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April 20 - May 5, 2021
Silence allows you to see differently.
What do you do when you have lost faith in the place you call home?
The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy—to embrace cruel and hateful policies—exposes the idea of America as an outright lie.
Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.
In the after times, hope is not yet lost, even if the call to reimagine the country has been answered with violence. So the after times also represent an opportunity for a new America—a chance to grasp a new way of being in the world—amid the darkness of the hour.
What might an honest reckoning with the country look like now? How do we muster the courage to keep fighting in the face of abject moral failure? To not abdicate our responsibility to fight for our children and for democracy itself?
Throughout this country’s history, from the Revolutionary period to Reconstruction to the black freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century, the United States has faced moments of crisis in which the country might emerge otherwise, moments when the idea of white America itself could finally be put aside. In each instance the country chose to remain exactly what it was: a racist nation that claimed to be democratic.
“Backlash” mistakenly views demands for fundamental dignity as demands for privileges, and, worse, suggests that creeping incrementalism is a legitimate pace of change when it comes to remedying the devastation of black lives.
To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.
Who knows how many black people line the bottom of the Mississippi River simply because they wanted to exercise their right to vote.
life. Typically, the whole of the discussion of black Americans always began—and begins—with a deficit, with the idea that there is something not present that needs remedying.
This is the real American dilemma: acknowledging the moral effects of a way of life emptied of genuine meaning because of a lie that denies the things we have done.
This legacy of trauma is an inheritance of sorts, an inheritance of sin that undergirds much of what we do in this country. It has never been America’s way to confront the trauma directly, largely because the lie does not allow for it. At nearly every turn, the country minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through
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We find security and safety in fantasies of how we are always, no matter what we do and what carnage we leave behind, on the road to a more perfect union.
The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian.
We are told every day not to believe what we see happening all around us or what we feel in the marrow of our bones.
Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.
the moral burden of America’s racial nightmare rested not with the black people rioting in the streets but with those white people who insisted on holding so tightly to the belief that they were somehow, because of the color of their skin, better than others who were not white.
How, what, and who we celebrate reflects what and who we value, and how we celebrate our past reflects ultimately who we take ourselves to be today.
Interpretation matters: What we do with the facts, the kinds of questions we ask about them, and for what ends, matter.
Faith in the capacity of the country to change by way of nonviolent appeal had been irreparably shaken.
White liberals weren’t loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content.
White people have to accept their history and their actual circumstances and they won’t. Not without a miracle they won’t.
Hatred, in the end, corrodes the soul.
Only love can fortify us against hatred’s temptations.
But, all too often, that compromise arrests substantive change, and black people end up having to bear the burden of that compromise while white people get to go on with their lives.
American history is replete with examples of attempts to convince those who reject substantive change in the country and what happens as a consequence.
In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe.
The value of a human being is never indicated by the color of his skin; the value of a human being is all that I hold sacred; and I know that I do not become better by making another worse. One need not read the New Testament to discover that. One need only read history and look at the world—one need only, in fact, look into one’s own mirror.
Elsewhere is that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe, to refuse adjustment and accommodation to the demands of society, and to live apart, if just for a time, from the deadly assumptions that threaten to smother. Living elsewhere can offer you a moment of rest, to catch your breath and ready yourself to enter the fray once again, not so much whole and healed, but battle-scarred and prepared for yet another round.
Self-creation was a dangerous and radical act for an American, so fixed from birth in this country by the American fantasy of the unfettered individual, who was white, decidedly male, and heterosexual.
The storms keep coming, and we are expected to keep moving and to endure no matter what.
The future isn’t set, but we can say, based on our current condition, that the future will damn sure be hard.
We have to muster the moral strength to reimagine America.
In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together.
We have to work on ourselves, if we are to live up to the kind of world we want to create.
In the end, finding space at the margins of the society helps us see this country more clearly. What might it mean to stand with those who are demanding real change in the country?
Our sincere commitments to democracy have always been shadowed by the lie evident in our practices.
What is happening today isn’t unprecedented; it’s just uniquely of our times.
Beginning again or doing one’s first works over involves concrete efforts and stories to bring into reality a new America.
Now we find ourselves facing a moral reckoning of the same magnitude. We should have learned the lesson by now that changing laws or putting our faith in politicians to do the right thing are not enough. We have to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this belief that white people matter more than others, or we’re doomed to repeat the cycles of our ugly history over and over again.
Instead, we should set out to imagine the country in the full light of its diversity and with an honest recognition of our sins.
A new story doesn’t mean that we discard all of the elements of the old story, nor does it mean that we dwell only on our sins.
Ours should be a story that begins with those who sought to make real the promise of this democracy.
Our built environment should reflect the brilliant diversity of the people that make up this country.
We have to build a different America.
They broke free from the world as it was, because they imagined the world as it could be.
We should all remember that we are at once miracles and disasters.
