To the Editor:
Today I watched the entire Keizer City Council’s October 26 work session, and I am disappointed. Words, in fact, do mean something and actions following those words are important.
We have sitting leaders making statements that question whether redlining still happens, white supremacy means different things to different people, that Nazis and BLM are comparable, that lovers of chocolate eclairs or whatever could become violent shows those leaders need a different education than just watching a presentation. The first thing you could do is listen to the sole person of color on our council and not dismiss his concerns.
We have been warned by the Department of Homeland Security that violent white supremacy was the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland” and that white supremacists were the most deadly among domestic terrorists in recent years. When you have the director of the FBI testifying before congress that “the majority of the racially-motivated, violent extremist attacks, are fueled by some kind of white supremacy” and our council appears unwilling to denounce the same, we have a problem not only with perception, but with understanding the seriousness we face.
White supremacy has no place in our country. The United States may have been founded by a group of white men, but their vision of an inclusive country was written in their words from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. It’s “that all men are created equal,” not all white men. It’s “we the people,” not we the white people. Arguing gender aside, the framers recognized that there was not one race and that all people in America were included in the actions taken to secure our freedoms.
We need leaders on our council willing to actually take a stand and denounce white supremacy as the threat it truly represents. At the bare minimum a resolution stating that white supremacy has zero place in Keizer is a valid start. We can and must do better Keizer.
Linda Warner
Keizer