This picture got worse when actual police officers began to be deployed to public schools in the wake of the Columbine mass shooting in 1999. The original intention was to keep children safe from a similar tragedy, but over time their purpose became policing students. The number of school resource officers increased dramatically, and during the 2011–12 school year ninety-two thousand students, 31 percent of whom were Black, were arrested in school.
Driven by implicit bias and unaddressed prejudice, these overreactions created an environment in which the chance that students, particularly students of color, would have to interact with the criminal justice system greatly increased. The end result, of course, was that stereotypes about Blacks and criminality were reinforced and perpetuated.
The statistics again paint a stark picture of racial injustice, but they also highlight the callousness and contempt with which our system of education, its administrators, and even its educators treat our children. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—children who are treated as if they are inherently bad and prone to criminality receive that message loud and clear. In this light, the problem isn’t only that, according to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 48 percent of preschool children who were suspended more than once are Black, it’s that preschool children are suspended at all.
* * *
We teach American history (badly, for the most part) in a school system that replicates the racial disparities in the larger world. Often the content of the education itself magnifies those disparities. Only recently were dehumanizing myths about the benefits of slavery removed from textbooks. Children are not taught about the cultures and communities from which African citizens were stolen, nor about the roughly six hundred distinct Native American communities that thrived before white settlers arrived.
We separate Black American and women’s literature and history as if Black Americans and women were not only outside the making of America but less important to it, a specialized subset of interest only to groups outside the majority.
There are no federally mandated guidelines for social studies or American history curricula. The production of textbooks has become a political process that leads to wide variability from state to state in how topics crucially important to students’ understanding of this country’s evolution, like slavery, are taught. This lack of consensus and politicization of our history is illustrated by the recent controversy over President Biden’s decision to use the 1619 Project as the basis for a grant program supporting education programs that incorporate issues of bias, discriminatory policies, and diversity in the teaching of American history.
Created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for The New York Times, with contributions by Jamelle Bouie, Bryan Stevenson, Kevin Kruse, and others, the 1619 Project is a necessary corrective to the ways in which most Americans understand slavery and its legacy and the contributions of Black Americans. It is, quite simply, in the words of Hannah-Jones, “an attempt to set the record straight.” Although some factual inaccuracies exist in the original publication—for example, the claim that colonists fought the Revolutionary War in order to preserve slavery—the project is a vital corrective to the false notion that slavery was not inextricably bound up in the founding of this county.
Conservatives from Erik Erikson to Newt Gingrich labeled the Project “agitprop,” “brainwashing,” and an attempt to keep “racial tension aflame.” Republican lawmakers in at least five states have threatened to cut funds from schools that use lesson plans that rely in part on the 1619 Project, which in the bills is 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.” These moves have been rightly described as propaganda.
Thirty-seven Senate Republicans formally condemned President Biden’s recent decision, writing, “Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense. Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.” In the choice between propaganda and truth, Republican leadership continues to make its choice clear.
Textbooks often default to euphemism. In a discussion of westward expansion and the violent confrontation with Native Americans, the American history Advanced Placement course guide includes this description: “Frontier settlers tended to champion expansion efforts, while American Indian resistance led to a sequence of wars and federal efforts to control and relocate American Indian populations.” Language is never neutral—this example fails to identify the aggressors in each case and the horror of the crime.
More troubling is what’s left out of many American history textbooks. While slavery is mentioned as a cause of the Civil War, and descriptions of the institution have become more blunt and realistic, larger discussions about the myriad ways in which slavery shaped America and its people or its lasting impact on both are largely avoided. And there are few, if any, discussions about the fact that seventeen of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention, a third of the founding fathers, were enslavers and the impact that may have had on the process of drafting the Constitution. The terms “lynching,” “peonage,” “Trail of Tears,” “Black Codes,” “turpentine forests,” and “convict leasing” are nowhere to be found in the AP American history curriculum. How can any student come to grips with this country’s past and its profound ongoing impact on our present without a thorough knowledge of all of those terms?
In both our cities and our schools, we all would have been better off if they’d just fixed the fucking windows.
* * *
None of this occurred in the distant past. It’s happening now.
In 1996, when I was thirty-one years old, Alabama state senator Charles Davidson argued that “slavery was a family institution and civilizing influence that gave enslaved people education and the Christian religion for which those converted black southerners are most grateful today.”
