And then too, the effects on our health-collective and physical-cannot be denied. The unmourned dead, the unhealed injuries, the emotions stuffed. The funerals we do not acknowledge. Remember Emmitt Till's mother was advised to have a closed-casket funeral and keep things quiet? It was her courage to display her only child's beaten and battered body that was the catalyst to the modern Civil Rights movement. It was that admission, that honesty, that made otehr people brave enough to speak out.
True. Back during the heyday of the consciousness raising movement -- one ritual of early '70s feminism -- the poet Muriel Rukeyser asked:
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
That's what T&R processes count on. LM told the truth about his life, and many of us found our heads exploding. South Africans told the truth about their lives, and closed reality of apartheid disintegrated. There's nothing quite like truth, well and often told, to shift the axis everything else spins on.
But, for people like Emmett Till's mother, telling those truths requires massive amounts of courage. Especially when you're telling truths about people you've lived beside all your life -- TO people you've lived beside all your life. Standing in front of one of those crackers and saying, "See what you did to my son," or even, "Here's what your grandpa did to mine" is going to be an a explosive moment. And you have to be willing to deal with whatever shape the ensuing explosion takes.
You can hardly blame people for refusing to go there. But at least these days, there's an understood process, with an order and a structure and people who will see you through.
'What does reconciliation look like? For one thing, Ifill says, we need to commemorate these events. "This history has largely been erased," she notes. "There are markers for all kinds of things in small towns -- but never for these events. Reparation is about repairing the harm -- and one way to do that is to acknowledge in the public space that these things happened."'
The Germans -- at least the Berlin, if not the Vienna variety -- know this lesson well, and could teach us a bit:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/883...57601934070356/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/883...57601934070356/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/883...57601934070356/
--It's probably not a coincidence that the last lynchings in the US occurred in the 1950s --
...James Byrd, 1998....
I'm not as optimistic as Ms. Robinson is (by the way, thank you for that absolutely fantastic piece of writing---almost wrote "peace of writing"). A great impetus of South Africa's Reconciliation process was undoubtedly due to the fact that everyone realized they couldn't go on in the old way. Here, I'm afraid we've got enough idiots who think "yeah, you've got all that civil rights stuff now, but Just Wait Until We Get Back Into Power." There's far too many unrepentant bigots just dreaming of The Good Old Days and wondering how to bring it back again.
TZS, I think that may be why Ifill says this has to happen town by town. Getting the whole nation there will, as you note, require a catastrophe of epic proportions. (If Katrina didn't do it, we don't have much hope.)
But we can come to our epiphanies town by town, county by county, taking it in smaller bites. Some places are beyond ready now. Others won't be for a long time yet -- but the more the country changes around them, the more pressure they'll feel to do the work.
The thing we need to count on is that 0nce a community goes through this process, it's very hard to go back to the old ways. My own hometown, which is just a way up the road from the Manzanar Japanese internment camp, has undergone a huge revolution in attitudes in just the past decade. When I was coming up, it wasn't something you could even get people to talk about (unless they were drunk, and then even people who should have known better would vociferously defend it). In that same decade, it also stopped being a sundown town, which it had been since 1940.
We can -- and must -- do what we can do, and trust that the rest will come along in time.
I've seen a number of photographs of lynchings, but this particular one is the one that really sticks with me.
Look about 1/4 of the way from the left edge of the photo. There is a dark haired woman in a dark print sleeveless dress . Look at how she is leaning a little back into the man behind her and how her right arm is twisted backward and she almost, but not quite grabbing the hand of the man behind her.
Judging from her body language, she and the guy behind her are on a frigging date.
...It's obscene, stupid, and infuriating that -- fifty years after the last lynching in America -- this simple, ugly racist crap still works just as well to divide us as it did in the 1920s. As long as we don't get ourselves over this shit, the Man wins -- and keeps winning. And we won't have a hope in hell of taking back this country until it stops.-SR
"The Man"?!? "We"?1? "We" who Kemosabe?!? First, the missed boat on euro's in Africa - now this. "We" ain't never had "this country" to take back from those who run it, from the gitgo. The Reconstruction, you say? Don't even try it. The Civil Rights Era?? Uh, yeah - right.
