But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the 1918 pandemic is the silence that followed. In some ways it’s as if it never happened. The only account in literature I could find is a short story by Katherine Anne Porter. Perhaps the tragedy got swallowed up by the crisis of the world war before and the catastrophe of the Depression after. Or perhaps the totality of the loss, 725,000 dead, more than we’ve lost today, and a much larger percentage of the population, made it impossible to process.
In contrast, there was a very clear narrative about World War II. Unfortunately, it was completely divorced from reality. Returning soldiers were valorized, the war itself cast as a triumph of good over evil, as if, at the end of the conflict, everything was just fine. Nobody talked about the broken marriages or the psych wards full of veterans suffering from serious mental disorders. The public’s unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of the war or listen to the stories of what our soldiers had actually been through made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to tell those stories. Their silence made room for reinvention, and their trauma got buried. But it never went away.
That kind of neglect or cultural interdiction against speaking about one’s traumatic experiences itself causes trauma. The effects don’t remain isolated—trauma is impossible to compartmentalize—but they can further trap the person, or group of people, suffering in an inescapable loop of dissociation, self-loathing, and sense of futility.
Trauma is compounded when it occurs over time, during wars or pandemics, and when it undermines or obliterates one’s sense of agency. When the traumatizing circumstances are made gratuitously worse by the people who (1) are responsible for them and (2) could have done something to mitigate them, the resulting sense of betrayal can feel similar to torture. Symbolically, at least, the experience is akin to being in the presence of another human being who, though witnessing the extremity of your situation, even though it could result in your death and despite having the power to render you assistance, refuses. When your life is endangered by the person who could save you, the sense of betrayal can be unbearable.
One of the worst things that was done to us during the year of COVID was the purposeful attempt to divide us and further isolate us from one another. One of the very few mitigating factors of mass trauma is the sense that we are all in it together. In times of war, for example, suicide rates go down because there is a sense of common purpose. Members of the Trump administration made that impossible not because they were incompetent but because they thought it was a winning strategy. Promoting divisiveness among us suited their purposes, just as setting up a false dichotomy between the pandemic and the economy did. In real time it could be hard to gauge how cynical and cruel this ploy was, but in retrospect the extent of the deliberate sabotage is breathtaking. It’s hard to grapple with what was taken from us and even harder to fathom the depth of depravity required to do the taking.
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As Elaine Scarry wrote in The Body in Pain, “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” But despite the attempts to divide us, we are all witnesses to each other’s suffering. Even in isolation we have the certainty of our shared experiences.
While we can embrace that, we also have to make room for the probability that we’re all going to emerge from this experience altered, with post-COVID bodies and post-COVID attitudes. We’ll be self-conscious in a way we may not otherwise have been, anxious or depressed because people are going to see us as we are now, not as we were a year ago, or two years ago. Whether or not this is a bad thing depends to a large extent on how willing we are to accept the new version of ourselves, how sincerely we accept the changes, and how kind we can be to this stranger who is now us.
There will be times when we are unrecognizable to ourselves, particularly in the company of people whose relationships used to help define us. Everyday occurrences that we never had to think about—hugging a friend we haven’t seen in a long time, going to a restaurant, being in a crowd—will require thought, a working out of logistics, risk-versus-reward assessments. Spontaneity will be on hold for a while.
But if we want to heal, it’s important to resist calls to look to the future, not the past. The past is what shaped us. Trauma is enervating and it is entirely natural to want to move beyond it. But trauma changes us at the cellular level. We carry it with us in our bodies, and there is no moving on without facing what we want to run from, because to dismiss your own pain is to postpone your freedom from it.
As a country, we have to resist the urge to move on just as defiantly. If nothing else, a crisis of this magnitude and scope forces us to assess the structural failures that left us so vulnerable. Despite the fact that mental health care professionals have been fighting for years to destigmatize their field, we still tend to treat mental illness as an afterthought or a moral failing and mental health as a luxury. The impact of COVID on our nation’s psychological and emotional well-being underscores how dangerous it is to keep making that mistake.
The impact of unacknowledged trauma can be catastrophic—at both the personal and the societal levels—and by failing to invest in the infrastructure necessary to prevent or at least mitigate these kinds of disasters in the future, we leave ourselves open to long-term damage that could be irreparable.
* * *
One of the most striking developments of the last five years has been the trend toward cruelty, the cultivation of a callousness toward anybody who believes differently or thinks differently. The mantra of “Fuck your feelings” at Donald’s rallies reverberated and reminded us that, even though it goes underground from time to time, the impulse toward cruelty never completely goes away. It’s hard to understand why someone would choose to withhold kindness even in moments of extreme suffering, and it continues to rankle that our need for comfort and reassurance during the last year was met not just with indifference but with contempt, as if our concerns for ourselves and each other were just another indication of how weak and unworthy we are, as if kindness can be split off from the human experience without diminishing us irrevocably. Who would want that for their children? And why would anybody choose that for themselves? Being kind doesn’t make you weak. Receiving kindness doesn’t render us incapable—it fortifies us.