In 2002, Strom Thurmond, the unrepentant white supremacist and segregationist, turned one hundred years old. His birthday party was attended by then–president George W. Bush, among a roster of other political figures. Trent Lott, the Republican leader in the Senate, said in celebration, “I want to say this about my state [Mississippi]: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Segregation and Jim Crow had been part of Thurmond’s platform during that campaign.
In April 2021, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who is actually paid to spout his racist opinions on CNN, said in a speech to the Young America’s Foundation, an organization of young conservatives, “We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
* * *
I grew up in Jamaica, a majority-minority neighborhood in Queens, New York, in which I saw not one bit of difference between me and the people I passed by on the way to the subway. In his article “The White Space,” the sociologist Elijah Anderson writes, “White people typically avoid black space, but black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.” Black people in America never forget this; white people never have to think about it. I knew this because of the circumstances of my childhood.
And yet, the N-word was used without any hint of self-consciousness in my grandparents’ house. My friends’ parents lowered their voices to a whisper whenever they said the word “Black,” as if its mere utterance made them suspect. Whenever we drove through predominantly Black neighborhoods, the adults in front would surreptitiously lock their car doors. When entering Black spaces, whites may be self-conscious, we may even be afraid, but we are rarely in danger.
I knew this, too.
My neighborhood notwithstanding, I was immersed in a culture that was white. The schools I went to were almost exclusively white, and American history was white history. Black history, if it was even mentioned, was something else. The literature I studied was white literature, and Black literature was separate. And I was a child.
Racism is something we white people inflict on our children as it was inflicted on us. It is a violence we commit against them—and as they grow up, they benefit from the same entrenched system that benefits us, because our racist, white supremacist society allows us to benefit from it. We become complacent and selfish and, in the end, just as guilty as the people, and the people before them, who did this to us. The cycle continues. Our ability to be decent and kind is stunted, our desire to belong to a broader community without fear is curtailed. It is a passive experience, until it’s not. The more we exercise our privilege, the easier it gets to cross that line between doing so unconsciously and doing so because we feel entitled to it. It is so easy to get used to the luxury of forgetting and the luxury of never having to know.
This is not to make excuses or suggest that our missed opportunities, our narrow worldview, in any way mitigate the impact of our choices or the effect white behavior has on Blacks in America, but we have to acknowledge our racism before we can start to do something about it. Unacknowledged, it continues unabated, denying us opportunities for friendships, partnerships, collaborations, and experiences we might otherwise have had. Our white power and privilege come at a great emotional and spiritual cost to us as human beings. We have an identity that is limited to that power and privilege. We live in a fearful, controlling, and often violent society of our own making, and unless we take the necessary steps, we’ll remain trapped by it.
White Americans worry that by acknowledging the atrocities of the past, the guilt of the actual perpetrators will somehow attach to us, while it’s the failure to acknowledge those atrocities that makes us complicit. We as a nation cannot begin to heal unless we face our past head-on with complete honesty and begin to understand how our country’s legacy continues to affect every aspect of our lives.
CHAPTER 9
Facing the Truth
A month or two before the 2020 election, I began to think about what might be facing us when, if, we ever emerged from COVID. At the time there was no vaccine in sight—we were still hearing it might take three years or five years or longer. It might not happen at all. At the time, two hundred thousand Americans were dead, there was no way to know when the lockdown would end, and every foray out into the world still felt like a terrible gamble.
I knew we were going to be looking at a mental health crisis the likes of which this country would be woefully unprepared for, even at the best of times. It was as if we were at war and had all been called to serve, in different capacities—from desk jobs to combat—at the same time. We were all going to be coming back at the same time, too, our health care professionals just as wounded and exhausted to one degree or another as we were.
How would we emerge after so many months—of isolation, of anguish, of government-driven division, of loss? How would we reconnect, to ourselves and everybody else? What resources would be available to the hardest-hit communities? How would we grieve after grief had been so long postponed?
Robert Penn Warren once wrote, “It takes a long time for the truth to become true.” Of course, some of us are better at facing the truth than others. Some of us have had no choice but to live it. If there was one thing about the year of COVID, though, it’s that regardless of where we were coming from, or how sheltered or privileged we might have been, nobody really escaped unscathed. To be human, after all, is to be always vulnerable to the experience of trauma. It’s an almost unavoidable part of the human condition. We just all happened to be vulnerable at the same time. Between the loneliness of isolation and the actions of a government that seemed so willing to sacrifice us, COVID was both disaster and atrocity.
