BUT FIRST, A NIGHT CAP
At his Klan rally last weekend in Arizona, Donald said, “The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating ... white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics. ... In New York State, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.”
Ah, yes, the discrimination against white people in this country is legion. So much so that white children must be protected at all costs from learning American history. It started with Republican lawmakers in at least five states who threatened to cut funds from schools that use lesson plans that rely in part on the 1619 Project, which was called “racially divisive” and “revisionist.” Mississippi is funding a Patriotic Education Fund and South Dakota is spending almost a million dollars to teach schoolchildren “why the U.S. is the most special nation in the history of the world.”
Now Republicans in Florida are taking it a step further. They recently introduced a bill called “Individual Freedom.” “An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” it reads. “An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”
Such language illustrates a solution in search of a problem; a perpetuation of the dangerous rhetoric around Critical Race Theory that worked so well for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. Worse, the position of the Right here seems to be that teaching our white children an unvarnished version of American history is akin to accusing them of being racists. There is no corresponding concern about what the impact of teaching a grossly inaccurate version of that history—in which the behavior of our white ancestors is either elided or manipulated—would have on our black and brown children.
In 1975, after a 110-year long attempt to reinvent Robert E. Lee as some kind of hero, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 407–10 to restore his full rights of citizenship. Not long after, President Ford signed the resolution in order to correct an “oversight.” Ford said: “As a soldier, General Lee left his mark on military strategy. As a man, he stood as the symbol of valor and of duty. As an educator, he appealed to reason and learning to achieve understanding and to build a stronger nation. The course he chose after the war became a symbol to all those who had marched with him in the bitter years towards Appomattox. General Lee ’s character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.”
This horrifying statement in praise of the greatest traitor to America—a man whose actions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, a man who owned and tortured other human beings, who separated families on a whim—is made worse by the fact that so many other people endorsed it.
Some of the most egregious crimes in American history weren’t crimes when they were committed. Often they were sanctioned government policy, like the forced relocation of one hundred thousand Native Americans during Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears and the domestic slave trade implemented in the decades after the international slave trade had been abolished.
Only by confronting these atrocities, sanctioned or not, can we put this country’s history—and where it’s led us—in perspective. Even small acts of whitewashing skew history in a way that fails us. The website for Monticello, Jefferson’s sprawling plantation, refers to him as a “patriarch of an extended family at Monticello, both white and [B]lack,” which is an odd way of describing the enslaved children Sally Hemings bore him.
By failing to ask the hard questions, by failing to acknowledge the mistakes of the past we almost guarantee that more egregious mistakes will be made in the future. We should not talk about the founders of this country without talking about which of them were enslavers, which ones actually supported the idea of owning other human beings, and yet we do. That’s the first thing we should know about them, and then we can judge the rest accordingly. Even Abraham Lincoln, considered our greatest president, struggled to accept the equality of Black Americans, despite believing they should be free. As Frederick Douglass remarked in his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II because of rampant xenophobia that was aimed directly at American citizens who were of Japanese descent and looked like the enemy. Roosevelt’s New Deal largely excluded Black Americans from the economic opportunities afforded white Americans, effectively shutting them out of the middle class. Racist policies pursued by many government organizations under his watch worsened the already bad problem of housing segregation, which forced Blacks into crowded, sub-standard living situations.
Failing to demand a reckoning for atrocities, even retrospectively, creates a situation in which we ensure such atrocities or crimes or transgressions will happen again. Failing to call them out is to condone them. Ironically, the fear of being associated with past transgressions often leads to silence about them. As we see with child abuse, sexual assault, and mental illness, which often go unreported, shame can be a powerful silencer. And this is what we see happening now on the Right—although shamelessness may be more operative in this instance.
Refusing to acknowledge the fact that the original sins have not been atoned for, acting as if the recompense is firmly in the past, adequate and complete, is to perpetuate the injustices and pave the way for future transgression and brutality. Cruelty and bigotry and white impunity are built into the system. And by remaining silent about historical truths, couching them in euphemisms, or rewriting them altogether, we ensure that the system will not change. Clearly, this is what Republicans are counting on.
Hey, White People