August 28 was the 60th anniversary of the1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech about the struggle to create a real multiracial democracy and humane society in the United States. On that same Saturday this year, a 21-year-old white supremacist murdered 3 black people at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville, Florida. The killer's AR-15 rifle was marked with swastikas. He also wrote a manifesto where he detailed his desire(s) to kill black people and start a "race war." In his manifesto, the white supremacist killer reportedly praised Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who is black, for being "The rare principled conservative, interprets laws based the Constitution instead of doing f—y activist shit like the last half-century's worth of Supreme Court justices."
That horrible coincidence of dates is a reminder of how very far America is from being a real multiracial democracy as the country continues to struggle against ascendant neofascism and the Age of Trump.
