Day 14: "Tear it Down" (Or, This is Your Brain on Word-Weighting...)

Why, no matter what orders Trump signs, or what tactics this administration uses, diversity is here to stay.

Tuskegee Airmen, Tuskegee, Alabama, WW2.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. – James Baldwin

Let America be America Again; the land that never has been yet, and yet must be. The land where every man is free. – Langston Hughes

Early last week, the US Air Force stated that it would no longer teach its recruits about the Tuskegee Airmen, the contingent of more than 15,000 African American pilots, mechanics and cooks who fought in WW2. They also eliminated a video about the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots) – the female pilots who tackled everything from servicing the planes to teaching male pilots how to fly them.

This was all due to a spate of recently signed executive orders by Trump, the same ones that placed all federal employees whose jobs were to increase inclusion among underrepresented groups on immediate leave. Trump also tasked the US attorney general with coming up with a plan for enforcing what he’s now calling “civil rights laws”; ones that end “illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI," and that pressure the private sector to do the same.

You heard that right. They’re actually calling DEI (which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives “illegal discrimination” and he’s ordered the Justice Department to find ways to prosecute organizations that engage in it. And that’s not all. He also signed an executive order that removes any other gender identities besides male and female from all federal forms.

In his inauguration speech, he said, "As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female." (Of course, that’s not true. It won’t “henceforth be the official policy of the United States government” – just until he and this administration are gone.)

Even still, there’s no way this can be seen as anything other than an effort to alienate, invalidate and erase trans and non-binary Americans simply because Trump believes they shouldn’t exist. (For me, I’ve decided that, until this changes, I’ll refuse to check either box or check both. I’d suggest we all do the same – that, right from the beginning, we vow to stand with them.)

Trump cut funding to inclusion initiatives across all agencies, with the goal of “ending DEI inside the federal government,” which he’s claiming is fundamentally unfair, and discriminates against the truly deserving. That’s worth repeating. He’s claiming, with zero awareness of the irony involved, that finding ways to prosecute companies practicing inclusion is what defending civil rights looks like. The mental gymnastics present in that line of reasoning could throw Simone Biles off her game.

The whole thing reminds me of a few years ago when Donald Trump Jr. tweeted how terribly unfair it would be if his daughter had to share all the Halloween candy she worked so very hard for with other kids. Somehow, this strikes him as “unfair”, that she’d have to share a tiny portion of what’s available to her simply due to an accident of birth. But the fact that his daughter got to trick-or-treat in an exclusive, gated neighborhood filled with other billionaires and where kids get $1,000 candy bars and concert tickets in their treat bags? That’s not unfair. That’s just America.

After the massive public outcry over the Air Force’s removal of the Tuskegee Airmen curriculum, Trump was quick to carve out a caveat, essentially saying if inclusion happened in the past, that’s not “DEI”, which he’s redefined as “illegal discrimination” (though he deftly avoids declaring who’s being discriminated against in his rewriting of reality.) Apparently, diversity-related programs of the past aren’t DEI. They’re just history. It’s practicing inclusion today that’s apparently discriminatory.

Notice how they keep referring to it as “DEI”, instead of by its actual name – diversity, equity and inclusion – an old marketing trick that makes it easier to forget what the acronym stands for. Like BP (which is more palatable for an energy-conscious society than British Petroleum) or KFC (which, at a time when people are eating less fried food, works better than Kentucky Fried Chicken). It also makes it easier to flip the concept; turning it into its opposite.

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is, in fact, a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded.”

Every time I think of those words from Goebbels on the fungible nature of circles and squares, I also think of George Orwell’s “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Orwell, in 1984, called this practice “Newspeak” – the fictional language of the totalitarian superstate where his novel was set.

Created to meet that state’s ideological requirements, Newspeak was a controlled language, one that, according to Orwell, follows most rules of English grammar, but is characterized by a continually diminishing vocabulary; one where complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms designed to conceal the creator's ideology and compromise the hearer’s ability to think critically or challenge the construct.

So, in our case, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to distill diversity, equity and inclusion down to its acronym – DEI. But, that’s only the start of it. There’s a concerted effort to somehow present every facet as its opposite. By embracing diversity, people who had preferential treatment everywhere, now only get it in some places. By promoting equity, their excessively outsized slices of the American pie are still larger, but less excessive. And, by practicing inclusion, we’re endangering their rightful, guaranteed spots at the top of the pyramid. How on earth did we get here? That’s what this letter is about. It’s a story with three parts.

