Mumbled oaths: What to do about kids and the Pledge?

I had heard it was making a resurgence during the Trump years.

For a couple of decades, I enjoyed entertaining people in other countries with my tales of Cold-War-era American schoolroom machinations, when we were required to stand and solemnly pledge allegiance to our flag and then practice hiding under our desks for shelter from Russian missiles.

Creative Commons image by Charlie Marshall

Since Trump took office, I have heard increasing reports that old Pledge statutes have been revived and more and more schools require the recitation of the oath again.

With one of my kids going to school in the US this year, that reality has hit home. My daughter is attending school in Oregon this year, while living with her grandmother, and scarcely a week went by before a note came home from the teacher directing her guardians to explain the importance of the Pledge to her.

My mother’s response was, “Well, it might be an issue, since she is a dual citizen.”

That wasn’t my first inclination, but she does have a point there. If one did believe in the Pledge, wouldn’t it be an issue that a kid clearly couldn’t pledge all loyalty to only one of their two nations? I wonder if school officials in rural Eastern Oregon even know that a person can have more than one nationality. But I frankly doubt they care, since back in my day they always insisted that immigrant children and atheist children swear to the flag and under God, regardless of reason or feeling.

I am sure it was controversial back in the 1980s too… somewhere. But it wasn’t controversial in rural Eastern Oregon where I grew up. There was no public voice of dissent and thus no controversy.

At that time, there was no possibility of open challenge or opting out in school. But there was also no question that my family were dissidents. Some of my earliest memories involve standing on a sheet of black plastic in the sunshine while adult hippies cut out around my shadow to use as a template for chalking onto the streets during nighttime direct-action protests against nuclear weapons.

Some will always claim that anyone critical of their government, must “hate their own country.” But we didn’t hate America. We just didn’t think America was much different from any other part of the globe.

I loved the land I grew up on passionately, but I was not particularly interested in where the borders were. When I was seven, my family spent a few months in Mexico and I quickly bonded with local kids. As a teenager I was concerned about justice for Central American people brutalized by US-backed paramilitaries. Even living in such an isolated, rural place I was aware of and focused on the wider world.

So, it did not seem reasonable to me that I should pledge my allegiance to a flag or the nation for which it stood. My allegiance was already given to truth and justice and human rights wherever they stood. Certainly, my parents instilled some of this in me just by talking politics and hanging out with other people who talked politics in a progressive, international and compassionate spirit. But a lot of the spit and fire for it probably was of my own making.

My older brother also had a significant influence on me and was similarly disposed. When I first entered school, he warned me about the Pledge and eventually he also gave me the means to deal with it, apparently unbeknownst to our parents.

It may be worth pointing out that we had been brought up in a dissident family, where our spirituality, our politics, the extra garden plot out in the woods and even our reading choices, were clearly in opposition to the mainstream and better kept quiet. I don’t recall my parents or any other adult in our circle of friends explicitly telling me to keep our beliefs or politics secret, but I think my brother may have sworn me to silence for my own protection.

So, we did not challenge the Pledge openly either. By the time we entered school, we knew the authorities of society would not take kindly to our views and that we were too small a minority to change things. At least, I’m assuming that’s why we went straight to subterfuge. We weren’t habitually dishonest in most things.

My brother’s method, which he passed on to me, was to recite different words—based on a quote by Matt Groening—that are close enough to the Pledge to go undetected by the casual lip-reading of teachers. The point was not to make a serious alternative pledge that actually meant something. The point was to simply opt out of the one on offer without being detected, even if we happened to be leading the Pledge in front of the class.

For that possibility, it still had to start with the same few words, so we departed a little from Groening’s original and said. “I pledge allegiance to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow and to the republicrats for which they scam: one nacho, underpants with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.”

It worked fine and saved me from agonizing over being a hypocrite. For many years, I firmly believed my brother had invented it himself, but the wonders of the internet have lead me to its original source.

In any event, when I told my mother this, she was shocked and appalled and forbid me to teach it to my daughter. For one thing, the local school is a charter school and she immediately had visions of my daughter being expelled for unwisely sharing our version, regardless of the 2020 Oregon law that makes it technically legal for kids to opt out of the Pledge. And under the “my roof, my rules” law of our family, my mother gets to call this one.

