Choose not to keep racism alive in America’s consciousness

I think the time is right and the ground is fertile for us to make progress as a state and to come together and remove the Confederate battle flag from prominent statue outside the Statehouse and put it in the museum. It is time to acknowledge our past, atone for our sins and work towards a better future. That future must be built on symbols of peace, love, and unity. That future cannot be built on symbols of war, hate, and divisiveness. I am aware of my heritage. But my appreciation for the things that my forebearers accomplished to make my life better doesn’t mean that I must believe that they always made the right decisions and, for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery. Think about it for just a second. Our ancestors were literally fighting to continue to keep human beings as slaves and continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will. I am not proud of this heritage. These practices were inhumane and were wrong, wrong, wrong. Now we have these hate groups and the symbols that they use to remind African Americans that things haven’t changed and that they are still viewed as less than equal human beings. Well, let me tell you: Things have changed. Overwhelmingly, people are not being raised to hate or to believe that they are superior to others based on the color of their skin. My generation was raised to respect all people, of every race, religion, and gender…I am proud to be on the right side of history regarding the removal of this symbol of racism and bigotry from the statehouse. But let it not satisfy us to stop there. Justice by halves is not justice.

Sen. Paul Thurmond, June 19, 2015

Will America succeed in shedding its presumptions that only White is right? Or White is Might? The concept, amongst holdovers from the confederate days, that America must be a Whites-only Nation? 

We have long allowed racists to dominate our conversations in government. Because their opinions are shockingly filled with hatred, we have kept our mouths shut. We have even allowed Catholics to be seduced by racists, such that their unconscious messages have gone on the airwaves, without proper filters from their content editors, and shared in our inboxes. 

During the campaign period to elect Pres. Barack Obama in 2008, I received emails from conservative Catholics, preaching not to elect Barack Obama, as he would become a Nazi Hitler in office. I replied, how many million Jews died at the hands of this US Senator? I asked the sender to be conscious of the hatred in her email, to which she replied, “but I did not react to your email about McCain.” I told her my email about McCain simply shared his track record. In my reply, I changed her subject heading and did not forward the offensive email about the President.

Should we now, as a group of Filipino-Americans, take a stand to filter out hateful emails, from the outside world, to not internally pollute our community’s inboxes? Should we not, as a community say this should not be shared, as we have long been accepting of all races? That Filipinos have been productive workers in 198 countries in the world and hence, we make room for all kinds of folks in the Philippines? What about here in America? Should that be our stance as world-class Filipinos, and by our institutions, as well? 

I recall a subscribers-only cable television network ask a question to Filipinos, sort of a survey to determine our subscribers’ opinion about allowing the incumbent Pres. Barack Obama to send troops to Syria and to declare a war. I challenged this network to check their facts and to figure out which branches of US government has the authority to declare war. While Pres. Obama is our commander-in-chief, he has shown caution in how he deployed troops, and at that time, he was seeking diplomatic solutions in Syria. Clearly, the misinformation was calculated to dissuade folks from not reelecting this Democratic President, just before his 2012 reelection. 

Should we allow the dominance of this cable television network to sponge off voters through unethical misinformation? Should we ask them instead to host town hall meetings about issues we care about: education, immigration reform, jobs, small businesses, and health care? 

I recall the US Catholic Conference of Bishops circulated a flyer to US Catholics asking them to lobby US Congress to oppose the Affordable Health Care Act in a rich zip code church. The US Bishops wrongfully believed the Affordable Health Care Act was promoting abortion, through the use of birth control pills, which they called abortifacient drugs. I personally challenged this misinformation by citing facts from the Mayo Clinic and reputable medical sources on the true nature of birth control pills, as not causing abortion, and the specific statutory language on the Affordable Health Care Act, as not covering abortions. 

But as Catholic lay leaders, who were privy to these flyers, should we have challenged the practice and pointed them to reputable medical sources that birth control pills are not abortifacient drugs? 

Do we allow our faith and our science to be corrupted for the wrong reasons, to protect the Catholic institutional coffers so they need not pay medical health premiums for their employees? 

Do we allow our consciences to be dormant, warped for expediency, just because they came from institutions, even when they plainly disseminate information that clearly negates science and truth, like the instances I described here? 

We have stayed quiet while racist commentators, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, the talk show host like Bill O’Reilly rudely interrupt and disrespect women, as if those are acceptable behaviors, or cable news commentators, birthers, senators, congressional leaders, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spew out falsehoods, targetting the incumbent in the White House​, projecting every mistake they could find. We have allowed inappropriateness and unethical behaviors to be popularized. 

We relied on President Barack Obama, Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow to do the critical thinking for us and to say these are not acceptable and decent behaviors. We did not stand up to say: enough Fox News​, we will not tolerate your way of reporting news without factual basis, much like what the Great Britain readers did to the Murdoch-owned newspapers who wrongfully spied on their public figures. We kept silent to wrongdoings, as the FCC stayed silent, which respectable broadcasters would not have been allowed, the likes of Tim Russert, Harry Reasoner and even Peter Jennings. We enabled wrongdoers by numbing ourselves to say, that “Black teenager must have it coming to him,” only to find out that he was about to graduate from high school.

Or did we kill the messenger by saying, “Oh that person was a detractor,” and enabled what was wrong, without standing up for truth and our collective consciences? 

When unarmed young black men were being killed by police in uniform, did we come out in indignation? Did we speak out like Chloe Dichoso, a sophomore at Salesian College Preparatory, who wants us to acknowledge our broken world? Or South Carolina state Sen. Paul Thurmond who understands his heritage, yet critiques it for how it dehumanizes sectors of folks? We must repair our brokenness, as America, to recognize that #blacklivesmatter and that #allhumanbeingsmatter, that we are all beloved children of God, and to keep the Confederate flag relegated as a museum artifact, and diligently snuff out racism from our collective consciousness.  

Broken World

by Chloe Dichoso (a Northern Californian poet who won second place in the Mt. Diablo Art and Creative Writing Contest) 

Do you not hear the world crying?

The mother weeps for her son

The woman weeps for her husband

A child left in broken streets

Cries for a guardian 

The land is torn

A world of battlefields

In man’s greed

Of garbage of plastic and fuel

Exploded as useless feces

Breathed in as toxins

Igniting violence and ignorance 

Is this the world you long to live in? 

The people who once did not have a voice

Will soon rise

Ushering the corner stone

To the ends of the earth

Spread as a message for all 

Until this earth stands united,

Together, hand in hand,

Our world will fall

Remaining in the chains we’ve held since the dawn of man 

Take your side

Choose your fate