I have read Daniel Richards’ March 26 op-ed column headlined: “HB544 is essential for New Hampshire and will protect free speech.” It would do nothing of the kind.

I note that the op-ed’s argument is constructed by selectively quoting professor Ibram X. Kendi, of Boston University (the full quote is below). Kendi’s work, How to Be an Antiracist, is a worthwhile read. In summary, he notes that discrimination — a particularly uncomfortable term that he borrows from his opponents in order to redefine it — can be used for equity or inequity.

We can “discriminate” based on race for good. We can use such “discrimination” to raise up those who have been previously oppressed. This is what health care researchers are seeking to do in the context of COVID-19 — “discriminate” those patients who are being most heavily affected based on age, race and existing medical conditions. If you do not look at those factors, you cannot solve the problem.

Being color blind is not what we need. If you do not see color, you do not see the problems associated with color. This is why I oppose HB 544, as it seeks to legislate how we approach racism and sexism, and thereby limits what we can do. For patients, a bill that aims to prohibit “divisive concepts” has real-life consequences.

Those of us who seek to be antiracist see this bill for what it is: a series of dog whistles by those whose fragility means they cannot fathom that they are part of the problem. Those of us who seek to be antiracist also know that this bill seeks to preserve the status quo because it would stop us from discussing the problems associated with existing discrimination.

The op-ed’s assurance that we can talk about the past (up to roughly the 1960s) hardly enables us to meet the challenges and crises of our own moment. Offering a historic cut-off date for what we can and cannot discuss exacerbates present crises and our ability to address them.

Take the following example, which NPR explored in a recent broadcast. In trying to understand so-called vaccine hesitancy among African Americans, who are far more likely to contract COVID-19 and die from the disease, several commentators offered the government-run “Tuskegee Study” of syphilis, from 1932-72, as an explanation and have chalked up current distrust to the history of racial trauma. But as USC sociologist Karen Lincoln argues, current failures of the health care system are more pressing and are causing more distrust than the events of the past.

We must be able to discuss failures in our current health care system to improve current health outcomes.

Similarly, we must be able to discuss current discrimination and current theories for understanding and combating it more broadly.

Kendi’s writings address this contemporary need. Here is the full passage, rather than just a selective quote:

“Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term ‘racial discrimination,’ transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, ‘You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.’ As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, ‘In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.’ ”

Sarah McDonald is a biomedical researcher who lives in West Lebanon.