Belittling or failing to acknowledge the importance of kindness is sociopathic. It is a by-product of the myth of rugged individualism that continues to have a place in the American psyche because it appeals to those who see benefit in convincing other people (and themselves) that they are self-made. It provides cover for those who don’t have any impulse toward helping people because there is no profit in it. The fact that “individualism” in this context is a myth hasn’t prevented it from exerting an outsize influence in our culture. Many of the responses to COVID—from refusing to wear a mask to entering state capitols with semiautomatic weapons—were a rejection of the idea that as citizens we don’t just have rights; we have responsibilities.
A society without kindness is no more tenable than a relationship without it. For four years the performative cruelty of the Trump administration and its message that we need to be tough and vindictive and punitive wore away at the fabric of our society. We were pitted against one another and forced to choose sides.
President Biden has a rare opportunity to make some real progress toward creating structural change that addresses our blind spots on issues of psychological well-being. At the same time, by demonstrating on a grand scale how effective government can be at helping people, by demonstrating empathy, he can go a long way toward undoing the damage done by his predecessor. We can, maybe for the first time, ask ourselves: What, after all, do we owe each other?
* * *
“Liberal democracy,” the behavioral economist Karen Stenner writes, “has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it.” Any path we take as we move on from COVID and the four years of the Trump administration needs to take that into consideration. One election isn’t going to
do the trick. The consensus seemed to be that the 2020 election was the most consequential in our lifetime, but, depending how the electorate trends in the next two years, it’s possible that the election of 2022 or 2024 will be. The Biden administration’s early commitment to restoring the safety net gives us an opening to tackle in even more direct ways the inequalities that have been built into our system since the beginning. We squander this chance at our peril.
One problem, though, is that the pendulum has always swung further to the right than to the left. Usually when a Democratic president comes in after a disastrous Republican administration, which has further eroded people’s rights and destroyed the economy, the best we get is a swing back to the middle. Now we are again at the point where demanding equal rights for all our citizens is considered a liberal position. If that’s the case, then that is precisely the position at which I hope the pendulum remains permanently stuck.
Fundamental change is required. Not a restructuring, but a reimagining of American potential. In the last eighteen months we have had experiences that should have given us at least some real-life, day-to-day insight into how important it is for us to be connected. By the same token, we’ve experienced what many Americans have been living with all their lives: what it’s like to live in fear—of a government that betrays you, of neighbors who don’t look out for you, of simply being out in the world.
The pandemic revealed the impact of decades’ worth of inequality and racism in the immense toll it’s taken on communities of color. The government’s response to COVID revealed something even darker—that it was willing to exploit those inequalities in order to score political points with the Republican base.
Slavery was not our fault, we say. But whether consciously or not, we have all benefited from it in a million ways, large and largely unseen. The original sin may not be our fault, but it remains our burden. White Americans need to interrogate our assumptions about race but also examine our failures to root out white supremacy. The longer we go without recognizing that fact, the more it becomes our responsibility.
* * *
A major concern after the Civil War was that freedmen and freedwomen would become dependent on government assistance. When during Reconstruction Blacks showed that they could succeed without it, every imaginable obstacle—from denying them loans and credit and job opportunities to threats of violence and actual terrorism—was put up between them and prosperity. And yet the conclusion drawn by many politicians and newspapers in the North was that after twelve years the experiment had failed and Blacks had proven themselves unworthy of freedom. Blacks were told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps after their boots had been stolen from them.
This country was built on land stolen from its rightful owners, the native populations. This country was built on the backs and with the blood of millions of Black men and women from whom prosperity, health, and opportunity were and continue to be withheld.
Yet, like a patient with post-traumatic stress disorder who can’t—or won’t—face the truth of the original trauma that continues to debilitate her, this country has failed to grapple with the pain of its early history. We are, as a nation, perpetually divided and angry, rendered a shadow of what we might have been, what we may still be, because the vast majority of us can’t face the truth of the origins of our privilege and the legacy of cruelty that continues to benefit us—or because we are never asked to.
Working-class whites are victims of the system, too. They have been tricked into voting against their own self-interest by a ruling class that has convinced them that allegiance to their whiteness is more valuable than health care or any other social programs that would lift them up. Superiority over Blacks, they have been told, just as the white laborers in the colonies were told, is more important than financial gain. Joining forces with the wealthy and powerful would be more beneficial symbolically, if not materially, than joining forces with the Black working class. Of course, none of that is true, but it’s a compelling narrative, so much easier than facing the truth of your having been used and lied to.
