The
first slave ship arrived on what would become US soil before the
pilgrims made it to Plymouth, MA. By the time the country fought a civil
war over the systematic imprisionment, torture, and rape of human
beings, it had been established as an honored tradition for nearly 250
years. The country spent the next 100 years practicing our own version
of apartheid, inflicting a legal form of violence and oppression on the
millions of descendants of the slaves we had once imprisioned, tortured,
and raped.
The events
in Charlottesville are the fruit of this long history and, critically,
our failure to deal with our national shame over our past. Let's
acknowledge that is shame, too. We all know this history, and white
Americans feel a powerful sense of implication. Whether our families
were Mississippi plantation owners in 1785 or arrived here from Belgium
in 1985, the color of our skin indicts us as surely as the color of skin
once indicted black Americans who lived under slavery or Jim Crow. It
is our legacy, and one that will never wash off.
This
doesn't make us unique or special. Dark legacies are a part of being a
human. No country is without its history of horrors, but some own up to
them more healthily. In the US, white Americans are unable to even
discuss it honestly without deflecting. Some things are just too painful
to acknowledge. Imprisonment, torture, and rape are just too much for
most of us. Instead, some of us prefer not to think about it (if we
still have that luxury), or we shift blame, refusing to accept the
national responsibility we all bear.
The
most damaged transmute that shame into pride. It is such an
overwhelming darkness, so woven into identity, culture, and history,
that to accept its substance is to risk annihilation. It's why, for
centuries, those who were closest to these unspeakable acts were the
quickest to invoke personal destruction, to cite their own grievances,
to play victim. They--we--are victims of this horror. Accepting
responsibility means accepting an identity shot through with
monstrousness.
Shame
is so powerful it can turn the mind inside out, and leave the worst
perpetrators feeling like the greatest victims. Shame turns to a hard,
mean instinct to shut out anything that invokes the original crimes.
People hunker in defensive crouches, coagulate with others willing to
work as hard as they to shut out this history that is too painful to
look at. And in that small, cramped hole of victimhood and fear, people
lose sight of the humanity of those around them. Anyone unwilling to
repeat the soothing myths becomes a foe--and those once oppressed become
an intolerable symbol of that awful shame. How else could a man work up
the hate to drive into a crowd of people of gun down a church full of
parishioners?
We
can't easily extract a better history from the actual one and hope to
start over. Our "greatest" founding fathers were slave owners, and we
wrote this atrocity into our Constitution. It shaped the way we designed
our republic, and in failing to confront slavery in 1776, we ensured
we'd inherit its legacy in vivid moments like 1861, 1881, 1954, and
yesterday.
There's
nothing controversial in our history as a matter of fact; everything
about it is well and extensively documented. But its meaning--the stain
that can't be washed from our national soul--is the battleground that
defines us a country. It is often cast as a problem of "race," but that
misses the mark. It's a problem of shame and how to address it. All
Americans own this history, it's part of us all. But for those of us who
can't accept or acknowledge its true meaning--that we did in fact
commit these horrors, that that *is* who we are--the pathologies of our
shame will continue to play out like this over and over and over again.
Things
will not improve soon, but if anything in this disgraceful episode
holds the shafts of hope, it's this: the reason Charlottesville was
ground zero for a white supremacist rally was because the city had
finally decided to confront our awful past. We are a long way from full,
real acceptance of our history, but we are slowly taking baby steps to
at least consider it. I hope.
PHOTO: CNN
