Reverends Irene Monroe and Emmett G. Price III told Boston Public Radio on Monday that this year's election shows a lasting legacy of white supremacy in the country.
"The reality is that white supremacy has been a wide open wound for this nation for quite some time," Price said. "I don't think the whole problem is Trump, I think he's a good partial fragment of the problem, but the problem is that white supremacy has run ingrained in this nation for so many generations that it's almost being normalized."
Monroe noted the racial divide in this year's exit polls. "Where I was shocked in 2016 that 52 percent of white women voted for Trump, I almost fell onto the floor to find out that 55 percent of white women voted for Trump this year," she said. "I actually felt this election was our third Civil War, with the second one having been during the Civil Rights Movement," Monroe said.
Some could assume President Donald Trump's voter base is aging out, but Monroe disagrees. "The Proud Boys are young boys," she said. "We've got to understand that in the soil of this country, the DNA, is racism."
Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist and the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology.
Price is professor of worship, church & culture and founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Together they host the All Rev’d Up podcast, produced by GBH.