The truth is that my daughter was not brought up in the atmosphere I knew as a child. We have never hidden much and while we are still outside the norm, inside the US or outside it, I haven’t raised my kids to fear authorities or to keep secrets. I didn’t think I had to, and while I think a parent has got to do whatever it takes to protect their kids in the situation at hand, I don’t think fear and secrecy is the best policy unless safety requires it. If I can choose, I would rather choose openness.

And as such, my daughter is ill prepared for this situation and hasn’t been good at keeping secrets, even about things like someone’s birthday present.

So, what can we do as parents and grandparents if a child doesn’t want to recite the Pledge? Well, there are a few options:

1. One could research local laws, and use them.

2. One could tell a reluctant child to simply mouth the words and not think about it too much, whether they want to or not.

3. Or one could discuss the issues with the child and figure out what part is bothering them and help them secretly change just those few words that bother them most. The child could pledge allegiance to the earth or to truth and justice or something of the like, reciting the edited version without actually informing the school.

The first option above—the option to use laws and reason to demand the child’s right to remain silent during the pledge—is something that has to be chosen based on the specific situation and the openness of the school administration. I might fight that fight if I was there in person and my child had a strong opinion on the matter, but I also might not.

As I said, Oregon law actually makes it legal for a child to remain silent during the Pledge. However, as I discovered as a child with a disability, integrated into an unwilling school by legal force, using that one in a school that is against it can make for a miserable experience.

It would take energy and time that might be better spent elsewhere. And it could result in lengthy homeschooling, which would be exceedingly difficult with my particular child. This decision really depends on the local community atmosphere, how committed the child is and whether or not the child is completely alone in their reticence.

The second option is my mother’s first choice and she was the one who successfully taught me to fly under the radar.

It would also be true to my daughter’s Czech roots. The Czechs—being a tiny nation squashed between superpowers—long ago perfected the art of pretending smiling loyalty to whomever held the castle at the moment.

Just recite and block it out. That was my husband’s first inclination, having grown up with similar anti-democratic tactics under the Communist regime of the East Bloc. His response was: “She’ll just have to bow her head the way we did under the totalitarian Communists. Her father and grandfather and great-grandfather all did it, and so can she.”

“As far as I heard great-grandfather went to jail several times rather than bow his head,” I ventured.

“Yeah, but he too learned in the end.”

I am not really as opposed to that kind of dodging as you might think, given my vehemence about integrity. I dislike it for what it tells kids about oaths, keeping one’s word and integrity, but I can also make up creative ways a kid could interpret those words.

If you are being forced to swear something through rote recitation in a group, I don’t believe it reflects that much on your honor if you don’t mean it. The shame belongs to those who would practice such abuse of an oath, one which permanently cheapens and degrades the concept of one’s word for an entire generation..

The final option is the one I am most likely to recommend to others. If swearing allegiance to a flag and a state and under a god that you don’t believe in bothers either the parent or the child or both, there are options. Certainly, I would prefer to teach children openness, integrity and the sacredness of an oath. But this may well be the best of the bad options those in positions of power have left to us.

If it is the “God’ part that bothers you, which is understandable for some of my Pagan friends, a child could recite “one nation under the gods” or “one nation under the sun.”

Despite my Pagan persuasion that isn’t actually my primary issue, though i don’t like the god bit either. My issue would be with swearing to a flag and to one nation. A child could recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flags of the United Nations, and to the earth for which they stand, one world, indivisible, under the sun with liberty and justice for all.”

Even that clearly isn’t perfect. Not all the states of the United Nations are anything you’d want to pledge loyalty to. But it’s close and it matches the wording enough that while it is easier to detect than my brother’s version, it is less likely to cause offense if exposed and more likely to be accepted by authorities as a reasonable alternative.

A child could insert, “the flags of my countries” if the issue is strictly that the child has allegiance to more than one nation.

For me, this is still very much a stop-gap measure, even if such alterations were officially approved by school officials. My greatest beef with the Pledge is not its wording, not the one nation or the one god or anything of the like. It is the way it handles oaths of loyalty.

i firmly believe that an oath should mean something quite sacred and it should always be a true act of will, i.e. voluntary.

Each autumn, there is a week in which I put images of the Roman goddess Fides, goddess of oaths, up on my altar to give offerings to her and restate my oaths—oaths of marriage and adoption, oaths of loyalty and pledges to action. This just happens to be that week as well as the week of this minor crisis for my family.

