Racial Pride Is Evil
I was disturbed by the overt racism in Melissa Lawlor’s recent letter to the Granite State News. (Reproduced below.) She stated, “I have dark skin, and I love it.” Melissa then goes on to say that she teaches her children “to love their skin color.” She then castigates “angry” “white person[s]” for having “privilege” and failing to live up to her expectations.
I was also disturbed by the encounter she described. (And let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and agree that it happened exactly how she described.) It’s totally inappropriate for someone to come on to her property and yell and curse at her, especially in front of her children. That’s despicable.
Melissa says she believes that “black lives matter” means “black lives, which are often seen as without value within our society, are important to humanity’s quest for equality.” Setting aside that it’s not true that “black lives” are “often seen as without value,” I fail to see how “humanity” will achieve equality by following Melissa’s demand that those of us who don’t look like her should “see color,” or by having parents teach their children to “love their skin color.”
News flash: No one looks like Melissa except for Melissa. That’s because she’s an individual and not defined by her skin color.
As Frederic Douglass said:
The only excuse for pride in individuals or races is the fact of their own achievements. Our color is the gift of the Almighty. We should neither be proud of it or ashamed of it. But we may well enough be proud or ashamed when we ourselves achieved success or have failed of success. If the sun has curled our hair and tanned our skin, let the sun be proud of its achievement, for we have done nothing for it one way or the other. I see no benefit to be derived from this everlasting exhortation by the speakers and writers among us to the cultivation of race pride. On the contrary, I see in it a positive evil.
Black Lives Matter, the organization as opposed to the declarative statement, is a domestic terrorist group with a clever name that promotes racial hatred, and it’s responsible for murdering many people. It has destroyed the lives of many thousands, including the lives of black people, and was founded on a lie.
The lie is that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a police officer in Ferguson, MO, while pleading “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The truth is that Brown violently assaulted a convenience-store clerk (this is shown on surveillance footage) and then, when confronted by a police officer, violently assaulted the officer, tried to take the officer’s weapon by force, and was finally shot dead after being given many opportunities to surrender. This was all established by a grand jury based on the testimony of many eye witnesses, most of whom were themselves black.
In July 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) member Micah Xavier Johnson, who happened to be black, murdered five police officers and wounded nine other officers and two civilians. According to media reports, Johnson had said prior to his rampage that he wanted to kill white people.
During a BLM riot earlier this summer, retired police chief David Dorn was murdered for a flatscreen TV as he tried to protect a friend’s pawn shop from looting. When police arrested his murderer, they found the TV in the suspect’s apartment. Dorn, like his killer, happened to be black.
Thousands of lives have been destroyed this summer by rioting and looting that have wreaked carnage on poor and minority neighborhoods in American cities. Businesses, many of which were owned by minorities, whose employees were minorities, and whose customers were minorities, were looted and burned. Their lives matter, but they don’t to BLM.
This past weekend during a BLM riot in Portland, OR, a man tried to defend a transgender person who was being harrassed at a gas station. He then tried to drive away to evade the mob but was dragged out of his truck, forced to sit on the pavement, and then was punched repeatedly before being knocked unconscious from a kick to the head by a BLM rioter who was wearing a vest bearing the word, “SECURITY.” He lay unconscious, visibly bleeding from the head while his wife, who had also been violently removed from their car and punched and thrown to the ground, sobbed a few feet away. While he lay unconscious, BLM “protesters” called him a “loser” and “a stupid “b****.” There was no police presence. This is on video live-streamed by a BLM member. They’re not ashamed of this behavior. The victims happened to be white, and the attacker happened to be black.
The answer to historical racism and violence is not racism and violence. Melissa’s focus on skin color is a bad prescription for our country and leads to the kind of racial conflict, resentment, and rage — favored by Black Lives Matter — that destroys lives.
Let’s choose love, not hatred.
Below is Melissa’s letter dated August 13, 2020. I submitted my response to the Granite State News, but the editor declined to publish it.
