By Lucius Gantt
You never know who you’ll fall in love with but you do know who you want to hate.
My prayers and condolences go out to the people of Buffalo, New York that were the recent murder victims of a racially motivated killer.
Prayers are needed worldwide because racial hatred takes place all over planet earth!
No doubt, I sometimes speak about or write about racism, but I am not a racist.
Many of my closest male and female friends are Caucasians. I went to school with them, I’ve attended churches and worshipped with them, I’ve traveled with them, I’ve stayed in their homes and more than a few of my white friends have stayed in my homes, slept in my beds and they ate soul food at my dinner table.
My friends and I often disagree on a variety of political, economic and social topics but I think we respect each other. It is never ever our intention to don body armor, load guns and rifles with ammunition and to equip ourselves with helmets with cameras so we can livestream racially motivated murders on internet sites.
No matter what race you are, you did not exit your mother’s womb hating people with skin color that was different than your own.
People are taught to hate. People are told to hate. And, people are motivated, encouraged and provoked to commit racist acts of violence.
Racial extremists and racial terrorists are brainwashed at early ages to believe that their race is superior and other races are inferior. They are led to believe conspiracy theories, replacement theories and outright lies about their neighbors, coworkers and fellow citizens that have skin colors that differ from theirs.
In the past, lynchings, hangings, scalpings of Black, brown, red and other people of color were looked at as entertainment and today little children are dressed up in sheets and hoods and taken to cross burnings.
Every now and then, I see young people take a line from a book or an excerpt from a video by Frances Cress Welsing to post or talk about racism but our youth have got it twisted. Welsing wasn’t anti-white, her thoughts were based on scientific research about melanin or the lack thereof.
How do I know? Lorne Cress and I were coworkers at National Public Radio in the 70s when she and I sat down with her sister at Frances’ breakfast table and discussed her famous findings.
Racists have been taught to “fear a Black planet”! They have been taught that people of color are inferior, that they will be “replaced” by people of color and people of color will one day rebel, revolt and treat white people the way some whites have treated all people that are not pale skinned.
A couple more thoughts and I’ll be through.
Hate speech is not free speech. The millionaires and billionaires that own social media sites willingly accept and allow hate talk and hate speech to permeate their internet platforms because racists buy social media ads just like non-racists do.
The internet is where racial extremists and racial terrorists communicate with each other. It is where they post their racist manifestos. The internet is where white teenagers broadcast their murders live and in color.
Politicians can pass laws to prohibit untrue, ultra-provocative and racially motivated and violent messages from social media sites.
But guess what, some politicians are the major purveyors of hate filled lies and innuendos. Politicians that you love are the first to lie about replacement theories, the first to hate immigration of people of color, first to ban books about the history of people of color and they are the only people in the world that hate Mickey Mouse because Mickey Mouse is Black!
Finally, when racially motivated killers kill Black church goers, Black grocery shoppers and people of all colors that peacefully protest, some of the murderers suggest murders can and should cause a race war.
Well, wars cause bloodshed. Revolutionary wars are bloody, civil wars are bloody and military wars are bloody but the most-bloody war of all, would be a race war!
Men, women, seniors, children and babies could all be impacted by a worldwide race war.
Someone tell the white supremacists, there are more Black people on earth than white people and there are far more people of color on earth than there are pale people.
White people need to tell each other the truth. All men and women are created equal. The color of a man’s skin has no more significance than the color of a man’s eyes or the color of a woman’s hair.
White people know which of their friends and family members have racial motivations, they know which family members use racial slurs behind closed doors and they know the whites in their neighborhoods that have itchy trigger fingers that bought guns to kill humans.
Whites need to talk to other whites about doing the right things. In fact, all races should come together to put an end to racial hatred, racial extremism and racial terrorism.
Lucius is a contributing columnist to NNPA newspapers around the nation, and the author of “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” available on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere.