Originally posted to The Medium on March 31, 2025.

Hate isn’t an ideology that can be tolerated; it’s one that ought to be destroyed.

Since I’ve been writing articles talking about white supremacy in New England, I’ve gotten a few comments asking me why I give these people the “time of day.” While I understand where they’re coming from, and usually it’s in good faith, let me spell it out for you guys.

Growing up in the whitest state in the country as a black woman hasn’t always been easy. The first time I learned about the KKK was back in second grade where a girl in my class told me that the KKK was a group that hated and killed Black people — but made sure to tell me that they weren’t active anymore. This was the first time that I was made to feel “different.”

Throughout my academic career, I’ve been bullied because I have an afro, kids would throw up gang signs at me (as if a middle schooler living in one of the safest states in the entire country has any gang affiliations), I’ve been told that my great grandparents were hanged, and of course I’ve been called the n-word plenty of times.

In middle school, I was told to go to the back of the bus by some of the “popular” boys in my class. Of course, I refused, and I ignored them; because there’s no way some thirteen-year-old boy who thinks that I’m “irrelevant” because I’m not “popular” is about to tell me to go to the back of the bus — and expect me to do so.

When I reported it to the middle school principal at the time she called my mother and told her that “it’s because they like her, that’s what boys do.” I was infuriated, and I was even more upset knowing that they only got a slap on the wrist, most likely because of their social standing.

The same principal told me to take off my headwrap that I was caught wearing at lunch, because “hats aren’t allowed at school.” I refused; because there’s no way that a grown woman is about to tell a middle schooler to take off their headwrap because they’re too ignorant to understand that it’s not a hat.

So, I kept wearing it, I even had it on when she pulled me out of class so she could call my mother to verify if headwraps were part of Black culture, and my mother said that it was.

Hate takes many different forms. Sometimes it’s like the discrimination that I refused to comply with in school, and sometimes it’s far more blatant, like advertising a book burning in the Fort Fairfield Journal.

Because hate comes in so many forms, some people are still afraid to speak up in fear of retaliation, being ostracized, or not being believed. I remember being called a “snitch” and a “tattletale” back in elementary school whenever I told a teacher that someone called me the n-word.

But I still didn’t let that stop me. It never has, and it never will.

Racism isn’t just an opinion where I’ll still have respect for you if you think that racism is a good thing; racism, and hate of all forms rely on lies, stereotypes, and falsehoods that seek to silence whoever it’s directed towards at best and exterminate at worst. Ignoring bigotry never makes things better.

Would segregation be abolished if we didn’t fight?

Would slavery be abolished if we didn’t fight?

Three of Ida B. Wells’ (later Ida. B. Wells-Barnett) friends were lynched by a mob which inspired her to start an editorial campaign against it. She was born into slavery and traveled around to major U.S cities to speak about her cause and even went to Great Britain to speak twice. An editorial that she wrote about lynching in 1892 caused a riot in Memphis, Tennessee, and she was threatened with lynching if she’d ever go back to the city.

But what did she do? She kept going.

She worked as a staff writer for the New York Age, she was a lecturer and organized anti-lynching societies. In 1895, she wrote A Red Record, a more detailed prospective on lynching in America which she published under her husband’s newspaper the Chicago Conservator. In 1902, she wrote “Lynching and the Excuse for it.” This was a rebuttal to Jane Addams, a white woman from an affluent family and a leader in the settlement house movement wrote an article where she would go on to expand on an anti-lynching speech that she gave that Wells invited her to deliver. She condemned mob violence and people who would participate in lynching because it undermined the law and due process. [1]

Even though she condemned lynching, in this article Addams said that one should “assume that they have set aside trial by jury and all processes of law because they have become convinced that this brutal method of theirs is the most efficient method in dealing with a peculiar class of crime committed by one race against another.”

In Wells-Barnett’s rebuttal, she “respectfully, but forcefully” disagreed with the premise that lynching was only used to secure justice, so she published crime data that showed that Black people got lynched for minor offences, “not criminal, misdemeanors and crimes not capital.” Wells-Barnett concluded that “It must be admitted that the real cause of lynching in all such cases is race prejudice, and should be so classified.” [2]

She served as the secretary of the NAACP from 1898–1902 and founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League who helped migrants who were coming to the south, and it’s thought that she may have found the first Black women’s suffrage group called Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett is nothing short of an American hero. She didn’t back down after being threatened by hateful white supremacist cowards who were so ignorant that they have to resort to terrorism because they don’t know how to deal with their emotions like grown adults. She knew what she was, and she knew what she had to do. She didn’t let it hold her back, she let it motivate her even more.

The most important thing to understand about white supremacy is that it’s like a cancerous virus. It’s viral in the sense that white supremacists always change their optics, talking points, and propaganda to seem more acceptable within the mainstream, and it’s cancerous in the way that if you don’t try to stop it, it will keep spreading.

White supremacy will never go away completely, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to get comfortable with that fact. I recall one comment talking about how most people already oppose it so there’s no need to talk about it. But casual racism is something that’s everywhere.

A great and recent example would be the owner of Maria’s Restaurant in Portland, Maine making a post on Facebook calling on the Border Czar, a man who has no respect for the law whatsoever, after some customers dined and dashed.

Michael Brian on Facebook

It’s clear that they weren’t posting this message to only bring awareness to other restaurants in the area about dining and dashing; if they did, they would have included things like the approximate height of the individuals and the clothes that they were wearing. They posted this message to intimidate people. Like Micheal Brian said on Facebook, “You didn’t describe a theft. You described a demographic. That’s racism — ugly, dangerous, and loud.”

But underneath the apology post from Tony Napolitano, you’ll find some unwavering support for the establishment. With some users saying that there’s “No apology needed,” and some commenters talking about how reminiscent the post was of how Italian immigrants were treated when they first came to America.

White supremacy comes in countless different forms, whether it’s NSC-131 having the audacity to hold up a “Keep New England White” banner,

Determination is ingrained in the DNA of Black women all around the country. Whether it’s Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, or Shay Stweart-Bouley. Speaking out against white supremacy is something that has been ingrained in my DNA from the moment that my ancestors were kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in the south, when we would sing about freedom in the fields while working tirelessly for lazy rich racists, to braiding our hair into cornrows, mapping out how we’ll escape them.

I’m not about to be silenced by someone who’s so weak that they resort to calling me an “enemy” because I have critical thinking skills and reading comprehension; two tools that I have that make it so I’m not a hateful and narrow minded individual.

It’s unfortunate that centuries later in 2025, we’re still fighting the same fight against white supremacy, but I have an obligation to carry on the legacy of the men and women who fought for the rights that I have today.

By any means necessary.