2000. And by “hate groups,” I don’t mean guys in their bathrobes who go online and pretend their followers are legion.
No, I mean actual Klan cells, Neo-Nazi sects, gay-bashing “churches,” cliques of black separatists, white nationalists, nativists, racist skinheads and other merchants of venom who meet, plot and recruit in all 48 contiguous states. (Alaska and Hawaii have no known hate groups.)
Nine hundred 26 of them. The number is a record.
We learn all this from the Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org) in Mont-gomery, Ala., which has, since its founding in 1971, become a leading authority on the business of hate. According to the latest Intelligence Report, the SPLC’s quarterly magazine, that business is booming.
And maybe you wonder how this can be. How can hate enjoy such phenomenal growth in a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president? The answer is that we are a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president. Because if those things strike you as signs of progress, well, they are signs of apocalypse to those who believe only white, male Christians are fit to lead.
But that’s not the only reason for the increase. SPLC also cites the debate over illegal immigration that has dominated much of this decade.
Finally, there is the economy. When things get tough, people become more receptive to the idea that their miseries are the fault of some alien other. So the stock market, too, is implicated. Hate rises when the Dow falls.
I imagine the SPLC findings land like cold water in the faces of those who took Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency as proof that the nation was finally cured of the sickness of hate. The truth, I’m afraid, is more nuanced than that.
Maybe it helps to think in terms of alcoholism, a disease that can, with treatment, be contained, controlled, put into remission — but never cured.
Hate is something like that, a fact some of us have never quite understood. Such folks are convinced there is a goal line out there somewhere, which, once crossed, will allow the nation to declare itself cured. And once cured, we’ll never have to grapple with hatred again.
But it doesn’t work that way.
In a nation so deeply riven by culture, race and religion, there is always a temptation to hate somebody, to blame some group of others for the job you lost, the crime committed against you, the fear and uncertainty you feel. There is a simplicity and a seductiveness to it that are all too easily mistaken for righteousness.
So there is no “cure” for a nation’s hate. There is only an ongoing process of getting better, not unlike the alcoholic who must daily earn his sobriety anew. This explosion of hate is a reminder of what happens when we forget that, when we are undeservedly sanguine about how enlightened we’ve become.
It is said that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Well, that’s the going rate for tolerance, too.
Write to Leonard Pitts at lpitts@miamiherald.com.