Those who claim the Pledge of Allegiance is something positive for teaching civics are sorely mistaken in my view. I find that the Pledge not only does not teach good civics, it does the opposite. It teaches children, even those who don’t have an issue with it, that an oath of loyalty is something akin to words everyone is forced to mumble regardless of the meaning.

It is also like dedicating an infant or toddler to a religion they don’t yet understand. An oath forced on a child is not sacred. It is instead something vile and antithetical to honor.

Even if all oaths may not be entirely voluntary even in adulthood, we as adults at least have some idea what they mean and what the consequences of not taking such an oath may be. Even if forced into an oath, an adult should do all they can to keep it. Otherwise, we should be prepared to take the consequences of not making such an oath or the consequences of breaking it. Sometimes oppressive circumstances make that a terrible choice. But we have the choice.

A child who is told, “Stand here, raise your hand and say these words,” isn’t bound by honor in that way. But the child is taught by this that oaths are cheap and meaningless mumbles. That is the wrong hidden deep in the Pledge.

It is no surprise that the more authoritarian and fascist a state is the more such rote, mumbled oaths it requires. I know it is incendiary to call the Pledge of Allegiance fascist. Clearly it is not such a terrible thing on a day to day basis. I’ve lived through it along with most other Americans. But it is akin to fascism in that it promotes the concept of the automatic, thoughtless loyalty that fascism is built upon. That is the harm in a few seconds of mumbled words at the start of the day.

Here is one of my oaths, one I mean and which I recite anew with each new moon. I don’t make my kids say it because I believe it should be fully empowered through choice.

I pledge allegiance to the goddess of compassion and strength, and to the planet earth for which she stands, one ecosystem under the moon with interconnection and hope for all.

This is the oath I hold above all others. I have, out of necessity, made sacrifices of my comfort, time, resources and safety in the protection of the earth and I expect I will be called to do so again, in accordance with this oath. That is what such a pledge of allegiance should mean, after all.

The front lines in the war against fascism

Ten days ago I was snapping beans at the kitchen table with an old friend. It was a pleasant evening and the kids were in bed. We often talk politics at this table, bantering back and forth, bemoaning the state of the world, society and prejudice. 

But this evening, my friend turned down a different path. "I heard on the radio that there's new scientific evidence that we really are different from Africans. We didn't all come from one woman after all."

I question carefully. There is a lot of racially loaded misinformation in our local media, and while this old friend and I almost always agree on social and political issues, there is one way in which we are different. He has more time to listen to the local media and he eventually believes what is repeated enough times. 

Creative Commons image by Joanna Bourne

This time it turns out that radio commentators had taken recent studies of the human genome that have found traces of Neanderthal DNA only in non-African human genes and extrapolated a new form of scientific racism.

The real science first appeared in the journal Nature in 2014. That was a study showing that once very long ago some humans interbred with Neanderthals. This occurred during the migration of some humans away from Africa about 60,000 years ago. The traces are now very faint, but they may have initially helped the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians to survive in colder climates at a time when shelter was scarce. Less helpful traits, such as a decline in fertility and differences in speech centers of the brain, were weeded out by natural selection and are no longer part of our DNA. 

The amount of different DNA in Europeans and Asians thanks to the interbreeding with Neanderthals is now minuscule. No, it does not make us fundamentally different from Africans. No, race is still not something genetically significant. And yes, we did all still come from some long ago ancestress in Africa. (And why exactly do some people have a problem with that?)

But of course, there are those in today's political landscape who will jump at any chance to play tug-o-war with people's minds. I researched the science and then explained it. My friend nominally accepted it and backed down from the racial separatist interpretation. Yet I still felt troubled at how pervasive the propaganda has become.

Ten days later at the dark of the moon and after the white supremacist terrorist attack in the United States, I'm more than unsettled. I am a wordsmith and I know the craft. I know about motivation, targeting and persuasion. I see all the signs here. This misinformation is being targeted specifically at communities, nations and people who are white yet not white supremacists.

It's a classic fascist tactic. 

I have studied and written about extremist groups, inter-ethnic conflict and racial violence for twenty years, starting in the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans and following similar troubles around the world. 

