Brookings pastor Carl Kline: Hands Off, Trump. We won’t allow you to turn back the clock on hate and racism
In 1963, my wife and I left Aberdeen, newly married, for New York City. There we began a three-year residence at Union Theological Seminary, located on the corner of Broadway and 122nd Street. We were just across the street from Riverside Church, where I did my field work.
In order to secure its first senior pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the congregation declared itself an interracial, international and interdenominational church. Members came from Harlem, as little as three blocks away, as well as from the suburbs of New Jersey. You might sit next to someone from Tanzania or Germany, working at the United Nations, or someone from Grant Houses, a housing complex with many living in poverty.
Imagine, going from an all-white rural state (with a few Indian people, generally invisible in Aberdeen) to a racial and cultural stew like the Big Apple. It opened our eyes to the reality of racism. For instance, take grocery shopping. Getting our hamburger at the coop on Amsterdam Avenue, a block or two from Harlem, we would pay 89 cents a pound for meat that would turn into mostly grease when you fried it on the stove. Shopping across the river in New Jersey, we paid 69 cents a pound for hamburger, not grease.
Even paying the toll on the bridge and the gas for the excursion, we saved money shopping in a basically white suburb. Besides, the lettuce and vegetables were fresh, not old and wilted.
Gradually, we realized that racism is not just a personal attitude; it can be institutional. It can be built into the very fabric of a society, into the groceries available to you.
I began to realize that some of the young people I worked with at Riverside might never be able to escape its tentacles. It was evident to us, especially coming from a culturally and racially impoverished background like ours, that we needed a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, if we were to be the society we claimed to be, with “liberty and justice for all.”
My wife was the breadwinner in the city. We weren’t living in poverty but on a very tight budget. Our evenings out would often consist of a subway ride to the Staten Island Ferry, a round trip on the ferry, and the subway back to uptown. The ferry went past the Statue of Liberty.
It became more than a symbol! We saw the everyday reality! In fact, the reality of that welcome was evident with us on the ferry and the subway going home, in our seminary community, and in the church where I was working. You couldn’t miss it!
“I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Maybe he will have the lady removed with an executive order. If the first four years was any example, he certainly will limit the traffic. The cartoons with Trump and the Statue of Liberty are prolific. In one, the statue has bags packed and going to Canada.
In another, the president is simply chopping it down and saying, “I’m sick and tired of your tired and poor.”
Instead of a “golden door,” it is now a “Golden Card.” If you can put up $5 million, you could have one of Donald Trump’s Gold Cards, with his picture and promise of potential citizenship. At last count, more than 1,000 had been issued.
Perhaps the funds can be used to further the construction of the Southern wall, to keep “the tired and poor” out! Or maybe the funds can be used to fly more undesirables to distant destinations like El Salvador, or to imprison and deport more international students with unpopular opinions.
Although this administration is using racist dog whistles to generate support, it won’t work in the long run. Why? Because race is not the primary agenda! Power and wealth is! And as a country, racism is an old agenda, untenable in the longer term. We are what we are, which is a multiracial and multicultural society, constructed against significant odds over many years. It won’t be undone!
And people are beginning to discover this latest presidential campaign hasn’t been primarily about race. The race card has been used to generate power. And if a person of color can afford a Gold Card, and they are appropriately humble, they might be allowed to join the oligarchy that intends to rule.
Just as in the 1960s, people are also beginning to organize against a government that tries to institutionalize values antithetical to who we are as a nation. “Give me your tired, your poor,” has long been our belief and pledge.
We can count on the needy to contribute, in gratitude. What we can’t count on, are those who have more than enough, but only have their eyes set on “more.”
The April 5 protests saw the beginning of a new movement all across this country, an “Indivisible” movement. We won’t be divided by racist dog whistles. We won’t be divided by walls and barriers and tariffs and executive orders. We are one country, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all!
Hands Off, Mr. Trump and all your henchmen! Hands Off!
Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