Word-Weighting

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion,” Harry Potter’s Dumbledore said, “Our most inexhaustible source of magic; capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” And, he was right. In This Land Is Your Land, I describe how one of language’s most interesting qualities is that, even as it is used by millions of people at any given time, it is, like everything else, constantly changing. I give several examples, including “awful”.

Today, the word means “very unpleasant”, but its original meaning was the opposite; something that inspired wonder, or awe. Or, “artificial”, which now means “fake”, but once meant its opposite; something artfully and skillfully constructed, as in by an artisan. “Resentment”, which today describes a deeply held anger, once meant a strong sense of gratitude. And, the word “harlot” once described a foolish man, but today is used to describe a sexually liberated woman.

But perhaps the most interesting changes have been to words like “villain” (which used to describe a trusted farm hand, but now, as we know, describes the bad guy of the story), and “patriot” (which once meant “a factious disturber of the government”). The same thing has happened with words like “Aryan”, “socialist”, “welfare” and “special”. All are examples of word-weighting.

Propagandists use word-weighting to both poison terms that don’t align with their agenda (“socialism”, “Critical Race Theory”), and to take innocuous-sounding words (“states’ rights” and “religious freedom”) and assign them new, malicious meanings (“slavery” and “segregation”). Or, take pink and blue. Today, the idea that blue is masculine and pink is feminine is cemented in our minds. But few of us realize that not even a century ago, each meant the opposite.

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls,” said a June 1918 article in Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department. “The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Retailers across the nation routinely told parents to dress boys in (masculine) pink and girls in (feminine) blue.

So, how, and perhaps just as importantly, why, did things shift? No one has a prevailing theory, but it began in the wake of soldiers returning from World War II. It might have been as simple as blue being a color we now associated with valor, (“our boys in blue”), or the increasingly negative connotations associated with the color red in the 1950s (“better dead than red”). Even still, this shift didn’t happen immediately.

What started in the 1940s took nearly four decades to become universally adopted. But by the ‘80s, each color had been assigned a different cultural weight. We’d shift, so that the culturally dominant gender group (males) was associated with the now more positive color (blue), and we’d link females to the now less desirable color (pink); something that occurs in all manner of ways from “that’s so gay” to “he’s such a girl”.

And then, they’d get busy. They’d apply word-weighting to all kinds of concepts, from “states’ rights”, “forced bussing” and “special rights”, to “woke”, “All Lives Matter” and “the race card”, to “the gay agenda”, “man-haters”, “cancel culture”, “groomers”, and apparently, according to Trump, the “war on whiteness”. The same people who invented MAGA-ism have been using word-weighting to target all forms of inclusion since the days of Plessy v. Ferguson. But that’s not the worst of it. Campaigns like these are only successful if they can convince us that certain things are the opposite of what they actually are.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

In this case, that means rebranding inclusion initiatives as tools of exclusion; ones that violate so-called “merit-based hiring”. But, how do we do this? First, we must convince people that the tilted floor is actually level. That means asserting that the hiring process is, and always has been fundamentally equitable, inclusive and fair. That is, before those awful “DEI people” started perverting it, gaming the system so that the “undeserving” could get hired. And this, of course, meant that all those better-qualified, true Americans are now being deprived of opportunity. But, if we’re even remotely honest with ourselves, and if we’re at all attuned to our conscience, we’re forced to admit the truth – that ours is a system that’s never been fair.

Back when I first left the pastorate, I applied for a job at Big Brothers/Big Sisters. I brought to that work certain qualifications. As an ethnic minority who grew up in poverty and in government housing, I had strong commonalities with the program’s target demographic. Almost all “Littles” were non-Anglo and from low-income households. Due to lived experience, I knew, first-hand what their struggles were – everything from surviving in the summer without the school’s free lunch program to how the lack of enrichment experiences shrinks our world and our understanding of what’s possible in life.

