Photo by British Library on Unsplash
Americans don’t equate the Jewish Holocaust of World War II with the events of 1776-1865 in the United States that led to the civil rights movement: namely, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which resulted in the deaths of millions of Africans, and their American children, via untreated illness, exhaustion from overwork, starvation, grievous bodily harm, whipping, torture, medical experimentation, hanging, lynching, being torn apart by dogs, and grief. Grief from having their babies and children torn from their arms and sold, never to be seen again. Grief from watching their wives and daughters raped, their sons beaten. Grief from the loss of homeland, culture, and family back on the continent of Africa, which even now is referred to in the West as one homogenous place, not a continent of thousands, perhaps millions of peoples in various incarnations and of various beliefs and practices. Grief from the loss of freedom, of coming and going on their own volition, of resting when they were tired and working for their own wages, property and future.
In a recent email conversation, a conservative friend said to me, in essence, “Don’t come at me with emotions; give me facts.” But we have emotions about facts. We like certain facts; we don’t like others. We are unable to separate emotions from facts, and sometimes, at least, we shouldn’t. We should have emotions, and strong ones, about what happened on our soil, with our country’s consent. We should have strong emotions about this part of our history; it is inseparable from all the things we seem to have no trouble feeling proud of, but we deny it because we don’t like those facts.
Feel it. Feel the American Holocaust. Feel the war that was fought to defend the actions of American Nazis, some of whom founded our country, some of whom ruled it, some of whom are still venerated to this day. Feel the similarity in your horror at the deaths of six million Jews murdered, gassed, shot, starved, experimented on, and seventeen million enslaved Africans, the official UN estimate, though a conservative one by many reckonings. Feel the 12.5 million people shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, chained side by side, urinating and defecating and vomiting on each other, unable to move, sickening with fever, so that almost two million of them died before they reached land. Feel their despair when the survivors learned what awaited them on the shore of the “New World.”
When a person is wrongfully imprisoned and finally freed, they are granted compensation by the courts for the lost years of life. What happened when the enslaved Africans were legally granted their freedom? They were subjected to over 100 years of legal segregation, unequal opportunities for housing, education and financial stability, murder by lynching and other means without accountability, accusation without a trial, fair or otherwise, hate speech, and abuse of all kinds without recourse. They were prevented from building wealth, and when they managed to do so anyway, wealth was stolen from them or destroyed.
I've also had well-meaning white people say to me with regard to reparations, "I'm willing to apologize, but I can only apologize so much." My response to that is that they're right — apologizing is appropriate, but then it must be followed by action. Most of the people in this country who have been harmed by the legacy of enslavement and by past and present racism want far more than an apology. They want change.
Reparations does not have to mean money from the government—in fact, it should mean much more than that. Reparations can be individual money thoughtfully spent with Black businesses. It can be individual donations to support struggling Black families. It can and should be championing legal and cultural change instead of standing stubbornly in front of it insisting that we need to get back to "the good old days."
The good old days never existed. They are a convenient fiction—convenient only for the person who remembers things a certain way that never really existed. The Wall Street Journal has identified that longing for the good old days goes back to "the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, 5,000 years ago." According to the psychologists they consulted in their article, "collective nostalgia...can also be a source of communal strength in difficult times" ("Why We Can't Stop Longing for the Good Old Days" by Johan Norberg).
But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing collective nostalgia bitterly dividing our country in two, with the nostalgics stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that change is needed, that things weren't always so great for multiple groups of people (women, indigenous people, and Black people) due to conscious oppression, and that things still aren't great for a lot of people due to greed and corruption; racial bias in policing, job hiring, and other areas; harmful misinformation like the myth of the absent black father; and an economic and cultural system that was based on the enslavement of one race of people. And I'm not even going to get into the criminal justice and prison system in this article.
The Washington Post makes an undeniable point in discussing the absent black father myth, which was even perpetuated by former president Barack Obama: "Responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression. For black children, the presence of fathers would not alter racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures or the poisoning of their water. By focusing on the supposed absence of black fathers, we allow ourselves to pretend this oppression is not real, while also further scapegoating black men for America’s societal ills."
Vox also speaks to how deeply even unconscious racial bias in hiring practices has impacted Black outcomes: "Since the height of the crack cocaine epidemic and all of the racism associated with it in the 1980s, anti-black discrimination in hiring does not appear to have changed. That may help explain why, for example, unemployment gaps between black and white Americans have also barely changed over time, and why racial wealth and income gaps are still so bad." (A 2010 study, "The Visible Hand," identifies yet another cause, racial bias affecting outcomes of online sales, indicating that the systemic causes of Black income inequality are wide and varied.)
Thus with a little digging it's easy to see that what appear on the surface to be "problems" with a race of people are instead problems with the society that treats them differently for the worse. This is the meaning of systemic racism, which so many Americans dismiss because of confirmation bias and incorrect assumption that correlation implies causation.
None of this has to mean America is evil as a country. But we are evil if we deny the violent immorality in our history and the ways it has undeniably shaped the present, and our responsibility to actively discontinue that. You don't have to hate the United States, but you do have to work for change, or you are inherently part of the problem you are denying.
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