Make inclusion a real thing
I have come from the Martin Luther King Human Rights Breakfast, and if you didn’t get to be one of the lucky 100 guests or tune in on Zoom, let me give you a “taste” of this commemorative event.
We were served up some good eats by the Moscow High School students, and we were served up some good messages as well. Mario Pile, director of the University of Idaho Black/African American Cultural Center spoke on “Moving Forward Together.” How to get that done in a state that has embraced the Proud Boys and the agenda of hate, discrimination and white privilege? He had a few suggestions. Pile beseeched us to not become “complacent with hate” but to “make racists uncomfortable.”
Racists are very accomplished at that sort of intimidation. And it is not just the oldest among us who practice racism. Pile made it clear just letting an older generation to age and die will not prove a cure for the exclusion of people of color and LGBTQ. He said we must stand up, especially for Black women who have been deplorably treated in our communities, in the past and today, too. I wondered at the tools. How do I go about righting these wrongs? Am I somehow complicit in this discrimination? He asked us to look at our phones. If, in the last 10 calls we made or received we cannot note a person of color with whom we engaged, then we need to do a better job of reaching out. We need to make “inclusion” a real thing. Invite a student to dinner? Why not?
Dr. King said it well, “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Zena Hartung
Moscow