And, as an organizer, I had extensive experience working with the same kinds of professionals most likely to be volunteer “Bigs” in the program. But their screening process captured none of this. Their binary system was based on one thing; whether candidates met the education requirement. At the time, BBBS had a rule that only people with a master’s degree could be hired. But few people with masters, especially if they also had student debt, could afford to take a full-time role that paid $15,000 per year. My MA in Theology, though unconventional, meant that I was interviewed, and because I was already used to a pastor’s modest salary, I could take the job.

However, I would turn out to be the only ethnic minority working in a program where most children were ethnic minorities, and I was the only one from a low-income background. Even back then, I was aware of all the amazing people, from my Aunt Gwen who worked at Krispy Kreme donuts and whose house was where every kid in the neighborhood congregated to Mrs. Jeanette, a beautiful, afroed woman who was a maid and taught Sunday school, And how they would have been incredible in that position. But they’d never even get an interview.

Aunt Gwen was my aunt by proxy. She was the wife of my uncle Willie, one of my stepfather Joe’s seven brothers (no sisters). Her house, situated halfway between the A&P where I worked and the Brickyard, the government housing project where we lived, was always like a port in the storm for me. On my way home from work, I’d stop in, she’d fuss over me, feed me a snack, and give me a peck on the cheek; always glad to see me. I’d be greeted by my three cousins, along with all the other kids running around the large yard playing tag, or who were still at the kitchen table where Aunt Gwen had them finishing their homework.

Then, there was Mrs. Jeanette (a lesson for all you non-Southerners – in the South, you never refer to an elder simply by their first name), who was both mentor and confidant. I met her while working at E-Z supermarket, my first job. I was 10. Whenever I walked her home with her groceries, she’d offer me something to drink before I headed back, and she’d always tip me a dollar. (To give you a sense of how significant that was, I made $10 per week at E-Z.)

When I learned I’d been accepted to a high school for gifted kids that was nearly two hours away by bus, she was the one who implored me not to pass on that opportunity. “It’s how you get out of here,” she said, solemnly, with a look that said what she didn’t – that it was my only way out. And she was right. Can you imagine women like this working at places like BBBS, getting paid to work with kids from their neighborhood all day, every day? But that would never happen because the “merit-based” hiring system Trump is going on about cares nothing about actual merit.

The BBBS people weren’t prejudiced. In fact, they were working hard to diversify the team while operating within the parameters that had been set. They weren’t biased. But, they also didn’t need to be. The so-called merit-based system had bias baked in. So, the question we should be asking is who gets to set the merits? Because the system that favors a kid with a one-year Harvard MA over someone like Aunt Gwen or Mrs. Jeanette is just one of the edifices DEI has spent the last four years tearing down. Four years since Trump’s 2020 thrashing by people like them, and, no doubt, why he and this faction are so obsessed with obliterating DEI today. But it’s a fight they’ve already lost.

The Boy Who Cried “Wolf”

Still, we have to hand it to them. What supremacists pulled off is really kind of brilliant, in the worst way possible. They’ve successfully done what any dwindling faction that doesn’t want to relinquish power does – stage a coup – one they’ve been laying the groundwork for since the 1965 Voting Rights Act leveled the playing field of democracy.

It’s what New Right strategist Lee Atwater was doing in 1981, when he explained their strategic shift from shouting “Nigger, nigger, nigger” to framing school desegregation as “forced bussing”, to using budget line items as code: “I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.”

But, he was wrong on one critical point. He and his friends weren’t “doing away with the racial problem”. They were doing away with accountability for their racism. This same tactic is at play when we claim that people are “playing the race (or “woman” or “gay”) card”, a form of gaslighting – attempts to make a targeted party doubt themselves and their experience. We assert, for instance, that racism, sexism or homophobia wasn’t present until they brought it up, and by doing so, they’re falsely claiming bias where, in fact, there is none.

In this counter-narrative, the targeted person is now “the boy who cried ‘wolf’”; making the person being violated the problem, then crucifying the messenger. It works by simply declaring an unfair context a fair one, then attacking and discrediting anyone who dares speak up. The underlying assertion is that the bigotry the person is calling out doesn’t exist – i.e. – things were profoundly fair and completely unbiased until that sly, wily minority attempted to skew the process by injecting bias into it.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Again, we do have to give them their due. They’ve shown they can take just about any concept that stands for something they don’t like, and turn it into the opposite of what it is, making it so toxic that simple association with it is the kiss of death. Proponents of a “for some” America have been working to perfect this one weapon since before the ‘50s when McCarthy was yelling about “card-carrying communists”, and when people like Washington State Judge Joseph A. Mallery were attempting to reframe equal rights for African Americans as the opposite of what they were; “special rights”.

