One Anti-Racist Action You Can Take Today: Demand Truth & Accountability
By Guimel DeCarvalho
Vice President of People & Culture
All forms of oppression and tyranny rely on maintaining at least one “big lie” by many and escaping the consequences for that lie. Caste and white supremacy rely on the lie that one group is inherently superior to the other. As Isabel Wilkerson writes,
It mattered little that they were misperceptions or distortions of convenience, as long as people accepted them and gained a sense of order and means of justification for the cruelties to which they had grown accustomed, inequalities that they took to be the laws of nature.”
Hitler’s coup failed in 1923. Without true accountability of him and those who enabled him, he was back in power by 1933. As Timothy Snyder writes, truth & accountability don’t just happen. You have to do things to make them happen. After the Civil War confederate soldiers were pardoned, Robert E. Lee became a university president, and efforts were made to rewrite history to the “lost cause.” Our country cannot allow that to happen again. To preserve our democracy and in order to become anti-racist there must be truth and accountability. Snyder outlines 20 lessons on how to do this. Read the book and watch the video to learn more. Call your representatives and demand truth and accountability. Pick a democratic institution and defend it by supporting it and caretaking it.
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” – Thomas Jefferson
https://www.timothysnyder.org/books/on-tyranny-tr
Timothy Snyder Video (2017) – https://youtu.be/A7RBWea3Ie8
