A Prayer Huddle is Not Enough It would be nice to believe that praying would be enough to end racism, but it won't be. Since that was all McCartney had to offer in his thinly disguised "anti-racism" rally, the rest of us will have to keep working. Work is what it takes. We could start with Bill McCartney's description of the U.S. as a "racial powder keg." Does the description of race relations as violent, as his phrase suggests, help to defeat racism? Or does it just perpetuate stereotypes about people of color? Something the media has given very little attention to is the racist agenda of Colorado for Family Values and other fundamentalist organizations around the state. Bill McCartney, one of the chief spokespeople for CFV, has affiliated himself with an organization that is pursuing a racist agenda. Colorado for Family Values has publicly declared that it intends to remove all civil rights legislation in the state. And they've done pretty well, under various guises, including English Only and Amendment 2. Kevin Tebedo, another spokesperson for "family values," and the Tebedo family, spearheaded the English Only campaign, a bigoted and mean-spirited attack on Colorado's Chicano and Latino populations, as well as on other Colorado citizens who speak languages other than English. CFV and Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs have said that Native-Americans teach their children "voodoo" and "witchcraft," a disgusting distortion of religions other than Christianity. And the Eagle Forum, a racist and right-wing organization has gone even farther, claiming that, "many years ago Christian pioneers who settled the American West had to fight savage Indians. Missionaries were sent to the Indians to civilize and Christianize them. Today the reverse is true," they lament, "missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public school to heathenize our children." Colorado Springs Pastor, Bernard Kuiper, quoted in the Denver Post, said, "It should be clear that in order to live a Christian life, any Christian in any society must be able to discriminate, and you must be able to hate, because that's what the Bible says." How different is this from McCartney's litany about "abomination"? McCartney and company are certainly quite adept at hate-rhetoric. In Bill McCartney's video announcing his rally to churches, he only mentions Mexican-Americans and African-Americans. What about the racist attacks on other people of color, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others? Where do they fit? And nowhere, in Bill's promise keeping rhetoric, do women fit, regardless of their color. The national English Only movement was heavily populated with right wing Christian fundamentalists and neo-Nazis. The national campaign was directed by a fundamentalist Christian organization out of Virginia called English First, a project of the Committee to Preserve the Family. Those following the agenda of the right-wing know that all of these organizations are linked and they share similar racist, homophobic, and sexist values. I worked against English Only in both California and in Colorado and against Amendment 2 and I consistently saw right-wing groups trying to pit Asians-Americans against Chicanos, African-Americans against gays and lesbians. In Florida, the English Only law has pitted Latinos against (other) Christians, Black and white. This kind of divisiveness does nothing to end racism and I fear it is exactly the tactic McCartney is using, pitting Christian people of color against those who practice other religions. But what about real change? What about real work against racism? People who work against racism know that real change means hiring people of color, not firing Black coaches. It means acknowledging and encouraging racial diversity beyond those who are on McCartney's football team. It means paying attention to women, not sponsoring expensive workshops for mostly white men who want to reclaim their "positions as spiritual Masters of their homes." It means accepting that not all football players are Christian and not forcing them to pray to a god that is not theirs. It means working aggressively to overturn the English Only Amendment and Amendment 2, both of which threaten large numbers of people of color. It means renouncing the racist attacks by Colorado for Family Values and Focus on the Family on Native Americans, Jews, and on civil rights legislation. It means working to ensure the maintenance of these important civil rights protections across the state. I sincerely hope that McCartney wants to work actively against racism. I hope that he will begin within himself, I hope that he will look at those around him who have endorsed racism and renounce that racist history, I hope that he will look within his own office and work toward making changes there, I hope that he will stop using his powerful position to promote bigotry. But I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, there is much more to do than just pray. Jesus, activist that he was, would certainly ask for more. Jim Davis-Rosenthal Jim Davis-Rosenthal Academic Access Institute Campus Box 184, Lower Norlin University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0184 (303) 492-1417 ============================================================