(ThyBlackMan.com) This week the U.S. pauses to honor the late great Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But I want to talk about the other “King” making news: Congressman Steve King of Iowa. I must admit, I was as bewildered as he when he said, “When did white nationalism and white supremacy become offensive?”
You see, on the very day we honor Dr. King with a national holiday, Alabama and Mississippi – as did Arkansas until 2017 – celebrate the birthday of Robert E. Lee. Yes, the treasonous general of the armies of the South that fought to preserve slavery. The State of Virginia just held its celebration of Lee’s 212th birthday where he was lauded as “a Great American.” Television personalities in St. Louis and 
Rochester, New York announced, on air, the upcoming “Martin Luther coon” holiday, later apologizing for their “slip of the tongue.”
Barely 24 hours after the House of Representatives passed a Resolution denouncing “white supremacy”, Congressmen Andy Harris of Maryland and Phil Roe of Tennessee were photographed welcoming notorious Holocaust denier and white supremacist Chuck Johnson into the Capitol building. And the white police officer who killed black teen Laquan McDonald in Chicago was sentenced to just 6 years in prison for shooting him sixteen times, as the suppressed video of the shooting showed McDonald backing away – three other officers who tried to cover up the murder by claiming McDonald had “lunged” towards them were acquitted.
So I can see Congressman King’s surprise at the furor over his comments. Why were they picking on him when the president himself said there were “some very fine people” marching with neo-Nazis and Klansmen in Charlottesville and comments by the president when he was a candidate saying that a judge of Mexican heritage “couldn’t judge” him was defined as the “textbook definition of racism” by then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan?
If nothing else good comes from this presidency, at least we can now clearly see the hypocrisy in our culture when it comes to race or ethnicity. For example, if someone is suspected of being an “Islamic radical” in the commission of a violent crime, law enforcement will quickly search his cell phone and social media accounts to see who he has been in contact with as they are under suspicion for being part of the attack. When a white nationalist attacks a Synagogue or a supermarket targeting Jews or African Americans, he is portrayed as a “lone wolf” with no need to follow up on investigating his circle of “friends.”
When the crack epidemic was ravaging urban America, the victims were deemed “super-predators” and the solution was to impose lengthy mandatory minimum sentences on users and dealers alike. In the midst of the current opioid abuse crisis in rural America, the users are described as people deserving of our empathy and treatment is the prescribed solution. The big pharmaceutical companies manufacturing, marketing and distributing these drugs to date have received no penalties at all.
Congressman King, in the same interview, mused why was he taught about the supremacy of white people and “western civilization” in school if it wasn’t so. Again, I can see where he’s coming from. No doubt the schools he attended in rural Iowa made no mention of the contributions of African Americans and others to the development of the United States and certainly did not include the history of the ancient world upon which the foundations of Greece and Rome were built. I’m sure in his mind Elizabeth Taylor was Cleopatra. I’m also sure he never heard of the black Roman general – Saint Maurice – who is, to this day, the Patron Saint of Germany.
We have a lot to correct in our schools, news media, cinema etc. to ‘make right’ the many misrepresentations of the ancient and modern worlds. February, coincidentally the shortest month, isn’t the only month that black people made history and George Washington Carver’s uses of the peanut is not black people’s greatest achievement.
Until the symbols of white supremacy – like the Swastika and Confederate flag – are no longer accepted as merely expressions of free speech, but publicly renounced for what they are – symbols of a hateful and oppressive ideology – we will not have moved beyond our racist past. Until the contributions of all peoples to the creation of the modern world are equally acknowledged, we will still be under the fallacious assumption that western civilization is wholly original and not a derivative of earlier cultures.
My parents taught me that “you are no better than anyone else and no one else is any better than you.” A life lesson we should all heed.
Staff Writer; Harry Sewell