They were honing its edge in the ‘70s when Anita Bryant claimed that a law that prevented gays from being fired simply because of their orientation was, inexplicably, an assault on her civil rights: because it prevented her from living in a world where they were either invisible or didn’t exist. And they’re doing it today. News anchors, instead of calling out the ridiculous attempts to rebrand DEI “illegal discrimination”, are trying to parse this insanity, talking about how teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen isn’t part of those “evil” diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Instead of pointing out the absurdity of calling inclusion the new exclusion, they’re tacitly validating this outlandish premise.

But saying the Tuskegee Airmen isn’t about DEI is laughable and an invalidation of all they overcame. When the United States reluctantly launched the segregated pilot training program, they set it up to fail. First off, they went forward with it because the 1940 Census reported there were only 124 African-American pilots in the entire nation. Then, to make sure it couldn’t succeed, they set the qualifications extraordinarily high – far higher than any comparable program. Anywhere.

It didn’t matter. The Air Corps was inundated with applications from men who qualified, even under the restrictive requirements, men who’d already participated in the Civilian Pilot Training Program launched in December 1938. Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute (now, Tuskegee University), one of the few colleges African Americans could attend, had been training pilots since early 1939. One of the pilots trained there was a woman – Mildred Hemmons Carter – one of the first women to earn a pilot's license through the program.

Mildred applied to become a WASP, and by the time of her application, she’d logged more than 100 hours of flying time. Still, she was rejected via letter sent from Jackie Cochran, founder of the program. The letter explicitly stated "I was not eligible because of my race,” Mildred explained years later. “It left no doubt." Nevertheless, she went on to have an amazing career in aviation, including mentoring women who’d go on to become everything from flight nurses to aerospace engineers. At 90 years of age, Mildred would be declared an official member of not just the WASPs but the Tuskegee Airmen.

That’s why it’s important to grasp the ramifications of our claims that what these people accomplished is not a critique of the America we once were, and that some want us to be again. I get that we’re doing so to preserve the story of these American heroes, to keep it from being erased. And we’re right. Their story, instead of being eliminated, should be elevated. But, by claiming it’s not DEI, not about diversity, equity and inclusion, their story becomes proof of American greatness; how we’ve always been fair and just, land of the free and home of the brave, and how, if we can get back to who we once were, we can be great again.

But, as we saw in Right-Sizing Changes Everything, that’s certainly not the America these WW2 vets, including the Tuskegee Airmen, came back to: “Oo-wee, look at all them there spangles on your chest,” was what one socially white man said to Dabney Hammer, upon his return to his hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, wearing his war medals. “Glad you back. Let me tell you one thing don’t you forget… you’re still a nigger.”

Sergeant Isaac Woodward, a 27-year-old Negro veteran, upon being honorably discharged from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, was pulled from a public bus (still in uniform), incarcerated, and during the night, beaten so badly that he was blinded in both eyes; one of which was gouged out. In Alabama, when a Negro veteran removed the Jim Crow sign on a trolley, an angry streetcar conductor shot him several times. The Chief of Police, finding the Marine still alive, fired a single shot to his head, executing him.

In South Carolina, a veteran who complained about Jim Crow transportation had his eyes gouged out with the butt of the sheriff’s Billy club. And, in Louisiana, a Negro veteran who defiantly refused to give a white-identifying man a war memento was dismembered, castrated, and blow-torched. This is the America these men returned to, the same “great” America this faction is trying to return us to today.

But even this, having a president force his supremacist agenda on us and an administration that’s both making injustice legal and equally importantly, making justice, illegal, isn’t a first for us. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in 1913, became the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He appointed Southerners to his Cabinet, and some began to press for segregated workplaces; despite the fact that Washington, D.C. and federal offices had always been integrated. It was here that segregation and discrimination became federal policy, then, normative across the country. We’ve been trying to undo the damage ever since.