The primary impetus for the truth and reconciliation movement in S. Africa was a simple one - numbers. White South Africans, being outnumbered by their Black, newly enfranchised and empowered (and itching for James Brown style PAYBACK with that special Fela flava'd sauce) counterparts had little choice in the matter. Get right or get wronged in return. White Amerikkans, on the other hand, have had the historical luxury of always being in the numerical majority. A mathematical and logistical buffer that has afforded them the ability to say "Kiss our collective white skin privileged asses" for the past 240+ years. It has allowed them to create a transformation resistant culture capable of dealing off the bottom of a marked sociocultural & socioeconomic deck, while at the same time, excoriating the victims of it's crooked cardplay with whining accusations of "playing the race card".
Muthafuckas puhleeze!! It's the only one you've given out while you've sat there picking your teeth with the corner of the joker and the four aces Snidely Whiplashed up your gartered sleeves.
"...Our ability to create a progressive American future depends, completely and utterly, on whether we can summon the will to confront the past -- to open up our overwhelming load of shared baggage, examine its wretched contents with honesty and courage, and then agree on ways of putting these things in their proper historic place -- always remembered but never perpetuated -- so we can all move forward together, shouldering a much lighter load."-SR
This country will begin moving "forward" when we shoulder a much lighter load of those who have a vested interest in keeping it from doing so. When its racial demographics change and White Amerikkans find themselves in the same quandry, facing the same demographically "cold equations" (see Godwin, Tom; scifi writer) that their white counterparts in South African face - then and only then will you see your hoped for "progressive American future". A major die off is all that is needed...
drbopperthp, I would like to agree with you about white Americans being forced to face up to this country's real history when the demographics of the populace change but I can't.
The right wingers are pretty effing stupid and show an amazing ability to ignore the reality before them which completely negates any idea of them owning up to anything.
What we are in for I think is more violence as the whites become just another minority.
If some whites can't feel secure when they run everything and have no real reason to be afraid what will happen when their numbers are reduced and those paranoid fantasies of being overwhelmed by the "mud people" is suddenly bolstered the numeric reality?
Personally, I'm thinking about taking shooting lessons.
We're not ready for it.
We, being America as a whole, and the thing we're NOT ready for, is a “truth and reconciliation” sit down. I'm not being pessimistic here, but rather, a pragmatist. You see, we as a nation are so wedded to the idea of “American Exceptiionalism”, and the view that we operate on such a higher level than our international peers in matters of race, that it blinds us.
What happened in South Africa was directly impacted by the demographic breakdown as Doc B. noted in his comment. The numbers were always gonna be so horribly skewed for a Black majority that at some point, the Whites were gonna have to come to the table and deal —if at least superficially— from the heart, and come clean. Black folks here constitute what—like 12% of the population, making it easier to NOT say I'm sorry because we're not in a position to bring the place to a standstill should we not be dealt with respectfully.
But back to that “blinding” I was talking about. In S. Africa, the nature of the terror was so clandestine, and so “shadow of the night” in its implementation, in a largely “third world” (as far as how the victims lived) society, that it took on an almost “mythic” nature. America's White population I think in many ways likes to keep the idea of that kind of naked terror as within the province of somewhere outside of us this place. You see, that picture at the top of this post speaks volumes. Those bystanders are someone's dad, grandpa, uncle, mom, and auntie. Other pictures of that nature show people lolling about grinning as if at the State-fucking-Fair.
Arakasi notes the snuggling couple—petting as a man hangs tortured in a tree. Those are AMERICANS. Crop that picture just to show the couple, photoshop a different background on into it, and go to that town and ask “Hey, who is this couple?”, and in an hour you'd have a line on 'em. This country PROUDLY did this shit, as noted, often in the town square or on a judge's lawn. The brazenness of the extra-judicial act was a nature of the sense of privilege shown by racist, White Americans in America.
No one wants to confront that gleeful, open expression of bigotry at its deadliest. Because it would put us right there with those other countries we love to fucking mock for their civil rights abuses. That's why the power structure so often goes to the “Let's get past it” school of “dealing with it by not dealing with it”. Those proto-soccer moms in '74 yelling “N*gger, go home”, and throwing rocks at buses in Boston—that shit is DOCUMENTED. And people aren't ready just yet to own up to mom and dad in that lynching pic, or Aunt Pat screaming in the footage from Beantown. They want it to go away—because addressing those previous misdeeds —misdeeds not in the super-distant past—by people that they loved, to a certain degree casts aspersions on them for caring about someone who could be so evil.