If you are white in America and feel you’ve been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it’s not because of Black people and immigrants. It’s because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are—disempowered, angry, and fearful.
As the four years of the Trump administration and the first hundred days of the Biden administration demonstrated, leadership matters. Even when things are going well, however, there will be missteps.
At the end of April 2021, two Republican politicians weighed in on race in America. Tate Reeves, the governor of Mississippi, claimed there is no systemic racism in his state. (Not long before this he had declared April to be Confederate Heritage Month, as governors of that state have done for decades.) Mississippi, however, could well have had a Democratic governor and maybe even a Democratic senator if it weren’t for the state’s refusal to restore voting rights to former felons and its entrenched problems with voter suppression. After all, Mississippi elected the first two Black senators in this country back in the late nineteenth century. The power is there, but it’s been systematically thwarted for two centuries.
Then Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina—and the only Black Republican senator—said in his rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s first address to Congress that America is not a racist country.
In response to Scott, Vice President Kamala Harris also said that America is not a racist country, adding that we must “speak truth” about its history with racism. President Biden made much the same point. I would suggest that, despite the voices of civil rights activists, scholars, voters, and writers raised in opposition to oppression since the founding, it is our country’s centuries-long failure not only to speak that truth but to confront it that has kept this country racist.
It’s vital that we address the past, but language matters, and saying we’re not racist sends the wrong message. It is the political equivalent of blaming police violence on a “few bad apples.”
If we’re told that we need to “speak truth” only about the past, it implies we can be complacent about the present. When our leaders tell us that America is not a racist country, whether the motive is malicious or well intentioned, the wrong people are emboldened and the rest of us are demoralized. Making that claim puts a wrench in the wheels of progress, to the extent they were even turning. It gives the side that is comfortable with the status quo permission not to do the very hard work of self-reflection, while the rest of us wonder what the hell it will take to gain enough momentum for real change to happen. If we can acknowledge there is systemic racism, then by what logic can we posit that the country governed by that system is somehow free of its racism? And if America isn’t a racist country, then what does that word even mean?
This isn’t a denunciation, merely an observation of fact. For our leaders to avoid being blunt about this is to miss an opportunity finally to engage with the issue nationally. To avoid the topic is to allow injustices to continue.
It’s not surprising when authoritarians try to divide us against ourselves in order to accrue more power. That’s what authoritarians do. It’s dispiriting, though, when our leaders who purport to want to heal our country miss the opportunity to unite us. Choosing the easy path shuts down conversation, requires no sacrifices, effects no change, and in the end keeps in place the system that privileges some of us and shuts everybody else out—that’s what happens when you cling to the notion that America is not a racist country.
* * *
It is almost impossible to grow up white in America and not be racist. We live in a society where white is the default. In media, white is the default. We watch news programs that disproportionately cover Black crime. We live in communities where Black people are criminalized and comprise a disproportionately high percentage of the prison population, not bec
ause they are worse than, or more violent than, or have tendencies to be more criminal than white people, but because they are arrested more. They are accused more. They are convicted more. They are sentenced more harshly.
We are a rich country in which there are ghettoes and food deserts. We use property taxes to fund public schools so children of the rich get more and children of the poor and working class get less. We have entire cities without clean water, and an entire class of people we refer to unironically as the “working poor.”
Nobody should live in a slum or a ghetto. Nobody should go to a school that has chipping paint and broken plumbing, or that serves rotten food; nobody should have his or her entire future destroyed because of committing a misdemeanor. It shouldn’t cost more to eat healthy food than it does to eat fast food. Yet all of these things are true because the system has been rigged since the beginning against the very people who created our wealth.
* * *
The force of white supremacy was so great that it launched America on a trajectory it often seems incapable of deviating from. The only way to combat inertia is with force. Paying out reparations will show the world, and the people from whom so much has been taken, that America is capable of basic human decency on a grand scale and is committed to fulfilling its potential as a democracy. Every society asks itself the questions, Who counts? Who doesn’t? For four centuries the calculus used to answer these questions has changed, but the answers rarely have.
The United States engages in its own form of toxic positivity—a series of deep denials that perpetuates our two-tiered system, maintains double standards, and keeps our wounds from healing. This recurring urge to move on, this impatience with doing the hard work of atonement, of accountability, of tearing down the structures of oppression and rebuilding new ones that work for everybody, traps us in the same cycle of privilege and denial of privilege that keeps us separate, hostile, and suspicious.
The Reckoning Page 15