Race and Politics in America
I’ve yet to ask it, but the next time I have an opportunity to talk with one of my Congressional Reps I want to ask, “Can you reflect on the changing color of leadership in America? ” I’m sure I will get a comfortable answer about the positive aspects of diversity. The follow up is, “Is diversity, gender, age, race, and orientation, important for the Federal and State legislatures; and if it is, then is it unconstitutional, or at least unfair, for one party to be able to redraw voting districts based on race and economics that ensures that diversity is limited?” Reading Rev. Jim Wallis’ latest on the Huffington Post, reminded me that there is little truth telling and lots of historical revisionism or at the very least a passive acceptance of “separate, but equal.” Here is are two paragraphs and a link.
The Most Controversial Sentence I Ever Wrote
Jim Wallis | The Blog (Huffington Post) | 10/24/13The most controversial sentence I ever wrote, considering the response to it, was not about abortion, marriage equality, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq, elections, or anything to do with national or church politics. It was a statement about the founding of the United States of America. Here’s the sentence.
“The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.”
And it’s time to be honest about the deep-seated sense of race in the heart of our national politics. But when people of color speak the truth about the realities of race in our culture and politics, they are always accused of “playing the race card.” So let me, as a white man and an evangelical Christian, do some truth-telling about race in American politics right now.