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July 27 - July 30, 2021
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.
We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices. But today we confront the ugliness of who we are—our darker angels reign.
The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles.
The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that “all men are created equal” was a lie, at least in practice.
changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will never be sufficient to produce a healthier society.
The point wasn’t to declare ourselves color blind. We would have to fight it out in order to finally rid ourselves of the assumptions about who was valued more than others. That may have to involve black people celebrating their blackness, because it shatters their interior agreement with the lie. In this sense, one can only transcend color by passing through it, and uprooting the lie along the way:
The scars on our backs and the white-knuckled grip of the lash that put them there remain in dim outline across generations and in the way we cautiously or not so cautiously move around one another.
This legacy of trauma is an inheritance of sorts, an inheritance of sin that undergirds much of what we do in this country.
The controversy over the Confederate statues reflects this complex relationship between history and memory, between what actually happened and the kinds of stories we tell about what happened and for what purpose.
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.
Being free to reject the stories, for Baldwin, is the precondition to becoming open to accepting them on one’s own terms.
The storms keep coming, and we are expected to keep moving and to endure no matter what.
To live and move about the world without questioning how the world has shaped and is shaping you is, in a way, to betray the gift of life itself,
Trump cannot be cordoned off into a corner with evil, racist demagogues. We make him wholly bad in order to protect our innocence. He is made to bear the burdens of all our sins, when he is in fact a clear reflection of who we actually are.
the places we live are often, though not always, landscapes layered with the violence of generations. It is in the soil that nurtures us even when we can’t see it on the surface.
