The way to tighten the bonds of a group is put them through an ordeal, to make their lives difficult, to make them feel persecuted, to make their cause seem unfairly attacked. The way to loosen the bonds of a group is to ignore it, to treat it as irrelevant, to make its existence boring and unimportant, to yawn at its tantrums, to keep telling the truth so that its lies are clearly seen for what they are.
All of the attention that white supremacy has been receiving can only be making tighter the groups holding to that perverse ideology. Continuing to attack them head-on is only feeding them, giving them what they want, giving them what they need to keep going.
Articles like this serve as recruitment tools, not as deterrents. They’re well-meaning but wrong-headed.
We defeat racism by loving people, not by hating haters. When my focus is on loving my neighbor and co-worker and family member and friend of whatever racial-ethnic background, I make racism irrelevant.
When I tell my kids the truth that all humans are made in the image of God and are thereby of the utmost value to God and to us, then any lies told about any subset of humanity are seen for what they are.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s goal was brotherhood. He chose nonviolence because, well, it ended the violence. He knew he couldn’t forge a unity with someone he was fighting.
Is there more to this? Am I being simplistic? Probably. But I’d like to see racism become boring and irrelevant. I’d like to see its proponent groups disband because of a lack of interest, rather than grow in number and in strength because they feel like a misunderstood and mistreated but tight community. Let’s stop feeding them with the rhetoric and attention and persecution that nourishes their cause.
Love and truth are always the best way to defeat hate and lies.
They may not get the results we want immediately. But they do win in the end.
[Featured image is by Chris Keane/Reuters]