Know me by name, not by dermatology
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 27, 2024 – Unless and until you instruct your personal and public promoters to refer to you by name and title only, but not by demographic marker, then you will not have begun the job it will take to unify America.
To identify you as a person of color accomplishes these ends, regardless what anybody wants it to accomplish:
- it emits an odor thought to appeal to all persons of color;
- it emits an odor guaranteed to repel many non-persons of color (or persons of non-color).
Since the m.o. of your republican opponent is the tried-and-true tool of tyranny – divide and conquer, then the first job in the unification of our fifty states must be the insistence that we not be known by the color of our skin, or any other arbitrary marker, but by the content of our character. Unless we no longer agree with the eloquent dream of Dr. King?
Since 1964, the republican party has been the de facto party of Jim Crow; that’s when they welcomed the defection of America’s most prominent segregtionist, Sen. Strom Thurmond. In so doing, they announced the birth of the southern strategy that elected Nixon, who commissioned the Powell Memorandum, which led to the Heritage Society, and the malodorous mess we’re in today.
Clarence Thomas is only the first person of color raised to prominence and power by new Jim Crow; all we can do is hope that his out-sized appetite for the trappings of power has given them buyer’s remorse.
Good luck and Godspeed,
[Published as a letter in the Berkshire Eagle, July 27, 2024, the day Ms. Harris came to the Berkshires to begin her presidential campaign.]