All tagged Racism
Calls for racial justice continue nationwide, and hopefully Swarthmore residents will keep discussing the issue within the community, and with our leaders, as we struggle toward more recognition and real change. I’m appreciative of the efforts of Swarthmore’s Human Relations Commission and the commitment of many Swarthmore residents working towards this cause. But each of us, surely, can do more.
While reading an article in the July 17 issue of the Swarthmorean, “Panel Wrestles With Racism and Inclusion,” I began to feel my heart rate rise. I knew that, as a 26-year resident of Swarthmore, I needed to share a few thoughts.
The idea of reparations expressed in a letter to the editor in the July 17 edition of the Swarthmorean is terrible. This is an expression of the bigotry of low expectations from some of our fellow Americans by telling some of our other fellow Americans they cannot compete because of the false narrative of “systemic racism.” These types of attitudes are destroying the promise of the civil rights era.
As a lifelong Christian, I read the letter from the Interfaith Council of Southern Delaware County (ICSDC) in the June 5 edition with hope and fear. I hoped that the strong letter would be followed by strong, public actions confronting the vile doctrine of white supremacy. I feared that the actions would be pusillanimous.
This is the right time for Congress to rename the military installations that are now named for Confederate generals. It was never the right time to have named them after these men in the first place.
A letter in the June 12 issue of the Swarthmorean, obliquely referencing the recent racist incident at Strath Haven High School and its aftermath, managed to discuss the topic at length without ever acknowledging the victims — the minorities in our community who continue to be deeply wounded by these events. What does the larger white community owe to them? Sociologist Robin Diangelo’s “White Fragility” is among the books on race being recommended following the killing of George Floyd.
“Don’t come into my community. Your work is in the white community.” Those were the words spoken at Pendle Hill by a black activist to a gathering of white activists for racial justice. I write in the hope that white Americans will do the work that it is ours to do.
We, as members of the Interfaith Council of Southern Delaware County, Pennsylvania, affirm the interrelatedness of our communities and states. When an injustice occurs in our society, we find it imperative to not sit idly by.