And when rooting out fascism it isn't the rabid hatred of the other that is the best clue. The first battle lines are amid those who could be considered part of the in-group but who are not radicalized.

Today if you follow the mainstream media, you are told that racism is wrong and mainly a thing of the past. But you are also told many negative things about people of color, whether refugees, immigrants or people in your own community. Eventually you also hear how white people should believe that they are different and they should hold themselves apart from non-whites. 

Creative Commons image by  Alper Çuğun

Across North America and Europe civil rights organizations have documented a rise in white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in the past five years. Since the election of Donald Trump in the US, the membership rolls of the Klu Klux Klan have exploded with thousands of new recruits. Through social media, racist hate groups have pushed past the reactionary fringe and become a force that poses a clear danger to average citizens.

And right now, although incidents like the one in Charlottesville pose the most obvious danger, the front lines are a lot closer to home than you might think. In far too many cases, the front lines of this conflict run right across your kitchen table, your bar counter or your social media feed. 

You may feel that I'm being overly dramatic. But consider the other recent fascist uprising and its devastating effects. I mean the one in Syria. 

The Islamic State has all the hallmarks of fascism. It may seem odd to compare a brown-skinned Muslim group to neo-Nazis but they are close ideological cousins. They just happen to have a different home-group as their central focus.

ISIS stands for an authoritarian, supremacist ideology rooted in fascist tactics and social media was crucial to its rise. ISIS has also made it clear in public statements, organized attacks and internal documents that while they feel they are superior to non-Muslims, the brunt of their violence and hatred is directed at Muslims who do not fully accept their twisted version of that faith. In ISIS territory, Christians, Jews and even Pagans are allowed to live, if with curtailed rights. But Muslims who do not adhere exactly and pledge their allegiance to ISIS are executed and make up the majority of mass graves uncovered in places ISIS has retreated from.

Statements and documents uncovered by western intelligence agencies indicate orders by top ISIS leaders to fuel European fear and hatred of moderate Muslims. That has been the open goal of recent Islamic terror attacks in Europe. Far from championing the Muslim cause, ISIS would like Europeans and Americans to do their work for them, isolating Muslims in their communities and denying entry to Muslim refugees fleeing ISIS terror. 

It should come as no surprise that the same tactics are used by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. They often call themselves "race realists" and claim that they are not primarily motivated by hatred of others but simply want to further the interests and ensure the survival of their own people, which they conceive of as the white race, minus those who are nominally white but deemed undesirable and ostensibly genetically different, such as Jews. 

And just as ISIS was built with social media and on the backs of moderate Muslims, white supremacists are focusing much of their energy on misinformation directed at average white people and hatred of "race traitors."

White supremacist groups are now in the stage in which they use social media and misinformation to grow their power. They set average white people against African Americans, against Muslim refugees and against all immigrants of color. And yes, they'll do the reverse too, whenever they get the chance. They draw harsh lines and attack white people who stand against them viciously. And they will very likely manufacture reasons for people of color to hate average white people as well, to ensure that we don't stand together.

Those--like that friend at my kitchen table--who don't want to be racist but also don't want to be bothered with the struggle against racism are key pawns in this game. Fascism has always fed on the discomfort people naturally feel for conflict and poisonous rhetoric. Most of the great atrocities of the world were not committed because of great hatred, but because of apathy and avoidance by large masses of people.

Those radio programs twisting science and claiming that Europeans are genetically distinct from other races and thus must be protected are not a random, weird-science occurence. This is the front line of fascism's war on us. Don't let racist pseudoscience go unanswered. 

In the spiral toward Fascism: White resentment and identity crisis

When Donald J. Trump spoke of "the forgotten men and the forgotten women" of America the morning after the election, I sensed instantly that he was dividing the country based on race. 

There was plenty in his campaign to lead both supporters and opponents to the conclusion that his message is intended to separate people along racial lines. He often protested that he has "a great relationship with the blacks" or that he loves Hispanics. Yet he made statements describing Mexican immigrants as a group of criminals and rapists and he depicted black neighborhoods as unending hells of crime and poverty. He argued that a Hispanic-American judge shouldn’t hear a case involving Trump businesses simply because of the judge’s background.

