Acknowledging history with your feet

The most encouraging thing I’ve seen in ages is the current effort to put right some of the wrongs of history, an effort accelerated by the killing of George Floyd by a bad cop with the entire world looking on. Suddenly you hear black people reliving for the nth time the misery of abuse by police, but at the same time recognizing that there is hope in the fact that this time white people in large numbers seem to be joining in and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Chalk it up to the internet. It’s one thing for white people to read about police abuse of black people. It’s another to see it with their own eyes. 

Some time ago, I came across a book which moved me powerfully. I’m still looking for the right words to give it a decent review, but haven’t managed yet. I’m talking about the book Learning from the Germans by Susan Neiman. She makes the case that America is dragging its feet in recognizing the sins of its past and urges us to learn from the Germans. That’s a complex issue, and I don’t want to get into it here; I just want to mention in passing that I have been bothered for years by the fact that after all these years we have never come to terms with slavery and segregation in America and still live in what amounts to an apartheid nation. The gap between the superwealthy and the rest of us is readily acknowledged, at least by those of us trying to wrench the country out of the hands of the Trumpistas. But the close correlation of the problem of the wealth gap with the problem of racism still has never been adequately addressed. Not on a national level where it needs to be addressed. Many Northerners see it as a Southern problem and many rural people see it as an urban problem. And many people in the “better neighborhoods” of our cities see it as a problem of the “bad neighborhoods” where people "simply need to learn to work harder and lift themselves up by their own bootstraps"

Not in my backyard, we say. We’ve got a right to live where we want and it’s not up to us to do that hard work of eliminating redlining. And those who would make changes are toying with socialism, and we can’t have that. Capitalism has brought us to where we are today and only idiots would mess with what obviously works. 

That sort of talk. The country in a permanent state of denial. 

And now, suddenly, we’re considering the possibility of restructuring our police departments so that we don’t reduce every social challenge to a question of law and order. We’re waking up to the realization that it has not been wise to criminalize everything from poverty to domestic abuse to abortion to drug addiction. Maybe there are better ways to solve problems than calling the cops. 

The backlash to this increasing awareness is already fierce. Fox and Friends and the Moral Monstrosity are already ridiculing the idea of police reform, charging that the "progressives" (dirty word) are intent on eliminating all police forces overnight, misrepresenting the earnest efforts to learn from experience when it’s time to revisit policies that have clearly failed. Only a very few black-and-white thinkers are actually calling for the sudden total elimination of police forces. The vast majority understand this is a call for a more thorough analysis of what's not working.  Unfortunately, oversimplification is as American as apple pie, and now the Democrats are worried this could become an issue which could cost them the election in November. 

But I don’t want to dwell on the danger of proposing changes to the status quo and the fact that the ruling class is clinging especially fiercely these days to the gains they made in 2016. Laziness and “I got mine!” thinking helped put the white supremacists in control of all three branches of government, to be sure.  And that’s got to change – and hopefully is changing. 

I can’t tell you how encouraged I am to see the celebration of Columbus Day is giving way to a greater recognition that 1492 was not only the year Columbus was off "discovering America/beginning the ethnic cleansing of the North American continent by Europeans" but the year when Grenada was surrendering to the power in Castille, i.e., the forced conversion of the Muslims to Christianity and eventual expulsion from Spain was also beginning. "In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue..." indeed. Who's telling this damned story, anyway?

And to see people speaking up about Robert E. Lee, “fine Southern Gentleman” though he may have been, as the man who led thousands of troops into war to maintain the Confederate States’ right to keep Africans enslaved on the American continent. And lopping off the head of the statue honoring him in Richmond, the onetime capital of the Confederacy. And our British cousins tossing the statue of slave trader Edward Colston into the river in Bristol. Good show. And my neighborhood grammar school changing its name from the Le Conte School to the Sylvia Mendez School, because Le Conte was a slaveholder and Sylvia Mendez was a desegregationist. Good show again. And Belgium's King Leopold finally getting his just desserts after what is arguably the nastiest of all nasty European colonial regimes. [Read King Leopold's Ghost if you haven't already.] Really good show.

The Moral Monstrosity may want to insist, clearly speaking to his white supremacist base, that Fort Bragg, Fort Hood and Fort Benning are “magnificent and fabled military installations,” to use his words. But no small number of Americans are recognizing that they are named after generals who followed Robert E. Lee into that war to preserve slavery. Can they not go on being magnificent and fabled under different names, they are asking, challenging their fellow Americans to recognize that Trump's claim that a name change would "insult the fine men and women who trained there" is throwing a bone to the white supremacists. We shouldn't miss the fact that continuing to honor these Confederate soldiers is no less an insult, this time to the U.S. Army and those whose emancipation from slavery they gave their lives for. If somebody's got to not be insulted, how about we give preference to those who fought and those who cried for liberation.

I have a fierce loyalty to the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. It’s where my paternal grandmother was born and raised and where both my paternal grandparents and my father are buried, and it’s where some of my happiest childhood memories are rooted. But I’m also conscious of the fact that the expulsion of the French population, known as “The Great Upheaval” (in French “Le Grand Dérangement"), which took place between 1755 and 1764, when the French were scattered to the wind or died in the process, was what today we recognize as “ethnic cleansing.” 

History may more often than not be written by the victors, but what they write down can be read by those who come later with very different eyes.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, the epic poem about a (French) Acadian girl who spends her life trying to find her displaced lover, Gabriel, and succeeds only on his deathbed, moved millions when it first came out in 1847. I read it in Junior High School and never made the connection to the English Canadian population I belonged to in Nova Scotia. Reading it again today gives me the uncomfortable feeling that I am entirely too similar to a German who moved into the confiscated house of a Jew sent off to a concentration camp in the early 1940s. 

At the same time it should not be missed that there is a qualitative difference between displaced Acadians, whose descendants in New Brunswick or Québec or Louisiana may have a bone to pick with history, and the descendants of the Black Americans of today who have to remember, when they are stopped by the police, to keep their hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel where the cops can see them, never say anything that might be taken as “sass” and never leave a store without a bag for their purchases and an accompanying receipt. 

Rewriting history involves more than consciousness raising. It requires a willingness to change behavior, to stop dead in your tracks at times, give up the direction you were going in, and go in another.