The brutal truth of us and why we must confront it now.…

  

The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deigned to join in the terror.

Jews in Nazi -controlled Europe, African-Americans in the antebellum and Jim Crow South, and Dalits in India were all at the mercy of people who would been fed a diet of contempt and hate for them for them, and had incentive to try to prove their superiority by joining in or acquiescing to cruelties against their fellow humans.

- Isabel Wilkerson, “Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control,” Caste (2020)  

In her powerful, prescient and disturbing new book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson notes that “Human history is rife with examples of inconceivable violence, and as Americans we like to think of our country as being far beyond the guillotines of medieval Europe or the reign of the Huns.” Yet, for most of this country’s history, institutionalized, racially-driven violence has been the norm rather than the exception … and our failure to accept, embrace and address this fact of history that continues to this day is evidencing itself in the undoing of our polity. The question on so many of our minds is whether this commitment to White Supremacy is greater than to our very democracy.

Of course, this historical amnesia isn’t merely accidental; it’s very purposeful, as it enables the dominant caste to absolve itself of a responsibility older than our country itself: to deal with the reality that along with statements of soaring values that are the envy of the world we must acknowledge that our system, our supposedly enlightened structure of participative self-government, is actually built on institutionalized inhumanity that continues to this very day. Among many such present reflections, how else can one explain the Electoral College, a racist relic that’s thwarted the will of the people twice in this century already?

I understand: if I were the beneficiary of unearned Privilege, soaked as it is in the blood of millions, I, too, would want to avoid its acknowledgment and address … but I’m not that fortunate, as I’m descended from the recipients of this extended cruelty. My roots remind me that my ancestors were owned and abused both for the amusement of their captors and to maintain the system of their own degradation, dehumanization and involuntary servitude. My inheritance is having to overcome all of these barriers – both visible and not, though undifferentiated in provable and proven power to constrain – that such a system created and now our slightly different system perpetuates.

So, I have to call out the realities of our history, not only to ensure that we don’t forget, but also to ensure that we choose to address them now, decades and even centuries too late.

The crimes of homicide, of rape, and of assault and battery were felonies in the slavery era as they are today in any civil society. They were seen then as wrong, immoral, reprehensible, and worthy of the severest punishment. But the country allowed most any atrocity to be inflicted on the black body. Thus twelve generations of African-Americans faced the ever-present danger of assault and battery or worse, every day of their lives during the quarter millennium of enslavement.

This casual disregard for black life and the deputizing of any citizen to take that life would become a harbinger of the low value accorded African-Americans in the police and vigilante shootings of unarmed black citizens that continued into the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Although the vast majority of our fellow citizens would prefer not to acknowledge it, America’s legacy is just as much about institutionalized inhumanity as it is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We choose to ignore this damning fact because it’s at once profoundly wounding and unavoidably obligating. So we pretend that, by perhaps different means, ours isn’t a society in which African-Americans – and others of The Different – aren’t reminded of their place and often brutally remanded to it every day.

One enslaver remarked “that he was no better pleased than when he could hear … the sound of the driver’s lash among the toiling slaves,” for then (the historian Edward) Baptist wrote, “he knew his system was working.”

If you don’t see the vestiges of caste continuing to suppress The Other every day in our society, you’re not paying attention … on purpose.

It’s fashionable today, even (or especially?) in elite circles, to be historically amnesiac. Though it creates a toll of appreciable cognitive dissonance, truth be told, choosing not to remember is far easier than embracing the reality of who we were and, in appreciable part, still are. You can do that when you have Privilege.

But I’m sure that some of you will object and say, but what of African-Americans and others of The Different, what responsibility do they bear for understanding this history and addressing it? To this conveniently diversionary response, I offer two rebuttals:

First, asking the victims to address their own dispossession is yet another craven demonstration of the inhumanity to which they’ve been subject since time immemorial. Racism, especially in the structural form that powerful whites have created and perpetuated throughout this country’s history, is a white problem and therefore the primary responsibility of whites to address and eliminate. Yes, we can and should assist you in this endeavor, but don’t ever get it twisted that it’s our problem, not yours.

Further, I realize that such an approach is ahistorical: as Frederick Douglass noted long ago, power concedes nothing without demand. Therefore, it’s imperative that you whites realize, our role is to demand this of you … so consider this one of my many individual contributions to this collective demand.

Second, I agree that we should be both more aware and actively engaged in our own liberation, but it’s one of the more ingenious and craven aspects of this racist system that the education that we’re afforded purposely obscures this reality of historical and present subjugation. As he details exhaustively in his profound and incisive book Lies My Teacher Told Me, Prof. James W Loewen observes that the history books from which we’re taught not only avoid or give short shrift to this unseemly but nonetheless real aspect of our history, but they purposely diminish the myriad contributions of The Other throughout it.

