‘Please stop talking about Black people and White people’

OPINION:

I am going to say it. 

Something that few people appear to be willing to say.

But yet, something almost everyone believes. 

Please stop talking about “White” people and “Black” people.

Millions of us just don’t care what color you are. 

This racist nonsense is destroying America. 

Please stop saying that “White people don’t see Black people as human beings.” — CNN’s Don Lemon.

Please stop saying that “racism is unconscious in everyone.” — Aruna Khillanani, speaker at Yale University who “fantasizes about killing white people with a bounce in her step.”

Please stop calling people with lighter skin “psychopathic.” — BET’s Mark Lamont Hill.

Please stop talking about people who look different than you as being “less than” human — Comedian Nick Cannon.

Please stop your virtueless virtue signaling by posting emojis of an upraised Marxist fist in honor of a holiday that ironically stands for American freedom rather than the bondage of communism.

Please stop your smug self-elevation and feigned deprecation of pretending that just because you’re white, you are somehow “privileged.”  

Please stop your “humble” self-flagellation of “repenting for distant uncles and aunts (white) who lived in Tulsa” during a time of riots that they, and you, had nothing to do with … The Wesleyan Church’s JoAnne Lyon.

Please just stop.

Stop your racist rhetoric. Stop focusing on color. Stop destroying our unity. Stop dividing our nation. 

Your message is destructive. Your demagoguery is dangerous.  

In my book, “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, but It’s Good,” I offer this:

“If you do not believe that there is a concerted effort to divide our nation, I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska to sell to you. Our intelligentsia — our country’s cultural and religious elites — think that if they can get Americans to focus on ourselves, our grievances, and our victimhood, that the nation’s very fabric can be taken apart strand by strand. Or, as Solomon told us, ‘A cord of three strands is not quickly broken,’ but a cord of one is defenseless. In other words, divide and conquer.” 

Evidence of this strategy is pervasive. In addition to the not-so-thinly veiled racism we see every day from secular talk heads, just look at the contemporary Church’s divisive rhetoric, such as what I cite above. The transparent enablement of us-against-them is rampant in our pulpits coast to coast. 

Sunday morning’s repeated homily from our religiously woke and righteous in one of segregation rather than integration. Theirs is a sermon that divides by race and gender and whatever else can balkanize us into competing groups with irreconcilable demands. Rather than warning of brimstone and fire, they pound their pulpits angrily about “us against them.”

The moralizing is shallow. The polity is immature. The piety is selfish. It is the antithesis of Christ’s admonition to die to self. It is the opposite of St. Paul’s call to set adolescent ways aside and “grow up.” 

Again, from my book “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, but It’s Good”: 

“Adolescents are, by nature, individualistic and insular. Adults, to the contrary, see the wisdom of promoting unity rather than division, integration rather than segregation, us rather than me and mine, a United States rather than divided states. Adults care more about a common cause of personal righteousness than the divisive demands of personal rights. Adults see the value of hundreds of hands working together, rather than one person’s hand smugly clapping in midair.”

The church of all places should understand that our identity isn’t found in race or gender. It isn’t found in personal grievances or our narcissistic infatuations. What is so confusing about Saint Paul’s clear admonition that “we are neither Jewish nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, barbarians or Scythians,” but one in the body of Christ? 

The progressive fixation on color – on “black people” and “white people” will inevitably result in more exclusion rather than inclusion, more segregation rather than integration, more anger and resentment, more hate, move vice, less virtue, and much less love. Churches preaching this nonsense are pumping spiritual carcinogens into a cultural cancer that grows more malignant with each passing day. 

Do not let these people divide us.  

Strength is found in unity. 

A cord of one strand can be broken. A cord of three cannot. There is only one race, the human race. 

We are one nation under God, indivisible.

There is no “I” in team, and those who think there is always lose. 

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery) and, most recently, “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, But It’s Good” (Regnery, 2021).