HYPOCRISY ABOUT JUSTICE IN WASHINGTON AND LITTLE ROCK

 

©Wendell Griffen, 2024

May 17, 2024

Little Rock, Arkansas

 

In recent days we have witnessed several public displays of hypocrisy by white politicians from Arkansas involving social justice.

A statue of Mrs. Daisy Bates, a civil rights activist and journalist, was unveiled in Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. White politicians extolled her courage, tenacity, and leadership that led to nine Black teenagers breaking the racial barrier and enrolling in Little Rock Central High School in September 1957. The same politicians are undermining everything Mrs. Bates stood for.

They are actively looting public education funds to benefit private schools. They are falsely claiming that accurate instruction about the history of systemic racial injustice in this society is “indoctrination.” That’s a two-sentence summary of the political hoax called the LEARNS Act that Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Republican super-majority of the Arkansas legislature manufactured.

They are legislatively enacting and judicially validating schemes to disenfranchise, intimidate, suppress, and dilute voting by vulnerable Arkansans. Four laws passed by the Arkansas legislature in the early months of 2021, weeks after Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, have been upheld as constitutional by the Arkansas Supreme Court. The justices who decided the case did so while professing devotion to voting rights.

Republican state legislators and Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde showed their disdain for Pulaski County Sheriff Eric Higgins when they held a “hearing” in Little Rock concerning the Netflx docuseries “Unlocked.” Sheriff Higgins displayed candor, intellectual honesty, and professional competence during the exercise. His interlocutors and County Judge Hyde showed their disregard for those virtues plus colossal hypocrisy concerning public safety. Arkansas state legislators did not hold a hearing after the public learned that the Washington County Sheriff had detainees injected with a veterinary drug administered to horses and falsely claimed that the drug would protect the detainees from contracting Covid.

These events show that Arkansas politicians are smug about their hypocrisy. They are willing to pimp the name and work of Daisy Bates while looting public education and suppressing voting rights. They demean the competence of Sheriff Higgins yet were blind and speechless about the incompetence of the sheriff who gave horse medicine to defenseless detainees.

They are as culturally incompetent in 2024 as their predecessors were when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public education was unlawful. Their devotion to white supremacy is acted out in different ways now. But it’s the same devotion to “the rightness of whiteness.”

They aren’t subtle about that devotion. We shouldn’t be subtle about our disgust concerning their hypocrisy.

Maya Angelou famously said that when people show you who they are, believe them. We know who the hypocrites are. Let’s show them that we are sick and tired of their hypocrisy.

And in the unforgettable words of Fannie Lou Hamer over fifty years ago, let’s show them that we are “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”  The time for pious words and pretended cordiality is over.