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

A professor at the University of California Irvine by the name of Michael Tesler decided to take a statistical look at the racial trend of Trump's support in the summer of 2016. He compared the voting preferences of Republican primary voters in 2008, 2012 and 2016 with the voter's scores on a "racial resentment" survey. The study found that the more  resentment against people of color a voter expressed, the more likely that voter was to vote for Trump in the primary. Interestingly these same voters had mostly voted for failed Republican primary contestants in 2008 and 2012. They had simmered with resentment and frustration because even the Republican nominees who lost to Barack Obama were unsatisfactory to this group.

Despite his protestations that he is "the least racist person," the terms and focus of Trumps speeches make it clear that there is a norm, which is white and Christian. Trump's repetitions of the slogans "America first!" and "Make America great again" are placed so as to imply white America. 

It has become fashionable in intellectual circles to contend that support for Donald Trump stems primarily from economic, rather than racial, tension. Yet an analysis by USA Today's Brad Heath shows that Hilary Clinton lost most unexpectedly in counties where unemployment had fallen during the Obama administration. And now everything Trump actually does harms the working class and enriches a handful of the wealthiest.

If it was about class, Trump's appeal would be very thin indeed. His support comes primarily from the frustrations and identity crisis of a group that is defined both by race and by class--that is the white, mostly Christian core of small town and suburban America.

If we want to call this group "working class" we have to reassess the term. "Working class" tends to evoke images of coal miners and line operators, but that isn't the mainstay anymore. If you look at the income distribution graphs for the US, the "working class" could conceivably be considered everyone who is not in the bottom ten percent (the very poor) and not in the top ten percent (the extremely rich). 

That gives you 80 percent of the nation, a group of people in which the top 10 percent is only ten times wealthier than than their poorest group members. That may sound like a big internal difference for a group, but in the scheme of things--when compared to the astronomical wealth of those Americans who are too wealthy to be in the group--this middle 80 percent really is a class in itself and largely they are people who actually work in one form or another for a living--thus working class. 

And if you take that middle 80 percent and divide it by race, singling out the white Christian majority of it, you have the group targeted by Trump's message. They work, they struggle, they look at the boggling wealth of the wealthy and feel the fear and the siren's pull of the mostly non-white poor. They have been told in a myriad ways in recent years that they have no culture or that their culture is shallow and silly. They have been told that they once had a divine destiny, but that was deemed morally wrong and now they are not special, not ordained in any way. They live reasonably well but feel stifled and frustrated.

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

I doubt Trump or even his speech writers looked much into the historical references of the "forgotten men and forgotten women" phrase, but I did. The first widely known figure to use "the forgotten man" gimmick was William Graham Summer in 1883. Summer was a social Darwinist, meaning that he promoted the idea that survival of the fittest should dictate which humans get to survive to adulthood in society. It was kind of a precursor to eugenics I suppose, the idea that they could breed "better" humans by letting the weak die of hunger and disease. 

In a speech titled "The Forgotton Man," Summer made a case that could easily have been a template for Trump's campaign strategy, claiming that hard-working people needed to be freed from the dead weight of useless poor people. 

Summer divided society into the hard-working "forgotten man" type and the "nasty, shiftless, criminal, whining, crawling, and good-for-nothing people." The second category was supposed to be that bottom ten percent that Trump degrades as well, but like Trump, Summer inflated it to appear much larger and more threatening without actually including his target audience in it.

Since Summer's day, several American presidents have played with the rhetorical concept that there is some group of Americans who do not complain, who work hard quietly and ask nothing of society, a mythical deserving class. Reagan's "silent majority" was one of the more blatant but that never reached the level of Trump's appeal to white people in small towns and suburbs to see themselves as the unsung victims in society. 

One world leader did go this far and built a fast-rising, brilliant and brutal regime based on exactly this concept. He started it with a book entitled in translation "My Struggle," which sought to teach his fellow white citizens to see themselves as wronged and to instill a righteous thirst for revolutionary vengeance.

That was, of course, Adolf Hitler. And while I'm sure,. you've probably seen Trump compared to Hitler so many times in the past few months that you find this predictable and even boring, I want to call your focused attention to something that is NOT merely a rhetorical comparison, using exaggerated connections. 

I have been watching the reactions of white Americans and others of similar Caucasian-Christian background around the world with growing unease. 

A year ago, it was a dull throbbing drumbeat, occasionally mentioned but generally ignored. Since the election it has been steadily ramping up. That is the modern concept of white people as silent social victims. And it is not limited to the United States.

