Standing Against Racism in Trump's America

Every spring since 2007, the YWCA has organized a national stand against racism. During the stand - usually from 2:00 to 2:25PM, people in towns throughout the United States stand in unison declaring their opposition to racism. www.standagainstracism.org

This year in our increasingly polarized society, I felt that I had to stand with the YWCA and all groups that were saying that bigotry is wrong. I was proud to stand at my synagogue Beth Emet in Evanston to do this.

While it should be self-evident that racism is wrong, apparently it isn’t. Expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslimism, and attacks on the LGBT community have risen sharply since the presidential election in 2016, spurred in large part by T’s racist rhetoric. In the days immediately following the election, 867 incidents of harassment and intimidation of African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, and people in the LGBT community were reported. The Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org) reports an increase in hate groups. They have identified 954 hate groups operating in the United States. The FBI reports anti-Semitic incidents up 55% in 2017, anti-Muslim incidents up 25%, and increased incidents against the LGBT community.

After the disturbances in Charlottesville, I watched in horror as the President of the United States gave a press conference attesting vehemently that many of the people joining the march of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were “fine people.” Since then he has reiterated many racist statements thus emboldening racists to act on their feelings. After Charlottesville, for example, the Holocaust Memorial in Boston was vandalized for the second time that summer. Although the perpetrator was arrested and charged with a hate crime, the fact is that it was done.

I am not accusing our current president of creating racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Evidently people always had those feeling but they lay under the surface. In the past, however, people knew that acting on those feelings was unacceptable in the United States. Since 2016, they have been given permission to express those feelings. For myself, any feelings I had of being secure and safe in America have been erased.

It is because of this that it is more important than ever that we stand against racism. We have to stand and say that racism is not acceptable. After the stand, we standers from Beth Emet joined a discussion at the Unitarian Church with members of their congregation as well as people from St. Marks Episcopalian Church. We reaffirmed our opposition to racism and discussed efforts being made in our community to combat it.

Some say that there will always be people with racist feelings and I agree that there will be. I can’t control what is going on in the hearts and minds of other people. I can, however, work with other people to create a situation in which people are not allowed to act on those feelings. That’s the direction the United States had been headed toward during the past few decades since the Civil Rights Movement. We have to work together to get our country to return to that direction. I hope that it’s not too late.