until we are all free...
A note on this post: the content of my thoughts in this post comes in response to the wisdom of the people of color in my life (a group that includes people I’ve never met, but whose work in writing their experiences and perspectives has broadened my notion of everything). Nothing I’m saying here hasn’t been expressed by others. I am indebted to their contributions, as I would not see the water we swim in as clearly without their help. This is merely a space for me distill some of my own thoughts on the matter. I hope they challenge you as they do me.
As a parent, some of my most difficult conversations revolve around trying to help my daughter find her place in this world. Case in point: our recent discussion about how the Constitution was not written with her in mind at all.
My daughter is a young black woman, which is a precarious position in our society. As she becomes more aware of the history of her adopted country, she has to come to terms with something I never will. At the inception of America, in its most prized and lauded documents, she was invisible.
Because she is black, she was not afforded full personhood. Because she is a woman, she was even further erased. This is the reality of our nation’s origin story.
Unfortunately, that reality is not merely an artifact of the past. In many ways, my daughter, radiant as she is, must still fight to be visible like most women of color. And that fight, as she is learning from the cycle of violence that plays in our nation on repeat, is not merely rhetorical.
To live in America is to live in a tension between the idealized and never achieving that ideal. It always has been. For some, that tension is intellectual, a form of disappointment that things aren’t “the way they should be.” For others, however, the cost of being caught between the dream of American possibility and the reality of its brokenness is violence, fear, and, in too many cases, death. This, as much as anything else, marks what we now commonly describe as privilege.
The divide between these two cultural experiences is that we live with a nostalgia for something that never existed, a type of historical storytelling that has often been a form of violence employed for the sake of preserving one group’s sense of itself at the expense of—and often through the complete erasure of—another group: their identity, their agency, and their lives.
Do you ever wonder why a criminal of color is so easily cast as representative of his entire racial or ethnic or religious category while a white man who commits the same crime is solely responsible for his actions? Do you ever wonder why you never wonder that? Again, this is what people mean when they ask you to check your privilege.
An example: the political slogan “Make America Great Again.” To adhere to this notion, that there is a historically better America to return to if we just try hard enough, is not new. The current candidate slapping the phrase on ugly hats did not originate the idea.
It’s always been with us; the elusive sense that returning to a simpler time would soothe today’s troubles, would save us. It’s why so many movies in the 80’s sought solace in taking us back to the 50’s.
But this is only a solution if your proximity to the Great American Tension allows you to see that earlier time as safe. As my pastor, a black man, put it, “What part of the past do I want to go back to? When was it better here for me?”
Again, if this perspective has never occurred to you, yours is merely an intellectual tension. If you don’t look at our history and recoil at the very real danger of the internment camp, the lynching tree, or the reservation, you long for a time that only more fully and openly privileged a very small group of people: a group you may not have been a part of even as you imagine yourself being so.
This is my problem with people who default to the unflinching rhetoric of valorizing without any criticality the work of the American Founders. Yes, they wrote documents laden with immense potential to liberate humans and create space for equality that has never really existed.
And yet, they lived lives that directly undercut the potential of their words and blocked the path to the very equality they championed for so many people in this country. In essence, they proved that even implements designed to heal and empower become weapons when they are applied selectively to benefit only those we most resemble.
And to create these benefits, we have kept them from others time and time again, right down to our three most cherished freedoms: the pursuit of happiness, liberty, and, in far too many violent instances, life itself.
This is why “I can’t breathe” are not merely a man’s dying words. This is why we should not fall victim to the pandering sentiment of “Make America Great Again.” And this is why we should never say #AllLivesMatter, because we don’t live that way enough yet to claim it as our aspiration.
Instead of nostalgia, which has literally killed people, we need hard reality, honesty that does not flinch or recast the world in ways that make us feel better about ourselves, justice that is not selectively employed, mercy for those who are begging for us to acknowledge their suffering, and an actual attempt to hear each other in the midst of pain that renders us deaf.
I actually believe in the potential of the principles our country was founded on. If applied to everyone in equal measure, this would truly be the great place we imagine it to be.
But that’s not our reality and will not be until we do what neither the Founders, nor any generation since, could: value equally the humanity of everyone and admit that we are part of the blindness keeping us from doing so. This is the American greatness I want my daughter to experience.