Last year I might have seen a comment along the lines of, "You say 'prejudice' but you're just virtue signalling," once every week or so.  Now a day doesn't go by when I don't run across some version of the argument: "So called 'white privilege' is an quitter's excuse. When you get right down to it everyone has some sort of disadvantage. The only question is who tries harder." 

Creative Commons image by Fibonacci Blue 

The trend is easily observable both on-line and in the real world. Even my ESL students in a small Bohemian backwater have heard the arguments and some nod along with them and say that Trump has finally allowed people to say "what everyone was thinking all along."

On a few occasions, I joined one of these discussions and laid out the host of facts demonstrating that white privilege is alive and well. I cited statistics showing systematic disadvantages that still plague people of color. I gave my own personal experience as a white woman with a significant disability. I have experienced both sides of the privilege paradigm. I know what it is like to not have the privileges of others. And I have seen white privilege work even for me in many situations, including when I fervently wished it wouldn't.

I never see any indication that my reasoned arguments sway anyone who has already fallen under the spell of this rhetoric. And I rarely go to the mat over it anymore, though I do make a point of speaking up against it. The eventual exhausted silence of people who know better is one of the the things this kind of propaganda counts on. 

But the other thing it counts on is our lack of understanding for the identity crisis of the white working class. I am certainly not going to subscribe to a doctrine that says they are the victims of the past fifty years of domination by mythical "liberals" and people of color grabbing all the hard-earned spoils. But they do have grievances against the corporate-tilted economy which leave them vulnerable to scapegoating propaganda.

Across the board, that middle 80 percent of Americans have lost wealth and income in recent decades. Even the top bracket-the 80th to 90th percentile of the US economy, the people just poorer than the top ten percent of all Americans--has declined in wealth. Their financial strength has seeped toward the wealthiest ten percent.

To say this may seem like whining. The top half of this middle 80 percent is not suffering terribly in material terms. They have large homes, on average several vehicles, security, travel, health care, college education...

Why would they complain?

Because their fortunes are declining, not growing and the American ethos is all about growth and making sure one's children have it better and easier than the current generation. And for decades that has clearly been impossible for the middle 80 percent... especially for those who are white.

Why do I say "especially for those who were white?" Again, I'm not talking about the poor white victims.

The white people were in that middle 80 percent and they lost ground. But with the growth of populations of color as well as civil rights laws and expanded educational opportunities for two generations, some people of color have seen improvement in their circumstances over the past few decades. Not the majority of people of color, but a few.. It isn't improvement of their wealth bracket but rather that some individuals have climbed the ladder of wealth brackets to take their places along side those white members who were already there. 

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore 

White people did not lose ground to people of color. The white middle 80 percent lost ground to the white top 10 percent. But if you're living in a suburb where you can't see the top 10 percent and you can see the newly well-off black people next door as well as your own slowly eroding security, it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions. 

Add to that several harsh generation gaps that have cut white Americans off from cultural roots and created a sense of empty identity. Pile on top the misinterpretation of integrated history to be a litany of white collective guilt. And there is a recipe for resentment, anger and frustration that we are now seeing rise like an unstoppable chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar.

Trump has been elected and some have taken his election as a sign that it is now more possible to vent racial resentments. But instead of releasing tension this has only intensified the tenor of the frustration. In the end, we may find that Trump is the least of our worries and that a much greater danger threatens the nation and the rest of the western world. 

In the study of ethnic conflicts around the world, it has becomeclear that violence between ordinary people stems most often from the resentment of a privileged portion of the society when it sees its monopoly on power slipping. According to a paper in World Politics in 2010, a statistical analysis of 157 cases of ethnic violence--including that in Chad, Lebanon and the Balkans in the 1990s--showed that the decline of privileged groups is highly correlated to extreme violence.

Most unfortunately Trump is only a symptom of a disease--one that has spread well beyond the borders of the United States. It is past time, we acknowledged this. Simple suppression of racial tension and resentment will likely result in a more explosive reaction. It will take much more to avert violence and strengthen our open, multi-racial society to meet the challenges of climate change and resource shift. 

It is time to listen to one another. It is time to seek allies across racial lines. If Trump and his ilk wish to divide us by race, that is the first thing we must resist.