A friend called me the other day excited about new support for the Black Lives Matter movement. He said he has not felt so hopeful since the 1960s.
Former President Barack Obama says he, too, is buoyed, especially by a new generation of young civil rights leaders.
There is great hope in this moment. It is a movement and moment that could change America.
But there is also a current of exclusion and intolerance afoot in America today, and it is deeply troubling.
Martin Luther King Jr., and many others — Andrew Young, Bayard Rustin, Rosa Parks, to name a few — built a movement of brotherhood and mercy.
The question is: Will the impulse to build carry the day, or will the impulse to condemn and destroy prove dominant and irresistible?
To succeed, this new human rights movement in America must be one of dialogue, thoughtfulness and fairness. Justice is not achievable by unfair means. Progress toward a more just society is not possible in a society overcome by what historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.”
When a corporation bows to a Twitter mob with no regard for what the racist label means to the reputation of a person or an institution, and without any curiosity about what the truth of the matter might be, it violates every standard of fairness. But it also deals goodwill, tolerance and inclusion a blow. It signs on to a new standard — the presumption of some sort of guilt for almost all of us. And that is a wrecking ball.
Calling someone a racist in 2020 has the same force as calling someone a communist in the Joe McCarthy era in the 1950s. The accusation is the evidence; the label is the proof and the punishment. The mud sticks. Demagogues, charlatans and zealots are allowed to ruin lives.
They also trivialize and obscure the very real and profound problems of race that still exist in our country.
Every person in a position of power and privilege must be constantly learning about how to better wield that power and how his or her power affects those who have no power.
That’s a moral imperative that is not possible without goodwill and dialogue.
It’s not possible if we are busy smearing or canceling each other.
In the end, our collective hope must rest with particular actions and single souls. Every American must strive, always, to reach out to every fellow American. We cannot promote human understanding if we cannot practice it.
There is a related point to be made. It is that politics must have limits. As the great Andrew Sullivan pointed out recently, the whole idea of liberal democracy is that there are vast realms of life that are or should be outside the purview of ideology and political loyalty. There are transcendent modes in human life. Politics ought not to be one on them.
We still need to be able to relate to each other as human beings.
And we need to protect our private and inner lives.
When everything is subjected to the test of ideology, or a “correct” politics, you get totalitarianism, which is enforced by either the state or the mob. Privacy is destroyed. Civility vanishes.
Fascism can come from the far right or the far left: Authoritarianism from the right, and purges of thought, people and speech from the left. Through most of my life in newspapering, most of the bullies came from the far right. Today, in America, they come from the far left, though the fascist impulse is still from the far right in most of the world. But here, today, it is the “woke” who speak openly of silencing potential apostates.
Let me tell you about a few of the tactics of the current woke mob: They bomb your e-mail with what can only be called hate speech. They twist your words and actions. They make up things that you allegedly said and did that you never said or did. They target you and your family on social media. They bully those in their number who seem not angry or destructive enough into submission. They leave anonymous phone messages during hours when they imagine you are not in (they hang up when you answer), and they say things like this: “I am so happy you are suffering. No one deserves it more than you. I want you to suffer more. I know that you will be fired soon and that your name will be besmirched forever. This makes me very happy. I hope all this makes you sick and you die.”
This is not the behavior of a soldier in a human rights movement.
This is the method of someone who reduces all people to cogs in an ideological struggle and sees not fellow human beings but stereotypes; people as symbols.
Yet the future of our democratic experiment depends on our ability to deal with each other as individual, complicated, irreducible people, transcending class, age, race and political and ideological loyalties. In that democracy, we are each judged by the content of our character.
I think the future of our humanity depends on this too.
This is what Mr. Obama has long imagined and what Dr. King sought — a movement of love. It does not mean that society is trans- or post-racial, but that the open human heart can be. Heart can speak to heart, if we try.
Keith C. Burris is executive editor of the Post-Gazette, and vice president and editorial director of Block Newspapers (kburris@post-gazette.com).
First Published: June 28, 2020, 8:45 a.m.
