Words of hate create an ethos of hate, an atmosphere of hate, a political, social Petri dish of hate. Eventually, spoken words become deeds.
On Saturday those deeds were the racist murders of Angela Michelle Carr, Jerrald Gallion and Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, by a man who “hated Black people”, according to the local sheriff.
If this event surprised you, you’re not paying attention. We have hateful rhetoric coming out of the mouths of politicians at the highest levels in Florida every day. From the governor to the former president, it’s hate against Black history, hate against wokeness, hate against trans people, hate against immigrants.
The shooter reportedly put his vest and mask on at Edward Waters University, a historically Black institution that is the embodiment of the very history and stories that Ron DeSantis, the governor, and others are saying are bad for America. This is where the shooter went, pumped up and primed to hate, possibly to kill teachers and students – a tangible representative of that which extreme politicians and religionists have declared hurtful and in need of removal.
We’ve seen this before, this pattern of the tongue creating an environment giving license to violence. It is, sadly, as American as apple pie.
Woodrow Wilson reportedly called The Birth of a Nation “history written in lightning” and urged his staff to watch it. The Red Summer followed, with Black soldiers who’d come back from the first world war killed mercilessly all over the country. George Wallace, Alabama’s four-term governor, stoked violence with his hateful rhetoric, beginning with his infamous “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” inaugural address, which newspaper journalist Wayne Greenhaw said was “vehement … mean spirited … hateful. It’s like a rattlesnake was hissing it, almost.”
When Brown v Board of Education was decided, in 1954, southern governors decried the ruling. They said it was going to get young white women raped. What happened next? Emmett Till was murdered.
When we were standing up during Moral Mondays, starting in 2013, a state legislator made hateful comments about our activism. Within a few days, I’d begun to receive threats on my life. More recently, we have Trump’s hateful words leading to the January 6 insurrection.
We must tell the truth: this is not new. And we cannot run from it any longer.
When DeSantis and other politicians paint “wokeness” and diversity as problems, they are moving in the same historical tributary of violence that Wallace moved in as he watered the seeds of hate.
As the writer and academic Dr Eddie Glaude has noted, the original March on Washington had such an intensity because it was bookended by racist violence: dogs sicked on children in Birmingham and four little girls blown up in a church there, among other horrific acts.
In the civil rights movement, people knew what they were facing. They knew that the policies they were fighting for had formidable and violent opponents. They were taking on not just racial justice, but economic issues like good jobs for all. They knew they were in a violent society.
We can’t get lackadaisical. We need to recognize, as they did, that we are in a battle for civilization, a battle for democracy.
If you watched the Republican debate last week, you saw it. They’re ramping up. They’re not talking about poverty and healthcare. They’re in one mode only: attack, attack, attack on cultural issues.
We can’t get distracted, and must expose fearmongers for what they are. Culture wars are distractions, but also potentially deadly. They seed hate, give license to hate. They reproduce hate until it’s no longer in the mouth, but in human acts and deeds.
The Scripture reads, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” Indeed, the tongue can either produce resurrection, peace and love, or produce a nightmare, like we saw in Jacksonville over the weekend.
We will have to bury and mourn the dead, but afterward we must join the political forces of love and justice, and take power from and send home the proponents of hate and those who perpetuate more and more laws making it easier to get guns than an education.
We must organize and mobilize and register people to vote en masse. It’s not about Democrats or Republicans – when folks use their office to harm humanity, we must send them home. They might have the same opinions, but not the same power, not the same microphone.
Low voter turnout results in promoters of violence being elected. People stay home and extremists come into power. When extremists have power, they’re gonna use that microphone every way they can to create more and more division. That’s been their plan ever since former president Richard Nixon began implementing the so-called southern strategy. They called it “positive polarization”: trying to pit poor white and Black folks, who had been allies, against each other, consequences be damned.
We need people across the country to come together to create a political voting bloc of love that will shut down the political power of hatred.
Bishop William Barber is president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.
