The senior pastor of Washington, D.C.’s oldest black church still situated on its original site released a statement comparing the burning of his church’s Black Lives Matter sign to “cross burnings,” which were often conducted by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
The far-right group the Proud Boys and other supporters of President Donald Trump carried out demonstrations in the nation’s capital on Saturday. Violence erupted throughout the evening and demonstrators began removing Black Lives Matter signs from multiple black churches in the city – then destroying or burning them. Videos of these incidents were widely circulated on social media and police are reportedly investigating them as possible hate crimes.
Reverend Dr. Ianther M. Mills, the senior pastor of Asbury United Methodist Church, released a public statement on Sunday, pointing out that his historic church had been standing in the same place since 1836. “We are resilient people who have trusted in God through slavery and the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, and now we face an apparent rise in white supremacy,” he said.
These actions by Trump supporters reflect the extent to which such groups like the Proud Boys will go in their support of the current President. They will stop at nothing to extol their ‘so-called’ barbaric values of xenophobia, race and class hatred, and a deeply misogynistic vision of what their version of the US would look like.
It suddenly came to surface how badly that the US is split into two halves — one full of educated rational empathic individuals who care about people and democracy and are afraid to get the coronavirus while the other half think the virus is nothing to worry about and insist on attending churches, going to beaches and social events just because they have been told by the current President that they have nothing to worry about.
This deep divide is shocking — it shows the extent to which the US has been split across class and education lines. Mostly uneducated white rightists who are religiously extremists and live in the middle of the US and the south are the ones who feel insecure as they see the US is becoming diversified in terms of race, religion and democracy. These un-American Americans do not have much faith in democracy. One of their leaders claimed we decide election.
