To the Editor:
I found it heartwarming that Obama won in 2008 and was re-elected in 2012. American society had apparently evolved sufficiently that enough white voters would now vote for a Black man to put him in the White House.
The political sky has darkened since. In the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump made a blatant appeal to racial antagonism. At his rallies, Trump repeatedly set forth a vision of disorder and violence if Democrats regained power. Gangs of angry Black men and women, hungry for loot, would see a Democratic victory as a permission slip to storm into white suburbs, stealing from and terrifying the inhabitants.
Trump did not explicitly describe these marauders as Black, but there was no doubt as to whom he was targeting. His message was clear. Whites must vote Republican to be protected against a tidal wave of Black violence.
A Democratic administration has now held office for a year — and we have yet to hear of a white suburb being overrun and looted by a Black mob.
So Republicans have embraced a new line of attack. Fox News and its right-wing talk radio allies are now portraying our public schools as infested by a great number of teachers who are poisoning the minds of students with something called “critical race theory.” Their alleged goal is to indoctrinate young white Americans to condemn America as a “racist” nation, repudiate their parents and ancestors as “white racists,” and recognize that they themselves — even if only adolescents — are inextricably implicit in “systematic white racism.”
This tirade against “CRT” — whatever it may be — is part of the broader Republican effort to portray Democrats as ultra-leftist, radical, “Marxist” socialists who “hate America” and seek to transform the U.S. into a “Marxist” dystopia.
A reality check:
The 81 million Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 do not “hate America.”
Their children and grandchildren do not, and will not, “hate America.”
Those who believe that some sinister cabal of “critical race theorists” have achieved awesome powers to mesmerize large numbers of white Americans into feeling guilty of “racism” because of the color of their skin are in the grip of a borderline psychotic delusion.
As for “Marxism,” not one Democrat — or Republican — in 100 could give an accurate description of who Karl Marx was, or what doctrines he advocated.
R.E.L. Knight
West Tisbury
