BRATTLEBORO — My eyes burned with shame as I read of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's firing and excoriation of Curtiss Reed Jr. as a member of its Vermont State Advisory Commission.
I read carefully his commentary in the Oct. 18 Reformer and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Every word in it is true. As he always has, Curtiss was merely taking the care to present logically and accurately the case for anti-racism in our state, portraying it as the issue of life-and-death importance that it is.
I have known and worked with Curtiss Reed off and on for nearly two decades. He has the highest personal integrity. He is in every way qualified to represent our state in the crucial federally focused work of civil rights and anti-racism.
He brings to the job the very highest standards and sensibilities for professionalism and knowledge of the subject. He has been carrying high the banner of civil and human rights against racism for as long as I have known him.
Curtiss was accurate when he impugned the Republican slogan “Pure Vermont” as racist. Moreover, as a member of a persecuted minority in our state, he has the perfect right to relate his own nterpretation of current events to the public.
“Pure Vermont” might be an appropriate slogan for a state economic development office - referring to the purity of Vermont agricultural products, for instance - but as a campaign slogan for a gubernatorial candidate, it is most inappropriate. It is a tacit and hidden appeal to racism, even if it is not consciously meant as such.
Curtiss was also right to refer to the state's early-20th-century “eugenics” campaigns, codified under law as “voluntary sterilization,” to wipe out Abenaki bloodlines.
Because of the gravity of the systematic and structural crimes committed in our state against people of color and other religious and ethnic backgrounds, Curtiss was entirely morally correct to make the references he did, which did not compare the scope of these crimes against humanity to the Nazi holocaust against the Jews and other minorities, or to the Khmer Rouge “killing fields” genocide, but rather merely averred that the notion of “purity” raises the specter - the spirit - behind such occurrences.
For rarely is it indeed that you will find out-and-out racists spouting their blasphemous, bigoted drivel in today's world. Instead, you find them speaking with a forked tongue, as it were, telling people what they want to hear, and especially telling those in power how they can stay in power by oppressing minorities and, in effect, creating “gated communities” that exclude the objectionable “other.”
You find them speaking through such seemingly innocent things as campaign slogans, which, though they don't openly appeal to racism, in fact tacitly do so in a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” manner.
“Pure Vermont” is every bit what Curtiss called it - an inter-cultural blunder of monumental proportions.
There are reasons why Vermont remains one of the two whitest states in the union demographically, and Curtiss is painfully aware of these reasons. He sees and experiences every day the pain and anguish of minorities who cannot get anywhere in this state because of its tacit and explicit forms of racism.
In my work with Vermont corrections, I became painfully aware of the kinds of policies and institutional racism that cause this state, like most, to have a disproportionately-high minority prison population.
Locally I bore witness to actions - including misuse of the criminal justice system - that were very much intended to repel, and to expel, minority people from our state and community.
I appeal to my fellow white people in Vermont to raise high the anti-racist banner, to testify openly and publicly if you really know and thoroughly understand what white privilege and Euro-white supremacy in the world really mean, and to stand vigilant in the public sphere against racism and bigotry in all its forms.
I appeal to them to open Vermont up as a racially, culturally, and religiously diverse state, and to oppose forever the tacit and explicit policies and good-ol'-boy agreements that have in the past made Vermont an ethnically-cleansed white colony, and that have sought to keep it a white gated community, as it were, by blocking access by minorities and forcing them out of the state.