Be the Power

Mrs. JE Andrews, president of the Women’s National Association for the Preservation of the White Race (WNAPWR), established to counter efforts by the NAACP the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, accused the latter of being dedicated to promoting the ruin of the “pure white race” (Notice what she’s done there. In her framing, it’s the oppressors, the “pure white race”; the people at the front of the bus, writing the laws and dominating the ballot box who are actually under attack.)

Pure white race. That short phrase sums up the entire segregationist narrative, that they were white, that they were a race, and perhaps most importantly, that they, like the Ivory soap motto popular at the time, were pure. And there was power in that framing. Because, in doing so, the claim was made that they were the beset upon, the persecuted, the ones being illegally discriminated against. Sound familiar?

By 1931’s Scottsboro Boys trial, one of the many places Mrs. Andrews preached the “pure white race” gospel, race in general, and white supremacy in particular was emerging as our nation’s new dominant narrative. But 10 years later, with our entry into WW2, it was already falling apart. Far too much was changing, far too fast.

Then, there’s us. As susceptible as we Americans might be to supremacy narratives, there’s something at the core of us that’s equally committed to equality. To equity, diversity, and inclusion. Acknowledging that is so essential, especially given the diverse America we’re already becoming. Efforts to take us back aren’t just impossible; they’re like locking ourselves inside the house, then, setting it on fire.

But, reason won’t stop supremacists from preaching their gospel, whether that of a “pure white race” or a nation committed to MAGA Jesus – not as long as they think they can still win. They’ll keep insisting that war isn’t really war, but actually, peace, that freedom isn’t freedom, but actually slavery. And, perhaps even more importantly, that slavery is freedom – that we’re only truly free when we’re shackled, waiting at the auction block. When they fly the flag and talk about “the land of the free”, that’s what they really mean.

But, if you remember nothing else from the things I’m writing about, remember this: nothing they’re doing gives them a lock on the future. The numbers are so overwhelmingly in our favor that they simply cannot create enough trapdoors and barriers to stay in power; no matter how much redistricting they do or what voter ID measures they pass. None of that can change the fact that in 2020, 15 million to 26 million Americans participated in marches. Nothing like that had ever been seen in the history of our nation.

They faced losing their jobs and their lives, getting arrested and getting evicted. They were teargassed, shot down in the streets by rifle-toting supremacists and targeted by a sitting president. None of that stopped them. Nor, did they stop with just protests. They overran the ballot box. But, make no mistake, all that energy was present long before anyone knew who’d be running against Trump. It wasn’t about who we were voting for. It was about who we were voting against.

That voter wave was so massive that supremacists had to come up with their own Really Big Lie – that many votes don’t prove how much people wanted Trump out and have no relation to the tens of millions of protestors. According to them, those weren’t angry voters. Those were stolen votes.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Election deniers want to claim those votes came from magic. They didn’t. They came from pain. From the anguish of watching police choke a human being to death as he cried for his mama. From watching as Sean Reed live streamed his own death, only to have one of the officers who just killed him quip, “Looks like it’s going to be a closed casket, homie,” before the other cut the feed. And, from watching the footage of Michael Slager shooting an unarmed Walter Scott, who was fleeing from a traffic stop.

"Shots fired, and the subject is down, he took my Taser," Slager told the dispatcher. Then, the eyewitness video surfaced; one showing not only that Walter was too far away to have ever taken his taser; but he was facing away from Slager the entire time. Walter never once turned toward him. And the tasering Slager swore to? It did happen, but the video revealed that it was Slager, not Walter, who’d used it.

Then, he opened fire on a fleeing, just tasered Walter Scott; shooting him eight times, all in the back, killing him. He then walked back to where he’d stood while tasering Walter, picked something up off the ground, and then dropped the object, which, in the video, appeared to be his taser, next to Walter’s riddled body. So, of course, we were outraged. Who wouldn’t be?

But at the same time, outrage, no matter how righteous, is a greedy fuel. It’s almost impossible to sustain, which is why the 2020 election, the greatest voter turnout in the history of the American vote, though unprecedented, was also an outlier. It’s the thing that everyone from the Freedom Riders to the Selma marchers were trying to teach us: though outrage propels people into the struggle, it’s conviction that ensures that they win. Luckily, we have plenty of both, not to mention, the numbers.

