A scab that won’t heal

Kansas was briefly atop the Washington news this month when Rep. Jake LaTurner began his initiation in Congress by announcing he had tested covid positive. From there it went downhill for LaTurner and Washington.

The Trump-fueled insurrection, riots and looting of the Capitol left four rioters and one police officer dead. As the smoke cleared, Trump sympathizers in Congress resumed the insurgent cant that Joe Biden’s election had been (somehow) fraudulent in spite of his margins with 306 electoral and seven million popular votes.

Kansas Republicans joined more than 100 other Trump fanatics to protest Biden’s election in several House and Senate votes. In the Senate, Roger Marshall was among three or four who pledged allegiance to the fiendish Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. They endorsed the lie that Trump had lost in several states because Biden had stolen the vote. Seven weeks of re-counts, and five-dozen failed court challenges said otherwise. That, too, was corrupt, according to Marshall.

Jerry Moran, the state’s senior senator, would not join. He said Biden had been elected president and that we needed to move on. Rep. Sharise Davids, a Democrat from Kansas City, said much the same.

Four of the six Kansas legislators have ignored the legacy of a state with deep roots in the current turmoil. Nearly all the Capitol rioters, from the president down, were white.

Confederate flags flew inside the Capitol during the rampage. The rebels wore clothes and carried banners that glorified hate and promoted conspiracy. They shouted revolution and civil war, amplified white supremacy, promoted anti-Semites and anti-Muslim extremism.

A long history precedes this new paradox of Kansas and its contrarian legislators. Ours is the only state founded on the moral principle that slavery was wrong. We were born bleeding, in 1861, and years of murderous border wars followed.

By the turn into the 20th century Kansas had embarked on successful crusades for social and economic reforms, among them women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, stronger child labor laws, the direct primary, and election of U.S. senators, bank guarantee laws and other pillars of progressive Republican reform. For another generation Kansas would inspire a nation with stunning advancements in public health, transportation, mental health reform, and public school finance, among others.

But we ignored race. Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education (1954), the momentous Supreme Court decision, would put the courts on the side of humanity, if not our conscience. Racial segregation of children in public schools may violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but it did little to change behavior. It took another Court ruling, in 1970, to demand the desegregation that Brown had ordered 16 years earlier.

This exposed a continuing prevalence of Jim Crow in the notions and conceptions that separated people by skin color. In the mind and psyche, dark was different. And different was disconcerting.

Unconditional embrace is beyond legislating. In our minds if not our behavior we continue to tolerate a choleric placement of the white and non-white among us.

The deep south, with its history of slavery, was known for its cruelties, its racial injustice, its demonic, segregationist society. The region has endured long decades of blunt confrontation with the truth of its inhumanity, bringing an embrace of redemption and racial reconciliation. Ugly truths have been confronted in many sectors. Progress has evolved in fits and starts.

Racism, once a southern curse, is now an American dilemma.

A cruel aspect of the Trump insurrection is the press of its heat on the youngest Americans. If they gain the impression their lives are subject to the whims and prejudices of a handful of people, they will begin to question the worth of their government and the promise of life in this country. We are a global society and for many Americans there are now other, friendlier places to live.

We must not deny the freedom to learn, to examine wholly an onerous element in our lives. Reconciliation and redemption, as the South has learned, is never complete; it advances slowly as the generations embrace and acquire a soul of equality. It begins when we realize racism among us in all its forms, when we examine it, confront it, and resolve to be rid of it.

Our legacy of fear and ignorance continues. The protests of Blacks, Browns and Native Americans are somehow unpatriotic. Speaking out is, somehow, out of bounds. The white riots are encouraged by a president and tolerated by factions in law enforcement; their heat source is overlooked by many in Congress, including four legislators from Kansas. Enlightened leadership in Washington and Topeka must confront this scab that won’t heal.