Detention Officer Fired for Being a Member of the KKK

Detention officer Wayne Kerschner admitted to being a member of the KKK and blogging for a KKK Website. He also said that he attended a rally in Tennessee and was an officer in the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Alachua County sheriff's office fired Kerschner after the revelation. Clearly, the idea that a member of the sheriff's office is also a dues-paying member of the KKK is incredibly problematic.

Some other questions that come to mind are the following:

1) Are there other Klan members in the organization? Perhaps there should be an investigation of other officers and their backgrounds, particularly those who are in alignment with Kerschner. I don't believe that he was alone in all this.

2) Kerschner's background should be investigated in more detail: In spite of the fact that Kerschner defines himself as a "dang fair officer," the truth is that his record may not prove this to be the case. Any interactions that this officer has had with minorities in the course of his profession should be investigated to ensure that he was not unfairly arresting people of color or hurting them in some other way.

3) The real enemy is not the Klan: Subtle racism is a far greater enemy than the KKK. While few people are crazy enough to actually join the Klan, there are millions of Americans who hate people of color. By focusing on the Klan only, we might be missing the point. Additionally, institutionalized racism is created through decades of work-implementing policies that lead to disparate outcomes for minorities. That means that the biggest hurdles for black people come from the structure of the institutions themselves, not from the hearts and minds of those who run the institutions. In other words, much of the damage has been done, and there can be racism in an institution even when there isn't a racist person in the building.

The bottom line is that there is still a great deal of work to be done. Cutting ties with the one KKK member on staff does nothing to make us confident that racism has left the building. We must be more intelligent than that.