To begin, I've been a life long UU. Born and raised in a UU Congregation. I have been deeply concerned with the expansion of post-modernism French philosophy within what was our shared faith. My fear was that the new anti-racist/social justice movement was deeply totalitarian and purposefully discarded key foundations of Enlightenment values in the pursuit of "justice". My fears were realized over the past two or so weeks and I've debated sharing.

Why? Because I'm sure that what I've witnessed will be dismissed, it will be discredited - not because what happened was not as severe as I'm about to walk you through, but because the color of my skin and the fact that I'm in the wrong "tribe". I know this because five Unitarian Universalists were deeply involved in what I'm about to describe. Five Unitarian Universalists with good standing in the local congregation as well as the community at large. Five Unitarian Universalists who insist they have done nothing wrong and are fully justified in their actions because they were seeking equity for the injustices of white people on marginalized communities.

And I'm sharing this because I'm frankly very tired and what I have witnessed has made me give up all hope for the future of our species and has left me significantly depressed. I am posting this on the off chance that maybe I might reach one person, and make them take a moment to think.

Background

I'm a volunteer with a local food bank and have been working weekly on coordinating fund raising and food hand outs to our community. As a part of that we do outreach on the community Facebook page ("Hey everyone! We have milk available!" or "Hey everyone! We're setting a goal of $1,000 for fundraising this week!" - stuff like that). So a few weeks back as I'm putting our latest post up to let people know we have costumes available for kids, I notice a post has gone up from a prominent black community member. She owns multiple properties and has rotated between School Board and School Administrative positions in our city.

On Saturday she sends an email out announcing that our school distract has purchased enough copies of White Fragility for every parent and that they'll have consultants coming in to set up conversations for parents in the school district.

Currently our school district does not have enough computers or food for children. Since the end of last school year, the school board has failed to figure out internet access, tools, and food for children (something the local BLM group has protested about). Estimates from the teacher's union is that this program probably cost the school district roughly $400 to $500,000.

The Incident

The post begins by stating she hates the racism in our community, and goes on for about two paragraphs. In it she states a parent of a student has engaged in horrible white fragility and is a racist and she's sick of having to be "nice" to racists. She had received an "unsolicited and racist" email and this was an outrage for a school administrator trying to make the schools safer for children. It has been up for about 24 hours, and already has 130 comments. Most of the comments are very supportive of this school administrator. She has also posted another thread where she calls the parent out by full name. The parent doesn't respond.

Over the next 24 hours, the post comments grow. There are now 500+ responses to the first post. The second post (with the parent's name) get's pulled down. A new post goes up where the school administrator calls out the Facebook page moderators for enabling racism. This post quickly racks up over 800 responses within 3 hours.

Most of the responses are calling out racism, quoting Kendi, DiAngelo, and other critical race theorists. There was a shift, in the responses, from theory to action pretty quickly.

One poster states "I'm a Black Man with a gun and I'm sick of dealing with this." Another poster found the parent's Facebook page and pulled pictures of her children, put them up in the thread and in a new thread and said "[Name of Child 1] is a budding KKK member at [Child's address]. I think we know what we need to do." This was repeated for the other two children.

They found her place of work as well, and a group organized to harass the business owners until the woman lost her job.

Let's pause for a second.

Within 48 hours, a wealthy and influential black woman in our community has created a series of posts accusing someone of racism and hate. No proof has been offered. Just her word on the matter.

With just her word a mob has formed and called for "something to be done" against this woman's children. And herself. Unitarian Universalists were directly involved with this and encouraging the other posters.

The Response

Watching in growing fear and seeing messages start to come in to her work place, the parent at the center of this is terrified. She lives on a dead end street far from any main road and cars have been up and down her road slowing as they pass her house. At this point she has called the police. She will end up with a patrol car on her street for the next few days. Police also provide an armed escort to pick up two children who were in public schools.

By the third day, with post counts climbing, the parent decides (against my recommendation) to post a response. She puts up the email chain she had with the school administrator.

Two points: 1) The email from the parent was not racist. 2) The email was not 'unsolicited' it was a direct reply to the white fragility training.

I can't post the specifics because it involves a minor, but the parent's first email was fairly straight forward. The previous year, the youngest daughter of the parent was involved in "an incident involving race based threats as you are well aware". You being the school administrator. The parent then expressed concern that White Fragility and Antiracism training which tells people only whites can be racist and whites are all guilty of racism would not be a good thing for the school community based on the unnamed incident.

The school administrator was furious, and decided to share what the incident was to her followers.

The parent's youngest daughter was part of a group of white children who were targeted by black children for "elimination". They, the black children, stated in a video that was posted to YouTube, that they were going to "hunt and kill the blond haired ones" while pointing to 10 through 12 year old white kids on school grounds. The black kids were going to kill the white kids for justice.

I would learn later that the parent and the school signed an NDA about this incident, it was swept under the rug to avoid ruining the lives of the black kids, and that the parents of the targeted kids were offered 100% tuition at local private school on the school district's dime. The school administrator has now violated this NDA.

Her followers pounce on the post and start pointing out that white people aren't subject to racism, and also she had to know the black kids were just expressing their feelings about living in a system of white supremacy and wouldn't really kill those kids. And she was over reacting and totally racist.

In the posts from the school administrator they started mocking her and laughing about her kids being threatened. They made jokes about kids getting killed. They said it was clearly not race based because hair has nothing to do with race (though I wonder what would happen if someone said we'll kill the nappy hair ones).

Within four hours the parent took the post down. The local police had beefed up protection on her house and she had a police officer in her home.

The Fallout

A credible threat was identified against the parent in the morning of day four. A SWAT team was sent to the house of the individual and they were taken into custody. They had an unregistered 9mm handgun.

A lawyer working with the organization that runs the community page had the posts saved and pulled down. The local DA issued arrest warrants for multiple participants in the thread. For felony violations of local law.

The FBI became aware of the threats against the children. An investigation into the school district has been opened under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

State police are investigating violations of state laws regarding children in schools in conjunction with local police. If found guilty, the school administrator will be facing 10 years in prison.

Since this has occurred, multiple posts have gone up claiming the administrator as the victim. Including posts from the Unitarian Universalists. They have stated the parents have over reacted and nothing bad would have happened to them if they had just accepted anti-racism and admitted to their own guilt.

This has been supported by others in the community.

I wrote this post to try to process my emotions to this explosion. To the raw hate and pure evil that I witnessed. To talking to a parent who was so terrified for her safety and the safety of her children she was planning on fleeing the city. To being on zoom calls and listening to absolutely horrific racist ranting about white people and white children and that they not only deserve fear but even more - and declaring the FBI and local police reaction as an encouragement of white supremacy.

I'm shaken at the evil I have witnessed over the past two weeks.

I've looked into the eyes of white supremacists and seen similar hatred. Our rhetoric - be it white nationalist or anti-racism - is destroying us. I've seen Unitarian Universalists join a mob willingly, and gleefully, and decry the mob being stopped.

I don't know who you are anymore. There was a question asked on Reddit a few months ago: What would it take for you to stop being on the anti-racism train. The writer specifically asked "If you were asked to shoot a kid" would you stop.

I have the answer now. For five Unitarian Universalists, the answer is no. They would have happily cheered on the trigger being pulled.