This is a political post.
In the last thirty days racist people have killed nine people at an historically black church and now six other churches have "caught fire".
The last part, the other churches burning to the ground, doesn't appear to be heavily covered in the national media, and I'm certain not on Fox News who still think the confessed Charleston shooter might have had "other" motives. Since the Charleston shooting, College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, and Briar Creek Baptist Church in Charlotte all burned in consecutive days. Another church, Fruitland Presbyterian Church, in Gibson County, Tennessee also burned but the investigators haven't made a ruling regarding the cause as of yet.
The term coincidence doesn't even begin to cover this.
Then, after a skipping a day, Glover Grover Baptist Church, in Warrenville, S.C and The Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Fla both caught fire on June 26th.
Is this 1959? We have the internet and and can make video phone calls, we've landed men on the moon and can convincingly change a person's sex, but racial progress stopped with Kennedy? And I say racial because only church's that are predominantly attended by black people appear to have been the targets, so it doesn't look like Christianity is under attack, just the black section. Even those of us who don't attend church regularly understand it's importance in a community, so the act of arson against a church resonates. Isn't a house of God still a house of God no matter the race of those who gather there? What kind of mental gymnastics makes this okay?
Some like to entertain the notion that racism was over since we all got together and elected a black president. But what it really did was strip the veneer of civility and expose that we aren't quite who we think we are. What we have found is that a lot of the ideas and notions, stereotypes and cultural blindness that should have gradually faded away in the past fifty years are still very much here, and not just in the small change resistant pockets we thought they might be. Activists have been working on this for fifty years without pause for racial equality, and now we find that at best all we've done is maintain the social status quo from before the federal highway system was even a thing. We may have even lost a rung or two. Considering just how much time has passed, that's just scary.
I'm not sure where we go from here.
In the last thirty days racist people have killed nine people at an historically black church and now six other churches have "caught fire".
The last part, the other churches burning to the ground, doesn't appear to be heavily covered in the national media, and I'm certain not on Fox News who still think the confessed Charleston shooter might have had "other" motives. Since the Charleston shooting, College Hills Seventh Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, and Briar Creek Baptist Church in Charlotte all burned in consecutive days. Another church, Fruitland Presbyterian Church, in Gibson County, Tennessee also burned but the investigators haven't made a ruling regarding the cause as of yet.
The term coincidence doesn't even begin to cover this.
Then, after a skipping a day, Glover Grover Baptist Church, in Warrenville, S.C and The Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Fla both caught fire on June 26th.
Is this 1959? We have the internet and and can make video phone calls, we've landed men on the moon and can convincingly change a person's sex, but racial progress stopped with Kennedy? And I say racial because only church's that are predominantly attended by black people appear to have been the targets, so it doesn't look like Christianity is under attack, just the black section. Even those of us who don't attend church regularly understand it's importance in a community, so the act of arson against a church resonates. Isn't a house of God still a house of God no matter the race of those who gather there? What kind of mental gymnastics makes this okay?
Some like to entertain the notion that racism was over since we all got together and elected a black president. But what it really did was strip the veneer of civility and expose that we aren't quite who we think we are. What we have found is that a lot of the ideas and notions, stereotypes and cultural blindness that should have gradually faded away in the past fifty years are still very much here, and not just in the small change resistant pockets we thought they might be. Activists have been working on this for fifty years without pause for racial equality, and now we find that at best all we've done is maintain the social status quo from before the federal highway system was even a thing. We may have even lost a rung or two. Considering just how much time has passed, that's just scary.
I'm not sure where we go from here.
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