BALTIMORE: The NAACP Maryland State Conference President Flowers released the following statement regarding recent response to 2020 Election Certification.
For everyone who needs to hear this statement this is my full-throated denunciation of the clearly anti-American actions around the country yesterday. All actions planned and conspired to upend democracy and stoke fear in the name of patriotism were hurtful displays of anarchy and nothing else. What played out across the country was shameful, appalling and impeachable.
This kettle has been warming for a while, but it clearly boiled over yesterday on Capitol Hill. Additionally, close to my home in Maryland, the Howard County Public School System’s headquarters (where I currently serve as a Co-Chair of the Operating Budget Review Committee) was broken into and vandalized. This hateful action itself is a culmination of staged kindling that was not doused. None of this should be a surprise.
These are all the actions of cowards and illogical citizens who put their own unloving trauma on display in the name of patriotic activism. Their work to hurt others by destroying public property and impeding the constitutional transfer of power is unconscionable and anyone associated with these illegal actions should be arrested, tried and convicted to the fullest extent of the law. It is not a surprise to those of us who have been on the frontlines in opposition to white supremacy, hatred and racial injustice when it has always lifted its head before now. We have seen unheeded warnings where hatred was not confronted, so here we are.
While Donald Trump’s hands are bloody and he should be blamed and impeached, there is a long list of co-conspirators at the federal level who have allowed this chief pot stirrer to fan these flames as U.S. families grieve more than 357,000 COVID-19 related deaths. With their votes and support of Trump over the years, they all set the stage for the worst attack on American democracy in a lifetime and did nothing to stop it. They should all resign immediately. If you are in the state of Maryland and are not standing up and putting out these smoldering fires that will lead to these larger displays of anarchy then you are a part of the problem. Never should it be the case that we do not confront the many “isms” that will boil over moving forward. We must all commit to confronting hatred when it appears in any form for the sake of our children who are watching.
The outliers are obvious to me. Examples abound: the assassination of Richard Collins in 2017, the murders of multiple citizens in police custody, unchecked murders on the streets of Maryland communities and the general lack of interest in healing broken social determinants in communities to mitigate all of this is where we should direct our work. We have nothing to lose by putting out these fires, but they have to be confronted or we will continue to boil over into a crisis.
Yesterday’s actions were a sad but realistic display of what America is at this point in history. However, if we do not work just as hard to confront that spirit of destruction in its infancy or at the grassroots level we will never realize a just America that our children deserve.