There’s a reason that we were never taught about Africans and Phoenicians who sailed the world’s oceans long before Columbus, or that the latter’s true contribution to world history was the legacy of brutality and enslavement that’s afflicted the West since his ‘discovery’ of it.

By the way, how does one discover a land already populated by millions of Indigenous people?

Or why do we celebrate the Pilgrims at Plymouth more than the Virginia settlers who predated them by a dozen years? Could it be that: 1) the history of Jamestown is so problematic – you know, cannibalism and genocide being so taboo ‘n’ all – that we prefer to make up lies about the Plymouth settlement; and 2) the story of the Plymouth Rock and all of the other tales of heroism and community – like, say, the First Thanksgiving – are completely fabricated myths of our own making to help establish the greatest of these animating fables, American Exceptionalism?

Funny, we remember the Pilgrims as heroic – and, in fairness, for their bravery in setting out to make their way in a ‘new world’ they were (despite personal profit being the primary motive of most of those who sailed on the Mayflower) – but how much credit were we taught to give the Indigenous who sustained them? As Prof. Loewen notes, “Like other Europeans in America, the Pilgrims had no idea what to eat or how to raise or find food until American Indians showed them.” And how was this life-saving kindness repaid? Well, that, too, is an aspect of our history that’s been purposely whitewashed and largely forgotten.…

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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because

they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

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Because examples like this are so numerous and dispiriting, I’ll move on while noting that such indoctrination is itself designed not only to inculcate a false sense of our own moral superiority in history but also to absolve the dominant case of the myriad and ubiquitous sins attached to its ascent and perpetuation to this very day.

And yet, as the consequences of our historical amnesia become ever more evident and costly, should we continue to sustain it? What is it that we fear so much as to avoid it, as we have, literally, for centuries? That the truth of how inhumane so much of our history has been will further rile The Dispossessed? No doubt that, to an extent, this is true … but we never seem to ask whether the cost of continuing to lie to ourselves is even greater.

I think it is.…

Ultimately, I think that James Baldwin had it right when he noted that not everything that is faced can be changed but that everything that is changed must be faced. In this spirit, I urge us to confront our too often ugly history so that we can make amends and move beyond it to create an America that truly lives up to and into its professed creeds.

Of course, the dwindling white majority would prefer that we not do this because of its inherent indictment of their complicity … and yet what do we really think will happen when, in just a quarter century’s time, our nation becomes ‘minority’ in the majority?

Do we truly believe that as People of Color and others of The Different assume evermore of the leadership roles in our society to which they’re entitled by their talent and fortitude we won’t begin to dispel the cardinal falsehood of so much of our history? Why would we wait? Could it be that we’re kicking this metaphorical can down the road to our children and grandchildren because we don’t have the courage to address it, as generation after generation of our forebears did, too?

I can only think that the level of challenge and pain associated with this address increases with every moment of delay … and what makes us think that our children and grandchildren will have more fortitude and evidence more bravery than us, especially given that we’ve deliberately falsely instructed them just as we were dishonestly indoctrinated years before? No, it’s time to lance the wound so that it can heal, which means that we can recover from and move beyond our too often unfortunate history.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the avoidance driven by fear: there’s so much that the vast majority of us don’t know about the reality of our past that our sudden awareness could lead to deep and abiding outrage … but delaying the inevitable won’t change this. And, truth be told, we, The Different, have long lived with the realities of our racist, sexist, heterosexist, religiocentric, xenophobic, classist, etc., white-dominated society. So, yes, when we learn the truth even more of us will be even more pissed off … but I believe that the greatest damage will be experienced by the dominant caste members whose self-image will be revealed to the built disproportionately on a (voluminous) pack of lies.

I hope I’m wrong, but my suspicion is that our avoidance of The Reckoning is less about the fear of The Dispossessed revolting than it is about the Privileged descending. As the old saying goes, you should really be nice to everyone on your ascent, because you'll see them again on the way back down.…

Accordingly, I assert, now is as good a time as any to confront the brutal truth of us and then begin the long and hard work of dealing with it, healing from it and then coming together to create a new and better America in which all of us – and, in truth, many of us for the first time – can share in our uniquely animating and re-imagined Dream. I truly do believe that we’re at an inflection point in our society, a veritable crossroads of history, and that our choice of direction will have profound impacts for years – and, actually, decades (if not centuries) – to come.

I’m reminded that more than six decades ago a relatively small band of brave souls began a similar journey that, though torturous, resulted in profoundly positive change for us all. Did the members of the Civil Rights Movement understand that they were securing not only their own freedom but that of our nation as a whole? Perhaps. But I’m clear that this is the opportunity before us now and hope that we, too, will evidence the courage and fortitude to remake our world in a far more just, equitable and inclusive – and truthful – way.…

 

When you believe in things

That you don't understand

Then you suffer

Superstition ain't the way 

- Stevie Wonder, Superstition (1972)