What people hoping to game democracy won’t tell you is that today, we, those of us who believe in a “for all” America, are 4 years, 2 months and 25 days larger than we were even in 2020. And they’re 4 years, 2 months and 25 days smaller. It’s time we claimed the power that’s our birthright, that people laid down their lives for us to have. We choose the future. But only if we show up. This begins right now, with holding every member of Congress accountable starting with the election that’s 21 months away. That’s how long they have to show us who they’re fighting for and the kind of America they believe in. That, they serve at the pleasure of the people.

Doing this one thing, changing who Congress believes it works for, changes everything. It defangs this administration and lays the groundwork to end this faction’s mechanizations for good. Our incoming 2028 president will build on this work, taking it upon herself to set SCOTUS to rights, including building in safeguards so that an ideological coup can never occur again. Because, despite their efforts to convince us otherwise, we’re no longer that tiny remnant of society, begging for the majority to find its soul.

We’re no longer an America where people like Democrat senator Olin Johnson can proudly say, “I don’t run from niggers. I run them from me,” or where folk like Republican senator John Cornyn can feel comfortable tweeting, "Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education,” after SCOTUS struck down Roe v. Wade. That’s our job – to be the power – the one they answer to.

So, while their shrinking faction is running around yelling “Make America great again”, we’re doing the real work, the hard work, the work Langston Hughes called us to do. We’re making America “America” again – the land that never has been yet, and yet must be – the land where all are free.

Today marks Day 14 of the fight to make us into a society that works for all of us. There are 1,371 days between today and the 2028 presidential election, and 1,446 days until Martin’s 100^th birthday. So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day between now and then. Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing. And, how do we fight? In every way we can.

One last item: This DEI thing isn’t just some side issue. It’s at the core of everything the Civil Rights movement was fighting for. Getting it right is the only way our nation secures a place for itself in the future. I’m crafting a short series – Divas of Diversity – that uses pop anthems to help us grasp how to do this.

I have two closing songs for you today. The first is Tear it Down, a 2020 solo recording by Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, one of my all-time favorite groups, and the epitome of what it means to be artist-activists. Amy and Emily have always been close to my heart for many reasons, including how much heart they put into their songs, and because they, like me, are Southerners.

They also, like me, know the Southland’s flaws, and simply for daring to be who they are, they’ve suffered at that toxic ideology’s hand. But they’ve also seen the beauty at the heart of its people, and all the ways those people have reckoned honestly with the evil they’ve committed, instead of doing what so much of the rest of America has done – deny it.

“Tear it down,” Amy pleads, “Tear it down, that ragged cross of race,” with images of Southerners doing just that. “If all lives matter,” one sign featured in the video says, “Why aren’t you mad, too?”

Amy gets that there’s so much more to who we Southerners are than what supremacy left behind. She also knows there’s no whitewashing those leftover things or redeeming them. There’s no Newspeaking them or word-weighting them. We only find our way to something beautiful by razing them, so that all the bounty in our nation’s rich soil can spring forth:

You say “I miss the old ways, but not like that”. Dog whistling fool of a king. Don't you know that old Dixieland is more than dirt roads and simple ways? Tear it down, tear it down, that ragged cross of race.

I don't guess that we deserve all this; the beauty and the light. The way the firefly returns in June, as dusk sings her lullaby. All the lives that fertilized, and the manifested hand. The human bondage that provides the bounty of this land. Tear it down, oh, tear it down, that ragged cross of race. The stone and the ore beaten into monuments that rose out of hate.

I was that lonely kid in old cinemas watching Gone with the Wind. Tradition runs the core of me; the song of the south, "Whistling Dixie" again. Oh, that tune lived and breathed in me, and it wants to live again. We must fight with all our might to kill that racist hymn. Tear it down, ah, tear it down, that ragged cross of race. The stone and the ore beaten into monuments that rose out of hate. The epitaph I long to read is – "Here lies slavery."

The second, John Legend and Common’s Glory, from Ava DuVernay’s Selma – about that fateful fight for the future of democracy that occurred in Alabama exactly 60 years ago – about those who marched for inclusion and those who did everything in their power to stop them – needs no introduction. It sums up everything we’re still fighting for today in just four minutes. “One day, when the glory comes,” John declares, “It will be ours.” And it will be.