An open letter to Reps. Jason Osborne, Keith Ammon, and Glenn Cordelli, sponsors of House Bill 544, a bill that addresses the propagation of so-called “divisive concepts”: Having read HB 544, a bill relative to the “propagation of divisive concepts,” and having compared it to a September 2020 presidential executive order, I was struck by the repetition of ideas in both documents that are simply inaccurate and, sadly, fly in the face of contemporary history.

Solid research has demonstrated that, though we have made appreciable progress toward a racially just society, much structural, institutional racism remains and it will not simply disappear of its own accord. It is simply too integral and too invisibly ingrained in our society for reasonable people to expect that to happen.

To acknowledge this reality is not propagating “divisive concepts,” it is acknowledging reality as it exists in 2021.

Contemporary scholarship has produced several books demonstrating this reality. One of them is Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration published in 2004, which describes the experiences of Black Americans who fled the Jim Crow South to seek freedom and opportunity in other parts of our nation often to find only disappointment.

In 2020, Wilkerson published Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which traces the roots of human hierarchy in the United States, Nazi Germany, and in the Indian caste system.

Another significant book published in 2020 is White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones. Jones, who holds a doctorate in religion from Emory University and an MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.

Jones demonstrates conclusively that racism still exists in the United States. In his final chapter, titled “Reckoning,” Jones makes clear that our nation has much work to do: “Four hundred years after the first African slave landed on our shores, and more than 150 years after the abolition of slavery, a combination of social forces and demographic changes has brought the country to a crossroads. We white Christians must find the courage to face the fact that the version of Christianity that our ancestors built – ‘the faith of our fathers,’ as the hymn celebrates it – was a cultural force that, by design, protected and propagated white supremacy. We have inherited this tradition with scant critique, and we have a moral and religious obligation to face the burden of that history and its demand on our present. . . . Inaction is a tacit acceptance of white supremacy inhabiting our Christian identity. . . . Reckoning with white supremacy, for us, is now an unavoidable moral choice.”

Very recently I was asked if I had ever read the Cornerstone Speech presented in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, by Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the vice president of the newly formed Confederacy. When I read this speech I discovered that Stephens had unequivocally stated that the cornerstone of the new government, the Confederacy, “rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery-subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.” Why? Because God had so ordained this.

But the Catholic Church once preached that the sun went around the earth. Science has demonstrated the fallacy of the sun rotating around the Earth and science has demonstrated that there is no biological basis for race. Race is an idea propagated by human beings for their own purposes.

A 2003 documentary titled Race: The Power of an Illusion, is an examination of the idea of race, the fallacy of its connection to human biology, and the incalculable human damage this fallacious idea has caused. I strongly recommend it to you. I believe that once you have examined the materials I have suggested for your review you may well find it necessary to reconsider the premise upon which your bill, HB 544, is based.

(Janet Ward lives in Contoocook.)