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There’s no color line with white-supremacist thinking
You can count on Charles Blow, an opinion writer for the New York Times, to write and deliver the fire shut up in his bones with precise punches. Recently, he took to social media to tell the whole story about Abraham Lincoln to include Lincoln’s well-documented belief in white supremacy.
In response, one of Charles Blow’s followers tweeted if Charles Blow had been born white in 1809, he’d “be a white supremacist too.”
Well, is that how it works? That’s the logic from a mind that shrugs its shoulders and says, “there wasn’t a choice,” and “that was the time.”
I reject that logic. Usually, when I wonder if a Black person were white, I don’t assume they’d be a white supremacist too. That’s not where my mind goes. Instead, I think about life and liberty. My mind knows if Sandra Bland or Tamir Rice were white — they’d be alive.
To say, regarding any time period in U.S. history, “if you were white, you’d be a white supremacist too,” isn’t accurate. Here, technicalities count. There were white abolitionists in Lincoln’s day who were antiracist in thought and deed, and they believed in human equality.