* * *
Trauma can never be outrun, but it is a human impulse to try. We resist being stuck in one place because it makes it harder to avoid our feelings, and when we’re running it’s so much easier to pretend we don’t have any. But during the pandemic, the one thing we needed most to do in order to save our lives and the lives of those we love was stay home.
Being trapped in the place in which you’re being traumatized is its own version of hell.
To be human is to be oriented in time and space. When space became constricted in a way that often felt unbearable and time ceased to behave according to the rules we’ve always tried to impose upon it, it often felt like we were living in a perpetual present of repetition, sameness, and a lurking terror that intruded into our dreamscapes.
We had a year of unlived experience ahead of us (although we didn’t know it). The day-to-day became impossible to mark. Even our rituals—holidays, birthdays—became unmoored from the traditions we attach to them and divorced from the people who help us celebrate them, making it harder to etch them into our consciousness.
In addition to the uncertainty—which, paradoxically, worsened even as we learned more about the virus—we were stalked by the constant fear of exposure, isolation, sickness, and death.
The clinical psychologist Denise Hien says, “Stress is a part of our human condition, but when stress threatens our ability to cope, or our basic sense of identity, we call that traumatic stress.” And over time, when everything we feel or think or experience gets exacerbated by the slow boil of that stress, it becomes undesirable and even impossible to stay in the moment.
Time moved differently. It collapsed upon itself; it expanded past the point of absurdity. It stopped. After a few weeks I realized that in many ways COVID time felt a lot like PTSD time. Sometimes you’re in it, bound by it. And then you’re not, set adrift. There are no guideposts to bring you back into the stream of linear time as we usually experience it.
Sometimes, as the days and nights ran together, they had the slippery, seductive familiarity of depression. Sometimes the thread of whatever story we told ourselves, trying to stay tethered to something solid, got lost. To get our bearings we tried to orient ourselves on a sliding scale of misfortune—to allow us to feel better or worse compared to others.
We were all exposed to trauma in varying degrees, but there was no uniformity to the ways we responded. Past was no prologue: introverts became desperate for company, extroverts developed social anxiety. Some of us became depressed or obsessive, while others developed PTSD. Some reacted with resilience. There was no way to know.
When the vaccine was announced and suddenly we were talking about months until we could be out in the world again, finally knowing when instead of living day to day with only the most amorphous sense of what might be in store, there was a sense of hope for the first time in a long time.
But traumatic time destroys in both directions—past and future—and the truth of that can be hard to face, especially for the unpracticed. Being yanked so suddenly back into time forced us to reckon with the fact that six months, no matter how you count it, is a very long time. We knew there was an end in sight, but how would we get there? And who would we be when we did?
* * *
The pull to forget is even stronger than the pull to run. Forgetting makes us complicit with the trauma we’re trying to escape, and by ignoring the experience of it and, more important, the way the experience made us feel, a part of us, in some cases the most vital part of who we are, remains tethered to the past. By cutting ourselves off from that emotion we shut down access to the full range of who we are. But the price of release is steep, and it’s so much easier to live our lives pretending we’re whole.
Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, quotes a Vietnam vet who said, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”
It’s remarkable how desperately we want to salvage that rectitude, as if the only way to give meaning to pain is to lie about it. It’s counterproductive, of course, but it isn’t just individuals who are motivated to forget. The desire to move on, especially after large-scale betrayals, is irresistible. As soon as the dust clears, the people in power tell us everything is fine; there is no need to look back. After all, what atrocities don’t we want to put behind us? What crimes against humanity would we like to dredge up?
There are as many reasons to forget as there are people on the planet—guilt, shame, agony, the desperate need to avoid pain or evade responsibility, or a personally tailored mix of those. But as seductive as it is, wiping out chapters in our history, individual or collective, leaves future generations vulnerable. We know this. Only remembering will heal us. Maybe it will even set us free.
* * *
The similarities between the Wilson and Trump administrations and the ways in which they handled the 1918 and the 2020 pandemics is uncanny. President Woodrow Wilson didn’t issue one public statement about influenza even as hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying. As World War I was winding down, he stubbornly refused to halt troop mobilizations, thereby allowing infections to spread both here and abroad. Both men, at least on the surface, had an obsession that kept them from being interested in the pandemic—for Wilson it was the war and for Donald it was the economy.
The Reckoning Page 14