When about 200 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched in Philadelphia right before Independence Day, I found myself asking a single question: How do people find time to travel across the country in furtherance of hate?
With Americans needlessly dying from COVID-19 when vaccines could save their lives; with gun violence bringing death to workplaces, street corners and homes; with politicians arguing over infrastructure even as buildings collapse in our midst, America shouldn’t have time for hate.
That’s why white people who believe in this country must join the fight against racism.
We’ve seen it before, most notably last summer, when millions of white people joined African Americans and others in the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. If future fights against racism are to succeed, white people will have to stand up again, just as they’ve been forced to do in the past.
Abolitionist John Brown, a white man who fought violently to defeat slavery, staged a bloody raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, that arguably served as a catalyst for the Civil War. Violet Liuzzo, a white housewife and mother who traveled from Detroit to Alabama to help with the 1960s civil rights movement, was killed by the Ku Klux Klan for her efforts. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed along with a Black man named James Chaney while investigating the burning of Black churches in 1960s Mississippi. And Heather Heyer, a white anti-racism protester, was murdered in 2018 by James Fields, who drove his car into a crowd of demonstrators in Charlottesville, injuring 20 others in the process.