Wounds of the past
The United States has always seen itself as a young country; a place of fresh ideas. But recent events demonstrate that the past lies heavy on American life. Slavery ended in the 19th century, but its effects continue to depress the spirit of Americans, white and black.
It distorts the national mood, it infects many police officers with a lethal passion, it fills vast urban districts with a bitter hopelessness. Now it obsesses even Hollywood. This year, movie people are praying that the next Academy Awards will produce some winners, or at least some nominees, who can save the movie business from fresh charges of antiblack racism.
And it all depends on an unearned sense of entitlement that many white people can’t give up. They can accept civil rights laws, even elect a black president, but they can’t bring themselves to see blacks as individuals. The evidence suggests that they are happy to view blacks as a mass of mostly anonymous, but troublesome second- class citizens.
There’s more than a hint of how that attitude arose in the play Father Comes Home From the Wars. Written a couple of years ago by the gifted American writer, Susan-Lori Parks, its Canadian première recently took place in Toronto. It is set during the Civil War and includes a powerful speech by a slaveowner and Confederate colonel:
“I am grateful every day that God made me white. For me, no matter how much money I’ve got or don’t got, if my farm is failing or my horse is dead, if my woman is sour or my child has passed on, I can at least rest in the grace that God made me white.”
When he goes to war, he travels on a horse, while the slave he’s brought along walks behind. He talks to the slave, speculating what price he’ll get if he sells him. The God-given blessing of whiteness, packaged in the theology of church- going slave owners, must have nourished the arrogant superiority of many whites. It left them with an inbuilt sense of righteousness.
Racial purity, a concept much loved and protected by Southerners for generations, helped maintain the sharp difference between races. It’s been destroyed by a growing amount of genetic proof that masses of Americans have both European and African ancestors, but in the minds of many Americans, they still occupy separate categories.
A genetic test has demonstrated that even Jesmyn Ward, novelist and editor of The Fire This Time, a col- lection of essays and poems about the lives of AfricanAmericans, has ancestors who were, to her surprise, mostly white. Her skin, however, is black. She now calls herself multiracial. Nevertheless, as she says, “When people look at me they see a black person.” They don’t know how to see anything else.
Her book is an extension of James Baldwin’s famous The Fire Next Time, which appeared in 1963, a few years before American cities began literally to burn. It was Baldwin who said the people of Harlem regarded the New York police as the agents of an occupying power. Half a century later, in the flowering of the Black Lives Matter movement, that feeling has grown to include police in many other jurisdictions.
Ward dedicated her book, “To Trayvon Martin and the many other black men, women and children who have died and been denied justice for these last four hundred years.” Trayvon Martin i s now a martyr to every black American who resents and fears arbitrary white justice. He was the black 17- year- old from Miami Gardens, Fla., who was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer. Police did not charge Zimmerman because they accepted his claim of self- defence and Florida’s stand- your- ground law prohibited them from making an arrest. When he was eventually tried for second- degree murder, a jury acquitted him.
Belinda Becker, a Brooklyn woman quoted recently in a New York Times article, said whites can’t see blacks as unique persons. In the media, she asked, “Where do you see an independent black woman who is a DJ, a dancer who is raising her kid, who travels the world, who speaks French? Where do you see that?” In fact, the person she describes is herself, but she sees no such collection of attributes on public display. “We see this repetitive portrayal, just reinforcing these stereotypes of thugs, maids, whatever.”
In the fragmentary complaints that rise to the surface, it becomes clear that black Americans want above all to be seen, to be recognized for their unique selves, rather than as part of a social problem that needs to be solved. But that recognition, that acceptance as full citizens, remains sadly in the unknowable future.
TURNING THE RASCALS OUT DIDN’T PRODUCE BETTER RASCALS. — BLACK SLAVERY ENDED IN THE 19TH CENTURY, BUT ITS EFFECTS CONTINUE TO DEPRESS THE SPIRIT OF AMERICANS.