Legislative violence should not be our norm today: Equality is not the goal of SB3

Legislative violence should not be our norm today: Equality is not the goal of SB3 by Kwami Abdul-Bey

As a public historian and as descendant of racialized terror, legal lynching victim here in Arkansas, I rise furious, but clear-eyed, against Senate Bill 3–a dangerous bill written and championed in deceit, arrogance, and historical amnesia. This legislation isn’t about equality. It is about securing and maintaining a white priority complex system wrapped in erroneous, misinterpreted quotes from our founding documents, as well as a blind preemptive obedience that, in past decades, eventually led to worldwide war.

Senator Dan Sullivan claims his legislation attacks “discrimination” while falsely stating that SB3 is required under President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders. He also claims that his legislation enforces what he sadly calls a constitutional mandate that says, in his words, “that all persons are created equal.” Sen. Sullivan’s willful stupidity should not be the standard for leadership that we Arkansans entrust with the power to write laws that can potentially wreck all of our lives, especially when such laws wreck the very public schools that teach all 9th graders the civics that Sen. Sullivan should know as a legislator.

Let’s be clear and blunt: presidential orders have never, and will never, have any legal authority over our duly elected state legislature. And, it is the Declaration of Independence, not the U.S. Constitution, that contains the words “All men [not persons] are created equal.” Just as those hypocritical words written by Thomas Jefferson–an enslaver who repeatedly raped one of his teenaged captives–referred only to White property-owning men, the anti-DEI stance is equally hypocritical when you examine the qualifications of Trump’s meritless cabinet picks who all have one sure thing in common, their immense wealth.

Real equality requires repairing past harms with the goal of getting everyone to the same starting line to enjoy the opportunity to fairly compete in this present race of life–something SB3 sabotages by banning targeted help for undervalued, underestimated, and marginalized persons and the communities in which they live. When Sen. Sullivan invokes Trump and Jefferson as his inspiration, he reveals willful stupidity about America’s unfinished journey toward the true equity required for us all to create, and to live and thrive together within, the Beloved Community that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned before he was killed for speaking about the economic injustices that poor Americans face.

Look at the chaos Trump’s executive orders have already caused: My alma mater, the U.S. Air Force Academy, last week banned the mentioning of, and teaching about, the Tuskegee Airmen, who, in their time, were labelled DEI pilots that had to struggle for the mere privilege of fighting in World War Two. And had they not gained the opportunity to go out and demonstrate their awesome merit while destroying the Nazis, America would not have won, and we would be living an alternative history right now. In 1990, I was a freshman cadet, who was only the third Black Arkansan to attend the Air Force Academy. Then, I helped launch the years-long battle for the inclusion of the Tuskegee Airmen story at the Academy. Now, three decades later, this important story has been excluded from required cadet knowledge, with a swiftness never before seen in any military administrative procedure than I have ever witnessed. And Sen. Sullivan cheers?

Now, SB3 threatens similar erasures here in Arkansas: (1) The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center could be targeted for “preferential treatment”; (2) Arkansas MLK Commission might face charges for hosting a college fair for Black youth at Philander Smith College, an HBCU; (3) the Minority Health Commission could collapse while addressing Arkansas’ racial health gaps; and (4) the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff just might, yet again, have its budget significantly cut by the legislature in retaliation for just being an HBCU.

Sen. Sullivan, and the supporters of SB3, call this “equality” and “merit.” I call it legislative violence. My granduncle, Lonnie Dixon, suffered a legal lynching on his 17th birthday during the time of 1927 flood crisis. Similarly, John Carter was also hanged, and his dead body was burned at the intersection of 9th and Broadway in downtown Little Rock, as hundreds of rabid White citizens paraded the streets in celebration, forcing all of the Black residents to flee the city. Now legislators are flooding our state with public policy initiatives denying that systemic racism and structural oppression ever existed.

As a former public school social studies educator and a current public historian, I warn: SB3 won’t create fairness. It whitewashes history while protecting the very systems that kept my ancestors–and the Tuskegee Airmen–fighting just to be seen as equal humans. True equality needs equity’s scalpel, not SB3’s sledgehammer. Kill this bill before it buries Arkansas’ progress in the Delta’s muddy waters.

———-