Take a Stand, Local Officials: An Idea for Repairing Our Badly Broken Civic Life

By George Takei, The Washington Post

08 November 17

Part of: 38 ideas for repairing our badly broken civic life

s our nation again grapples with very tough questions around race — while white supremacists walk our streets and our president equivocates — I am reminded that America has never been fully free of racism’s shadow. Indeed, our greatest sorrows, the most horrific chapters of our history, grabbed hold when racism became government policy, extended by all the power of the state. The genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans — all occurred with the sanction of our elected representatives.

My father once remarked that, as a people’s democracy, America can be as great as the people who inhabit it, but also as fallible. When we choose leaders who personify our greatest hopes, we advance as a people. But when we choose fear, division and hate, we careen once more down a dangerous path.

The whipping up of racial hatred is not the exclusive purview of either major party. It was a Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed Executive Order 9066 and set in motion the internment of my community. And it was a Republican, Earl Warren, then attorney general of California, who advocated most vocally for our incarceration. These men were willing to tap into deep wellsprings of mistrust and ignorance to advance their agendas and political fortunes.

So when I hear talk, as I do so often lately, that caricatures, labels and vilifies whole groups, when I see scapegoating the vulnerable become the order of the day, I know that the greatest danger is silence or inaction, for history is eager for another go at our darkest impulses, to prove our tragic fallibility once more.

In the absence of strong national leadership on the question, state and local officials must take a stand and proclaim that racial hatred has no place in their towns and cities. Our local elected officials should stand arm in arm with peaceful counterprotesters. If the answer to racial division is racial unity, the answer to racist demagoguery is courageous leadership in the very face of that hate. It is now up to today’s local politicians to make a difference, to avoid the tragedy of our past when so few spoke up.