Pivot Point: The Immorality of the Trump Rally

Pivot Point: The Immorality of the Trump Rally

There has been considerable debate about the way the President’s Rally in Greenville, N.C. was used to disparage and characterize the four young Congress women. It was reminiscent of the rallies I witnessed as a young child growing up in eastern North Carolina.

My siblings were threatened because they dared to integrate a new, white high school in the county. Klan members called and threatened to hurt our family if we did not remove ourselves from the new, white school. They continued to value a segregated, “whites-only” society and saw integration, multiculturalism, and pluralism as a threat and immoral.

Echoes of “go back to your own school” were heard as my brother and others walked the halls daring to believe that they could get a quality education without fear or harm. They were harassed, tormented and ostracized for their courage, their resilience and their leadership.

In spite of such vitriol, they stood tall as many of us fighting for equality and justice have done over the decades. We should continue to do so today.

The chants we heard from the Greenville rally were the same type of chants that many of my ancestors suffered through as they were beaten, lynched and burned. I believe that these recent rallies and chants are grounded in a desire to reverse the American Ideal of diversity, multiculturalism, pluralism and inclusion and its underlying moral imperative for America. This moral imperative should be abandoned they say. Many of those at these gatherings are fearful of those who dare to question decisions, behaviors, and emerging values of leadership steeped in exclusivity and enjoy the badgering of those that are not white, like these four congresswomen. They feel support for a multicultural America should not be accepted or embraced. My question: Are these views the enemy of the American ideal? Whose perspectives should be rejected?

The central question is this: Are the attributes of these congresswomen that Trump and his supporters despise the real issue? Is it their willingness to share their diverse perspectives striking a nerve in the minds of current leadership who may be fearing a loss of white privilege and power? Is the president’s attempt to paint them as socialists and un-American, the same type of brush felt by our African American ancestors who fought for freedom, liberty and justice?

Perhaps the organizing principle of these rallies is amplifying and radicalizing those who do not want the American ideal — life, liberty, human dignity and the pursuit of happiness to be extended to those who are not white, native-born, or wealthy. Brown and Black people present an existential threat to them and the rallies are gathering ground for waging an effort to restrict and push back the rights of all in a diverse, multicultural, and pluralistic society, especially those that are brown or black.

If it is, the real haters are those that support such notions and who show up, much like those who showed up for lynching during Jim Crow and slavery, and who spew such hate in chants like “go back where you came from.” The focus has been restructured from a “physical” lynching of a slave or Black person of decades past, to one where the character, reputation and courage of those being targeted for standing up for their views, are been held up as evil and repugnant — a high tech, social media event. A new form of “lynching.”

America is better than this. We have a solemn obligation to resist hate, bigotry and intolerance. There is a moral imperative to do so!