Thank you, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, and alt-right marchers. Thank you for not covering your faces, for lighting yourselves well with dollar store tiki torches, so we can all know if you are our neighbors and co-workers and try to arrange our lives accordingly.



Thank you for outlining our President so clearly as an unabashed sympathizer, so that no amount of spin can alter the obvious trajectory of his position on racism. Thank you for clarifying so succinctly that your groups see his presidency as aligned with your mission.



Thank you, white supremacists, for illuminating for anyone in confusion the shallow nature of your cause, the immorality of your goals, and the sheer ignorance of the vast majority of your members. Thank you for the non sequitur squirreling through what passes for writing on your websites, so that someday perhaps we reconsider our custom of underfunding education.



Thank you for expressing yourselves so freely, so that those observers with a thorough education in psychology can navigate the turgid waters of your movement’s cold soul and help the rest of us strategize some way to communicate better with you through the jungle of icons and clichés that seem to surround you.



Thank you for drawing the lonely, the misfit, the disoriented to your side, so that we who may have ignored them can meet them and make sure we are not part contributing to their sense of abuse. Thank you for making it so clear exactly how and where our world needs healing.

Thank you for showing us that those who are inspired to oppose you using violence and abusive taunts only feed and nurture your sense of being misunderstood and excluded. Thank you for making it so obvious that only love, welcome, and thoroughly honoring the first amendment, where speech meets speech to resolve differences, can someday clear our country of racism, our original sin.

Thank you for helping all of us understand that we may well have made some progress toward social justice, but that we remain at the very beginning of a long journey we can only take together.



We couldn’t do it nearly as well, or as quickly, without you.



