Dear Secretary Clinton: Please Don’t Quote Slaveowners on America’s Inclusiveness

Obviously I agree strongly with the notion that Trumps (and the GOPs) homicidal xenophobia is beyond absurd and damaging to the country. Easy point. However there’s an irony to your using this Washington quote.

President George Washington was a lifelong slave owner.

While reassuring Jews that they would enjoy the freedom to practice their religion without fear of persecution and pontificating that prejudice would be given no quarter in the United States, he was happily using Black people as farm equipment.

Yes. The gist of your message is about religious tolerance. But it rings hollow when you echo words about freedom and human dignity from founding “fathers" who offered black Americans less than none.

Let us be clear. By invoking slaveowners discussing human dignity, you are erasing not only the blatant hypocrisy of their public positions, but also the internal American intolerance that is the direct antecedent of the systematic racism, police brutality and over-incarceration that has made the #BlackLivesMatter movement necessary.

Anti-Islam is without a doubt a serious and growing problem in America and it must be quelled, but this is impossible while between proclamations of religious tolerance, America dismisses the established problem of anti-Blackness.

The mantle of liberal inclusiveness is one that politicians reach for regularly without regard for what it actually means.

That we continue to amplify the words of men who believed fully in the non-humanity of black people and indeed profited handsomely from this belief is irresponsible and counterproductive. To perpetuate the narrative of Benevolent White America™ is to undermine any attempt to cleanse our political system of homicidal xenophobia.

If you as a candidate for the Presidential office cannot understand why conveniently ignoring the fact that blatant discrimination against the minority group of choice is and always has been welcome in America, then I lack confidence in your ability to lead us away from policy built on it.

This is not a diversion from your topic, this is the crux of it. Muslims know the history of America. They understand how it has treated blacks (many of them Muslim). Despite President Obama’s tenure, they can see that the lives of non-white people simply matter less to America. The world is not a vacuum where you can exhibit a virtue in a single domain and expect that no one will contrast it to your similar lack of virtue in a host of interrelated domains.

You simply cannot rail against anti-Islam using avatars of anti-Blackness.