Leveraging the Steve King episode (remember that?)

(part 4 in an occasional series on anti-racist allyship)

These days, the racial flare-ups come so fast that we often can’t keep up. A few ministers I knew were trying to distill some wisdom around the Representative Steve King debacle when….. BAM!! — America got a new teachable moment from which we will likely learn little. It was in the form of a Native Elder praying with a drum, a kid with a creepy smile in front of his super disrespectful schoolmates, and some tribe priding itself on rudeness called the Hebrew Israelites.

When all the dust settles, the lessons from the Not Quite Brawl on the Mall should be about social media overreaction and every side’s thirst to demonize others and grab the crown of pure victimhood. We could add the lack of appropriate history and ethics education and good supervision of our youth…..still, we probably won’t learn any of those lessons. But speaking of teachable moments we probably won’t fully leverage, let’s go back five days. There are some opportunities for everyday folk — especially anti-racism white allies that this article is aimed at — from the King kerfuffle. (The long overdue problems started from King saying to a reporter, “White nationalist, white supremacy, western civilization….when did that language become offensive?”)