I've been having some thoughts and wanted to write them down.
This weekend, I wore one of my "inflammatory liberal t-shirts," as a friend calls them, to my kids' soccer games.
One of the other moms - who seems like a great, kind, thoughtful person, came up to me and said, "I love your shirt. Good for you for wearing that here. I have a couple like that too, but I don't wear them out, because you never know what people's politics are, and I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable...." At the time, I responded, "Ha, not me! Come at me, bro!" But I got thinking about it later, and basically what she was saying was, "I don't want to make racist people feel uncomfortable about their racism. Because, you know, aside from not liking brown people, they seem like totally reasonable folks. Why ruin their Saturday afternoon?"
Oh, and before anyone responds "Just because they're anti-immigrant doesn't mean they're racist." Yeah, it kinda does. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never once heard anyone who's making the "Go to the back of the line/Just file your papers and do it the right way!" argument lamenting the illegal immigrants from Canada, or Russia, or China, for that matter. I knew an entire rugby team comprised of white dudes from New Zealand and South Africa who'd overstayed their visas and had no intention of returning home. I never saw ICE banging down their doors. Hell, there's a good chance FLOTUS was an "illegal immigrant" at some point and clearly Trumpsters don't have a problem with that. There seems to be a direct correlation between the GOP's anti-immigrant rhetoric and the amount of melanin in said immigrant population's skin. (Also also, immigrants are better educated and commit less crime than the US-born population. So they can just stop with the terrorists and bad hombre business.)
In any event. My point is. Making bigots uncomfortable is THE WHOLE POINT. Use your privilege! If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." - Desmond Tutu.
In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
"What hurts the victim most is the not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.... The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
So get out there, my friends, with your connections, your voices, your Facebook pages, your bumper stickers, your inflammatory liberal t-shirts. Let's Make Racists (and misogynists and homophobes and bigots of all sorts) Uncomfortable Again! MRUA!
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