One area I’ve tended to struggle in is analyzing religious text because the vocabulary and the style of phraseology aren’t commonly used in the modern era, making interpretation of scripture difficult.
In recent years, regular people have been inundated with religious terms that are misleading and difficult to translate unless you’re a true believer in the dogma — and no term elicits nearly as much situational confusion as “white supremacy.”
Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), claimed in a fundraising email this week that Tyre Nichols was “killed by white supremacy” rather than the five black cops actually charged in his death.
“Tyre Nichols should be alive today. Instead, like so many others he was killed by police. Killed by white supremacy. Killed by America. This is Black terror. We feel it every day. We feel it more today. Too many victims to name. Too much hurt to explain. Too many tears, too normalized, too numb. From 1619 to the present day we live in a constant state of terror,” he wrote.
“We need my fellow members of Congress and President Biden to provide historic leadership on this issue. We cannot maintain this status quo. We must lead for Black lives and lead for Black humanity.”
Rep. Bowman is absolutely correct: Tyre Nichols should be alive today and should have never been brutalized by men who swore to protect the citizens of Memphis. But accountability should be placed on the individuals who used their position of authority to murder — not in the invisible hand of white supremacy.
Blaming white supremacy for society’s ills is the tactic of the “religious left” because white supremacy is its version of original sin. When humanity succumbs to its sinful ways as those five black officers did, their individual actions don’t matter because the sin of white supremacy still courses through America’s veins. Or in Bowman’s words, black dehumanization has “infected the DNA of our country” (emphasis mine).
Read more of The Post’s coverage of Tyre Nichols’ beating death
This is why the religious left feels justified in claiming that black people can also be white supremacists because they are upholding a white-supremacist system and — shocker — this is true of just about everything in our society. And if you commit heresy by questioning liberals’ puritan doctrine and methodology, they’ll be sure to mark you publicly with the scarlet letter “W.”
Puritanical progressives see us all as being born into American sin, and the only way we can start to rid ourselves of this historical stain is to baptize ourselves in the superficial and shallow waters of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion).
The religious left views every present-day system as a relic of past white supremacy, and no matter the shade of the individual who participates in it, he or she is simply a cog in the machine of systemic oppression. From the perspective of our puritan progressives, those five black cops beating a black man to death was a feature, not a bug.
However, Bishop Bowman, I mean, Rep. Bowman has no problem leveraging claims of grand-scale social immorality while using Tyre Nichols’ tragic murder in Memphis as a way to pass around his political collection plate and gather donations from the American congregation to benefit him in New York; all proceeds go to the church roof fund as it was damaged by white supremacy after all.
Our progressive puritans are typically inconsistent because they’ll scowl with indignation when they feel we aren’t being mindful to care for black men and simultaneously treat dead black men like Nichols as martyred mascots to fund their personal endeavors. That sounds like “black terror” to me.
The preachers from the church of progressivism are no different from the charlatan prosperity preachers; they’ll claim to be speaking the word of righteousness while gaslighting you into making them wealthier. In the church of progressivism, however, there is no God because they have no room for anything mightier than themselves.
Bowman likely doesn’t see himself as being part of a white-supremacist system as a member of Congress and probably has never questioned representing the political party that is a relic of the Ku Klux Klan within government because he’s a “disrupter of the system.” See how that works?
Or maybe even more audaciously he sees himself as a “revolutionary” as he begs President Joe Biden, status quo personified, to help end the so-called status quo of black dehumanization after spending more than 50 years in government.
That sounds like a Hail Mary.
Adam B. Coleman is the author of “Black Victim to Black Victor” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Follow him on Substack: adambcoleman.substack.com.