It's human nature writ large.
The default, self-defense, denial mode has a while to go yet. Quite a while, in fact.
I remember killing time in Memphis one weekend about 10 years ago, goofing 'round at Graceland, making my pilgrimage to the abandoned lot that was wherer Stax Records stood on West McLemore—and then...I went to the National Civil Rights museum which incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was killed. I wandered through the displays, feeling the hair go up on my neck. There was an actual lunch counter from a diner where you saw sit-in folks viciously beaten down the old newsreels.
There was a “Freedom Riders” bus—with it's back end—burnt and blown out like an exploding cigar from being bombed by racists in the mid-60's.
And most disturbingly, was a yellowed Ku Klux Klan robe and hat displayed under glass on a wall. I remember getting a tension headache that spread from the base of my neck, and into the base of my skull from my muscles binding up while looking at it. My forearms hurt from clenching my fists. And then, at my left was a little White girl—about 8 or 9 years old, looking up at the evil, patina-ed hate-frock. I wondered who she was with, and then her dad appeared, a sandy-haired fella in a plaid shirt.
And she plaintively asked him, looking up at the robe as he neared her left shoulder “What is that daddy?”
I didn't hear him go “Uh..uh...”,
I could feel it. Almost with him. That question from his daughter linked us invisibly, five feet apart. The air caught in his throat, and I could feel it catch as the answers swirled in his head, formed en masse, rushed to his throat and log-jammed there. From the corner of my eye, I could see him blinking—trying to sift through the pile of answers—none of 'em that wouldn't lead down a path of a day's worth of questions about race that in spite of his good intentions in being there at that museum, he was not ready to answer. I walked away—figuring if I gave him some space and wasn't there as a living check and balance to his answer, he'd find enough gumption to say what had to be said. I ran into him later in the gift shop, His wife had his daughter off to the side, and he actually said to me “That was uncomfortable.”
“I'm sure it was.”, I replied.
“I mean...what do you say to a kid about that?”, he wondered aloud.
“S'gotta be the truth. There's a way to say it to a kid.”
“How?” he almost pleaded.
“That's for you to figure out. It;s not just about her. it's about you, too.
He turned and walked away muttering under his breath, “Ah...mygodmygodmygodmygodmygod...” as he trailed off.
The hard work of dealing with what his daughter asked him, he was NOT up to. In spite of his trying to at least start the process by going to the museum, the hard work of telling the truth was still too much for him to deal with. Make of that what you will.
Went to the NY Historical Society's exhibition of lynching photos and postcards (yes...postcards that folks would collect and swap—boasting a pic of the generally roasted, defiled victim with a crowd looking on, grinning ) not long after that. It was the largest gathering if such “curios” for viewing. The line for the exhibit went around the block that winter's morning—the last day of it. There were White folks, Latinos, Asians, and mostly Black people in the throng to see what was. When we got in, you could hear the gasps and ‘Oh my's” from folks. Not from the Black folks who were mostly silent, or if they did speak said “I've seen that one before.” when they passed certain photos. An asian woman passed out in a dead faint, after looking at a blood-stained pant leg of a victim's overalls. She came to after someone rubbed her neck with ice, muttering “Why? Why? Why?”
But, the guest who struck me most was a well-to-do White woman who seemed to be shadowing me from picture to picture, display case to display case. And I heard her say under her breath to her fellow doyenne, with a hiss, ‘Oh, we'll never get past all this as long as people want to remind everybody about how bad it was. Don't they know how this makes us feel?”
“...how this makes US feel.”
I just depressed myself thinking about that...harpy. Goddamn.
Almost all of the old men I knew in Germany growing up fought the Russians. It seems no Germans at all fought Americans.
Not to add much to the conversation, but I (again) highly recommend books by James Loewen, particularly Sundown Towns and Lies Across America. Particularly in Lies, Loewen talks about both the need and the ability to "talk back to the landscape" and correct and expand the stories told, obfuscated, or ignored at the local historical marker.
Again, thanks for sharing your stories Sara and Lower Manhattanite.
Loewen spoke at the same conference where I saw Ifill -- right before her, in fact, in the same room.
We've invoked him often enough at Orcinus that he probably qualifies for local sainthood there now.
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