Imagine you were to seek out a therapist, perhaps to help you work through some childhood and adolescent traumas that continued to impact your life as an adult.
You wish to get to the bottom of your current damage by exploring your past, hopeful that with proper guidance, you can learn from it — the good and the bad — and begin building a healthier present and more hopeful future.
Now imagine that upon sitting down on the couch, your therapist said that they looked forward to helping you, but unfortunately, they wouldn’t be able to examine anything from your past that might make you feel discomfort.
Or sadness. Or shame.
Even if their purpose is to help you navigate those feelings, and even if they have the professional tools to help you work through them — should they arise — they cannot.
Imagine your therapist were to tell you they look forward to helping you, but won’t be able to examine anything from your past that might make you feel discomfort…
And why? Because the state that licenses their profession has told them they cannot. Protecting your feelings takes priority over helping you face reality.
In such a scenario, one would assume that state officials had gone mad, or at the very least didn’t understand how therapy works and why it’s essential to confront the past, even when it’s ugly.
Conservatives sacrifice truth on the altar of comfort…
In some regards, this is what officials in dozens of states are doing with K-12 education — telling teachers they cannot honestly explore the nation’s past or the effects of that past on the present, at least the parts involving racism.
To do so, they insist, risks making white children feel discomfort, guilt, or shame for the actions of their ancestors, and so, this material cannot be explored.
Or if it is, it should be sanitized, scrubbed of clear judgments as to who was right and wrong and removed from any consideration of present-day racial inequities.
Returning to the therapy analogy, it would be like the state saying, “Sure, the therapist can talk about your past, but not about how that past might still be affecting you now because you really need to move on.”
In both cases, the purposes of therapy and history education are utterly erased — ignorance is elevated to a positive good while wisdom is sacrificed on the altar of comfort.
…and most white folks are okay with it
Sadly, most white Americans have never wanted to honestly confront the truth about racism in America.
In the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, most whites told pollsters that equal opportunity had already been achieved, and there was no need for protests, marches, or demonstrations.
History education largely ignored the struggles of Black folks against enslavement and segregation, presenting a patriotic “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” version of the nation rather than an honest appraisal of the country’s past and present.
While much has changed since then, the preference for an uncomplicated version of our history has never wavered for most white Americans.
This is why Texas only began teaching the truth about Confederate secession — that it was launched to preserve slavery and white supremacy — in 2019. Even though the state’s own secession documents made it clear that this, and only this, had motivated its departure from the union, students for over 150 years had been lied to.
They had been led to believe secession was about some abstract notion of state’s rights rather than a particular desire to own Black people.
Because to tell the truth might have made white students feel bad about where their ancestors had stood at that moment in history.
This preference for lies is why there are still dozens of streets in my hometown of Nashville named for Confederate generals, whose military prowess we are expected to separate from the cause for which they fought.
That we would be horrified to see Germany do the same for Rommel matters not one supposes.
That most whites would be more horrified by my analogizing the Confederacy to Nazi Germany than by the continued honoring of the former reveals all we need to know about white America’s aptitude for self-deception.
It’s why white folks are still shocked to learn of Thomas Jefferson’s enslavement of hundreds of Black persons, as Clint Smith notes in How the Word is Passed, and why they are often angered upon learning of it — but not at Jefferson.
Their anger is never directed at him or the teachers who hid the truth.
Instead, it is aimed squarely at those who offer a corrective, even when they are the docents at Monticello.
They came for the pretty tour, not the truth.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, these speak volumes
I’ve made this point before, using the same pictures I’m about to show you again because they viscerally demonstrate the different worlds in which white and Black Americans have long lived.
First is a picture of Hazel Bryan screaming at Elizabeth Eckford during the integration of Little Rock Central High.
The date: September 4, 1957.
And now for the second photo.
This is a promo pic for the much-beloved TV show Leave it to Beaver. It’s a program that represents a nostalgic image of family life for many white Americans and the ultimate example of a more “innocent time” in the nation’s history.
But here’s the thing.
Leave it to Beaver premiered on October 4, 1957: one month to the day after that photo from Little Rock was taken, amid ongoing backlash to desegregation there.
The America of that time was not innocent, no matter the syrupy sweet remembrances of it provided by shows like this in constant reruns on Nick at Nite.
Any nation that can produce such hagiographic representations of itself when others are being assailed and destroyed, as was happening to Black people all over America at the time, deserves to be exposed as the fraud it is.
And those who bought the lie — whose childhoods depended on it — deserve to have their memories assaulted with truth, to be confronted with reality no matter how difficult.
It’s called growing up.
White Americans have an understanding of this country which is, by and large, infantile. And we are held hostage by our ignorance. James Baldwin said it best:
We want release without recognition, pardon without pain, forgiveness without facing the truth of what this nation has done in our name. And to our relative benefit for centuries.
We want the America of the Cleaver family, but we fail to realize it never existed.
That image was pure Hollywood.
The reality was represented by that other picture from Little Rock.
And the problem wasn’t just the overt haters like Hazel Bryan and her fellow racist students there. It was the millions of whites who wouldn’t have screamed at children like that but did nothing to bring down segregation.
That was the vast majority of our parents and grandparents.
And that silence, that acquiescence, was far more evil than Hazel Bryan.
At least Hazel had the courage of her awful convictions. It is arguably worse to be the white person who accepted segregation quietly and compromised their humanity without even having the guts to own their sickness.
This country cannot much longer abide white denial and the perpetuation of the mythology that passes for American history. That mythology tethers us to systems of injustice and prevents us from becoming what we could be.
And it guarantees conflict and violence in years to come.
We must kill the lies we tell ourselves and bury them deep in the soil.
That’s what a therapist would tell us as individual patients stretched out on their couch. And it’s what is required of the nation as well.
How we remember ourselves and how we ended up in this place of conflict and acrimony — what forces brought us here — will determine how we understand our present condition.
And it will suggest the path we must take as we move into the future.
Or if we have a future at all.
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This post was previously published on Momentum.
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Hello Mr. Tim Wise Sir, Heard you on Tavis Smiley a few weeks back, just read Dispatches From The Race War, and thank you for a tremendous history book, that should become a mandatory classroom reading. I appreciate your gift of writing and communication, it is a honest reading of our faults, it is a powerful book and each page is a mirror reflecting back one’s image, conscience, reminding us of our racist views and our need to make changes. You opened my eyes to deeper understanding and appreciation, to see through the eyes of others. I find myself quite… Read more »