Moments ago, in the wake of a weekend in which we witnessed violent acts of terror in America, I spoke at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC about gun violence and the rising tide of hatred and white nationalism in America.
You can watch what I had to say here: [link removed]
I was there today because of love. The kind of love I learned about in church growing up. The kind of courageous love of people who could love those who hated them, despised them, and cursed them.
A heroic love that pushed people to march knowing they could be beaten, to board buses knowing they could be bombed.
A love fueled by multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalitions that share a commitment to a common cause and to our common destiny. A radical love that rejects the sinister and dangerous delusion of otherness -- a delusion that divides, that weakens, that pits American against American to our own collective peril.
It requires us to admit when we are wrong, to be vulnerable about our mistakes and our contradictions, and to be willing to question what we sometimes hold sacred. This is a lesson I have learned over and over again in my own life.
And to love our country in this moment means we must step outside our comfort zones and confront ourselves. We need to ask hard questions and genuinely seek answers.
And that means we need to acknowledge that the very founding of our country was an act of profound contradiction.
Bigotry was written into our founding documents. Native Americans were referred to as "savages" and Black people as fractions of human beings. White supremacy has always been a problem in our American story -- if not always at the surface, then lurking not so far beneath it.
We have seen it from slavemasters who stole and pillaged Black bodies for profit to demagogues who stoked racist and anti-immigrant hatred for votes, then enshrined their bigotry into laws.
And, yes, racist violence has always been part of the American story -- never more so than in times of transition and rapid social change.
We have seen it from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement; from the Red Summer 100 years ago to Charlottesville; from the lynching of Latinx people in Porvenir, Texas 101 years ago to the massacre in El Paso, Texas this past Saturday.
To say this is to speak the truth plainly -- because without truth there is no reconciliation.
We must acknowledge as a country that as much as white supremacy manifests itself in dangerous and deadly acts of terror, it is perpetuated by what is too often a willful ignorance of its presence in our society.
It manifests itself in a criminal justice system that arrests Blacks at three times the rate of Whites for drug-related crimes despite virtually no difference between Whites and Blacks in the frequency of dealing or using drugs.
In an immigration system that targets Latinx migrants fleeing violence at our southern border, separates families and throws children in cages.
In a health care system that fails Black and Brown Americans, that dismisses the pain of Black women with deadly consequences and where undocumented people are afraid to seek care after a mass shooting.
We must change our laws, but we must also confront our past. People's very lives are in the balance. And to be frank, the future of the country hangs in the balance.
We have the power to act. And we can act to legislate safety even if we cannot legislate love.
We must act to prevent people who should not have guns from getting them.
We must act to get weapons of war off our streets, out of our grocery stores, our bars, our temples, and our churches by banning assault weapons once and for all.
We must require federal licensing for all guns in America -- a policy that we know will save lives.
I went to church today to ask if we have the collective resolve to change the reality we live in, to ask if we have it in us to tell ourselves the honest story. Because we know the truth will set us free.
We know these are not problems that will go away inevitably. This is hard and painful and it will take hard work and sacrifice.
We must stand together and work together and struggle together for a new American freedom in our generation.
Freedom from fear, freedom from violence, freedom from hatred. Freedom to seek. Freedom to achieve. Freedom to dream America anew again.
Once and for all, let us be the land of the free.
There is only one way to get there -- and that is together.
And there is only one way to win -- with the power, healing, and the salvation we find in love.
Together,
Cory
Click to watch the full remarks at Emanuel AME Church: [link removed] for by Cory 2020
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