K
Knowledge
Guest
Of National Lies and Racial America
By Dr. TIM WISE
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html
For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once
affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie
that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which
now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an
idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained
sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much
injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and
genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being
only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the
game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at
righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah
Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally
Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having
brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils
about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned.
It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the
unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones
uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an
"angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of
particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it,
cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be
able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn
it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all,
didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't
he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because
of its treatment of the African American community throughout the
years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but
that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of
chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of
the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive
good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes
around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological
grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than
enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit
hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack
on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted
an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst
sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence
of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most
definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the
act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks
were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save
American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are
inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one
supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also
ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own
war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already
signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going
to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The
conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its
basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we
committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no
justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more
hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses
than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're
the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because,
you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once
said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States
of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He
was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation
that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons
undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up
hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug
possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according
to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking
around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what
God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or
shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping
with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely
disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any
God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the
statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If
anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black
people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his
suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black
folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright
isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill
Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of
his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief
in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN,
when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people
whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial
minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is
highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's
favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and
stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably
accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy
of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just
enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the
Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers
opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers"
who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel
Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like
Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but
he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a
Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell,
and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no
mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor
worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation
for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an
intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the
fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who
died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were
lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War,
according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time);
millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to
some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day
that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred
years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown.
To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the
hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as
chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of
Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States,
thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To
some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life.
Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find
it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality.
Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether
in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with
the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world
like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as
white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so,
having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we
cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally
shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work,
No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor,
grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very
accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world
they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire
lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so
lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example,
sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution,
because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt
racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history
worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a
white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and
we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the
U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say
they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social
science research to back them up) actually think that those
experiences and that data might actually say something about the
nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright
and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly
challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black
people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the
"shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of
looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still
dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the
main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people
do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they
understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully
committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those
tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless
America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and
proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting
against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods,
throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when
they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which
black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to
the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in
this country--when they discover that such events were not just a
couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy
out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were
never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events,
advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even
thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and
drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were
being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts
cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that
postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few
whites, including members of their own families did or said anything
to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past,
whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history
so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for
example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in
1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed
all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the
papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on
memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of
lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to
anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history,
of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact
into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white
version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it
so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more
than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a
re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their
concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In
that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of
grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows
Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in
which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the
sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These
iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than
selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and
memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June
Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks
of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how
disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them
and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we
wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color
with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave
it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed
thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of
the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus
called out the National Guard to block black students from entering
Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced
to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they
represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid
the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who
saw nothing wrong with calling children ******s in front of cameras.
That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so
many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows
white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your
teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon
"this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public
denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that
has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who
have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling
it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its
implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of
country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped,
it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring
shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are
always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we
occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for
anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at
all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate
our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals
prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as
deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as
though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves
truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized
fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to
earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those
fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing
but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is
that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is
that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever
have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we
can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have
yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every
week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their
lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while
black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are
demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to
say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and
worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling
bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a
skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either
preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and
have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a
Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in
every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every
children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card
they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about
Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to
who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those
who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact
that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as
to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally
evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many
of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that
theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of
Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question
about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one
accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty
clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part
is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't
Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted.
That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not
disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because
they go to a church that says that **** every single week, or because
they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see
nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their
views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and
their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the
God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the
right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to
be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a
Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action:
Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be
reached at: timjwise@msn.com
This essay originally appeared in Lip.
Here's The big Picture!
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http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/feb98herman.htm
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The amazing Dr. Neely Fuller-- http://tinyurl.com/34ybws
The stupefying Rev Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.
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The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan-- http://tinyurl.com/2pr8dq
Dr. C.T. Vivian-- http://tinyurl.com/2shh96
Dr. Cornel West-- http://tinyurl.com/3d8fx8
Dr Michael Dyson- http://tinyurl.com/2klt52
Dr. Lani Guinier- http://tinyurl.com/2tagqz
The incomparable Rev Al Sharpton- http://tinyurl.com/3a4drm
Dr Tim "White Man" Wise - http://tinyurl.com/2trkyx
Dr Jane "White Woman" Elliott-- http://tinyurl.com/38939f
Mrs Ida Hakim -- http://tinyurl.com/2p883y
Rachel Maddow-- http://tinyurl.com/3738py
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=White+Supremacy&search_type=
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Racism&search_type=
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people
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By Dr. TIM WISE
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise03182008.html
For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once
affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie
that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which
now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an
idiot.
Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained
sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much
injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and
genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being
only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the
game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at
righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah
Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally
Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having
brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils
about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned.
It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the
unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones
uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an
"angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of
particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it,
cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be
able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn
it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.
Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all,
didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't
he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because
of its treatment of the African American community throughout the
years?
Well actually, no he didn't.
Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but
that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of
chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of
the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive
good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes
around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological
grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than
enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit
hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack
on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.
He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted
an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst
sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence
of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most
definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the
act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks
were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save
American lives."
But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are
inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one
supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also
ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own
war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already
signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going
to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The
conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its
basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we
committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no
justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more
hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses
than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're
the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because,
you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once
said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States
of America. I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He
was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation
that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons
undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up
hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug
possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according
to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking
around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what
God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or
shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping
with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely
disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any
God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the
statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If
anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black
people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.
Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his
suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black
folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright
isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill
Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of
his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief
in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN,
when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people
whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial
minorities.
So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is
highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's
favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and
stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably
accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy
of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just
enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the
Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers
opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers"
who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel
Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like
Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but
he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a
Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell,
and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.
What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no
mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor
worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation
for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an
intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the
fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who
died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were
lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War,
according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time);
millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to
some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day
that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred
years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown.
To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the
hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as
chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of
Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States,
thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To
some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life.
Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.
But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find
it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality.
Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether
in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with
the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world
like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as
white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so,
having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we
cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally
shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.
This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work,
No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:
"White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor,
grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very
accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world
they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire
lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so
lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example,
sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac."
And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution,
because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt
racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history
worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a
white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and
we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the
U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say
they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social
science research to back them up) actually think that those
experiences and that data might actually say something about the
nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright
and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly
challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black
people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the
"shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of
looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still
dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the
main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people
do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they
understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully
committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those
tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless
America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and
proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting
against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods,
throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when
they heard the news that he had been assassinated.
Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which
black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to
the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in
this country--when they discover that such events were not just a
couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy
out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were
never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events,
advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even
thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and
drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were
being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts
cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that
postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few
whites, including members of their own families did or said anything
to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past,
whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history
so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for
example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in
1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed
all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the
papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on
memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.
Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of
lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to
anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history,
of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact
into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white
version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it
so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more
than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a
re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their
concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In
that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of
grasping at present, is that "Leave it Beaver" and "Father Knows
Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in
which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the
sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These
iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than
selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and
memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June
Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks
of Beaver and Larry Mondello.
These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how
disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them
and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we
wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color
with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave
it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed
thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of
the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus
called out the National Guard to block black students from entering
Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced
to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they
represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid
the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who
saw nothing wrong with calling children ******s in front of cameras.
That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so
many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows
white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your
teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon
"this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public
denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that
has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who
have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling
it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its
implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of
country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped,
it not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.
It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring
shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are
always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we
occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for
anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at
all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate
our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals
prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as
deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as
though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.
So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves
truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized
fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to
earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those
fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing
but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is
that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is
that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever
have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we
can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have
yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.
What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every
week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their
lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while
black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are
demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to
say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and
worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling
bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?
And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a
skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either
preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and
have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a
Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in
every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every
children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card
they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about
Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to
who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.
Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those
who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact
that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as
to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally
evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many
of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that
theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of
Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question
about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one
accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty
clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part
is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't
Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted.
That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not
disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because
they go to a church that says that **** every single week, or because
they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see
nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their
views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and
their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the
God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the
right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to
be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a
Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action:
Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be
reached at: timjwise@msn.com
This essay originally appeared in Lip.
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