From KKK to ICE to DNA
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Depending on where you live in the world, and particularly in the U.S., you, like me, may have heard little about the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in your backyard. No matter where you live, those three letters KKK spell rascists. Three letters can stand out in ways that say hatred. Think ICE.
I've learned a lot in the last few weeks about the rascism and outright hatred of my own French Canadian ancestors when they settled in New England. My young ears had heard the slurs, "Canuck" "Frogs" Pea Soupers", and perhaps worse, but my grandparents never would have spoken those words out loud within earshot of the children. But, what has shocked me is that the KKK held daylight marches with faces uncovered in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts where I grew up. Think Charlottesville.
The anti-Catholic white men, and a "special" order made up of women, did the same things in rural New England in the 1920's that I saw in newspapers and on television in the 1960's in the deep South. Things that happened somewhere else--not here--cross burnings and sheer numbers of hooded and masked men meant to frighten and intimidate the French Catholics who had been recruited by the so-called mill barons to work in their factories. My grandparents had answered their call.
The message beyond the mills came from the Church. The clergy were among the elite along with the political leaders and under their direction the people practiced their faith. The "trinity" of the great migration was: faith, language, culture--to be preserved at all cost. They paid for it in religious discrimination that manifested in the rallies of the KKK.
In my mind a link can be drawn directly from those hooded men of hatred to those masked men today. Their agenda going back before our time was meant to insure an all white, all protestant country. Think Christian not Christianity.
The goal is and continues to be to infiltrate institutions all the way up to the alleged highest court of law.* Think school boards to Supreme Court.
The KKK terrorized my French Canadian Catholic ancestors, maybe yours, too. It is inconceivable for me, a white woman with certain levels of privilege by that very fact, to put myself in the shoes of my own grandparents facing that anti-religious rascism.
Such targeted rascism against loved ones because of their faith, their language, their culture becomes part of the family story. Nobody is exempt when hatred drives the actions of a small-minded agenda. It's in our DNA.
No Prophets,** author and Congressman Jared Huffman, quotes Sinclair Lewis “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
He offers an antidote that has been proclaimed by prophets in our lifetime: Think Bishop Budde.
If we muster a broad interfaith coalition grounded in shared commitment to democracy, we can reclaim the public square for everyone—religious and secular—to share on equal terms.
For a long time, I have believed interfaith is the way to go. If my grandparents had had that option, rather than being oppressed, they may have joined others in the public square instead of having to huddle in "Little Canada" all their lives.
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