Q Toon: Historical Figure of Speech

This week's cartoon comes to you just in the nick of time for African-American Heritage Month, with no apologies to the Aryan snowflakes working to outlaw it from schools across the nation.

Having spent the past half century agitating to impose Christian prayer and creationism pseudoscience on the public educational system, they are now concentrating on telling teachers What Must Not Be Named, Mentioned, or Discussed. Fer Pete's sake, we only discovered the 1921 Tulsa Race Pogrom last year, and already we're all supposed to forget it ever happened.

Again.

Of course, the same culture warriors have always wanted LGBTQ+ people to stay locked in the closet, neither seen nor heard, so Bayard Rustin is something of a two-fer in the educational erasure agenda. His record doesn't include the sort of "judge by the content of their character" quotations that could be twisted to support pretending that racism and homophobia are things of the past.

So here are a few quotations from Bayard's career worth remembering:

"Most of the time the reservoir of racism remains stagnant. But—and this has been true historically for most societies—when major economic, social, or political crises arise, the backwaters are stirred and latent racial hostility comes to the surface. Scapegoats must be found, simple targets substituted for complex problems. The frustration and insecurity generated by these problems find an outlet in notions of racial superiority and inferiority.” ― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

"[T]he Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socioeconomic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs but human needs generally.” ― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

“It ... was an absolute necessity for me to declare homosexuality, because if I didn't I was a part of the prejudice. I was aiding and abetting the prejudice that was a part of the effort to destroy me.” ― Bayard Rustin

"If we want to do away with the injustice to gays it will not be done because we get rid of the injustice to gays. It will be done because we are forwarding the effort for the elimination of injustice to all. And we will win the rights for gays, or blacks, or Hispanics, or women within the context of whether we are fighting for all." ― Bayard Rustin

“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” ― Bayard Rustin

"We are all one ― and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way." ―Bayard Rustin