Race war rhetoric will destroy America

When Solomon famously identifies the true mother of a young boy by offering to cut the child in two and give half to each woman claiming him, it’s a fascinating example of the king’s wisdom. It’s also a beautiful act of compassion, and not just to the woman who receives her son back. It’s also a loving invitation for the woman who kidnaped the boy to escape the prison of her grief.

Solomon knows that replacing another woman’s child with the corpse of your own is not the act of a woman who just desperately wants to be a mother again. It’s the act of a woman enslaved by the bitterest of despair, a woman who thinks the only way to survive her sorrow is to foist it on someone else. And so, when Solomon offers to cut the child in two, he’s essentially saying to the woman, “your grief has caused you to invent this perverse game in your mind, a game where you win if you can keep a living child out of this woman’s hands. Your grief has taken a child created in the image of God and turned him into a flag to be captured and withheld from the woman you’ve foolishly decided is your enemy. But you will never escape your grief by trying to foist it on someone else. If you want the comfort of God, treat this child like the human being he is.”

We would be wise to hear the wisdom and compassion of Solomon today, especially in regard to the curious reality of dueling race war fundraisers. 

In April, shortly after a white high school student named Austin Metcalf was killed at a track meet in Texas, people began giving to a GiveSendGo account started, not to show support not for Metcalf or his family, but for the family of Karmelo Anthony, the young black man charged with stabbing Metcalf to death. While the fundraiser was ostensibly started to raise funds for lawyers and bail, numerous donors left vile comments on the fundraiser page. They weren’t giving to ensure that Anthony received adequate representation or a fair trial. They just wanted to reward Anthony and his family for allegedly killing a white man. “For too long, black Americans have been forced to suffer,” many donors essentially suggested. “But now Karmelo Anthony has helped us toss our suffering onto the head of Austin Metcalf’s family. As long as his parents don’t get a living child, the flag is ours. We win.”

More recently, a white woman started her own GiveSendGo after another race-related conflict. Shiloh Hendrix claims a young black child tried to steal from her, and she responded by calling the child a racial slur. After a Somali immigrant named Sharmarke Omar uploaded video of his subsequent argument with Hendrix, Hendrix set up her donation page, insisting she did nothing wrong and claiming she needed funds to find safety after her social security number, address, and phone number had been leaked. 

In response, people gave heartily, many seeing it as an opportunity essentially to steal the flag back from those supporting the Karmelo Anthony fundraiser. So far, it’s worked. Hendrix’s GiveSendGo currently has over $790,000 in donations, while Anthony’s sits at a tick over $534,000.

Granted, not everyone who has supported, financially or otherwise, the Hendrix fundraiser has done so for ideological reasons. In a recent video, conservative commentator Matt Walsh articulated a kind of pragmatic defense of Hendrix fundraiser. He supports Hendrix’s fundraiser, he says, not because he supports Hendrix’s behavior, but because the only way to disincentivize leftist mobs is to show them that “instead of getting their targets cancelled, they might accidentally make them rich.”

There are, however, two problems with Walsh’s argument. First, he overvalues the rationality of online leftist mobs. The mobs’ members aren’t under a central authority. They’re a bunch of individuals chasing dopamine hits through social media clicks. Expecting outrage addicts to refrain from demonization because it backfired with their last target is like expecting heroin addicts to refrain from using their drug of choice because their last round was laced with fentanyl. Addicts don’t remember things.

The second problem with Walsh’s argument is that he fails to account for the spiritual nature of the problem. Those who cheer Karmelo Anthony do so because they want the baby divided in half. Certainly, Christians should be cautious not to downplay the differences between the Hendrix and Anthony cases. If forced to choose, any sane parent would rather have their child called a racial slur than have their child murdered. Anthony, if guilty, belongs in prison for stabbing an innocent young man to death. Hendrix and her family don’t deserve death threats and danger simply for uttering an ugly word.

However, the difference between the actions of Hendrix and Anthony is one of degree, not nature, as Christ taught us when He declared, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.” Many Pharisees likely sneered at these words of Christ, convinced He was making ugly words equal with the most vicious of sins against your neighbor. It’s worth remembering, however, that these same Pharisees who wouldn’t turn from the lesser sin of anger at Christ soon found themselves conspiring to murder the very same son of God.

Even if the leftist mobs and the anti-white crusaders invented the game where they turn human beings into inanimate objects through the “capture the flag” race war game, we should avoid playing along. Wisdom tells us that dismissing the verbal assault of children and dismissing the terminal assault of teenagers are not as far apart as we might think.