Last Friday evening at St. Paul’s AME Church, I participated in a prayer vigil for those killed in their Charleston church while studying and praying over the bible. The service at St. Paul’s was mournful and joyful, thoughtful and exuberant, healing and reflective. I thought how many more such irrational hateful things must happen in our country? When will this sickness be gone and the stain that is older than our nation ended.

We call ourselves a great nation, an exceptional nation, even a transformative one, but when will we be a loving nation? The prism of color shapes our mind’s eye. To some the color of one’s skin is more important than anything else. Eugenics is alive and well instead of discarded along with Aryan superiority and the pseudoscience of phrenology. Skin color is only a characteristic like eye or hair color. It does not determine anything more. In 21st century America, it should not be how we define one person from another.

Though I did not vote for him, I believed that the election of President Obama would be a turning point for the United States. It hasn’t happened as I had hoped. For some Americans, it wasn’t good enough to oppose his policies because they disagreed with those policies. It became an irrational hatred based on race. When Obama’s birthplace was questioned or his being a Muslim was suggested, what was the inference to be that he was not an American or was a secret agent for Al Qaida? They were code words for being an African-American who, by the way, was raised by his white grandparents as a Christian in, of all places, Hawaii.

Our nation needs to end this bigotry. It is disgraceful that today so many of my fellow countrymen have such hatred in their hearts. This irrationality of thought leads to incidents such as Charleston. The deranged and delusional will be inculcated to weave the nonsense they hear into an act such as Mr. Roof did.

The color blindness I witnessed at St. Paul’s was a beautiful sight. I think for many of us in Stuart and Martin County, this idea may even be true. However, even where we live, we must continue and strive to end any racism that remains and is tolerated. Someday, to quote Dr. King “we will live in a nation that judges a person not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”