Peeling the Everlasting Onion of How Stupid–Part 1

Our 16-year-old daughter Cass was two weeks and eight lives into a history essay last week, on whether Truth and Reconciliation had worked…

Our 16-year-old daughter Cass was two weeks and eight lives into a history essay last week, on whether Truth and Reconciliation had worked in post-apartheid South Africa or not. It was kicking her ass. I jumped down in the mud and together we hog-tied 6 pages of footnoted Chicago convention 5-paragraph glory together and lived to sleep again.

I am so stupid, is what I learned. I keep learning this. Cass wrote that Germany and Rwanda hammered memory and moral knowledge of atrocities into their people at every turn and again and again to recover. She had Trevor Noah in there writing of South Africa by contrast.

“The atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren’t taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it’s taught in America.” Noah writes, “‘There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it’s done.’”

Ack, that’s how I learned. I see by Cass’ studies that at least by curriculum, it’s better now. But her dad and I laughed tears late in bed over the time her class was shown Gone With the Wind without comment during the Civil War unit, for atmosphere. This is an avowedly liberal school community in our historically white beach town, with a mix of hispanic families and a bohemian rebel culture now ebbing to quiet tech wealth incursions and dressed down AirBnB’ers. I overstate–it is still a real town, but just.

That rebel identity was forged first in the town’s hippies-with-hammers response to the Standard Oil spill of 1971, and then with the ragged takeover of the water board from the old guard, halting big development. Grow up there running wild, reading by kerosene and eating off a Coleman stove, and you can tend to presume you’ve got some proper lefty laurels by inheritance. The town has coasted forward through the decades feeling liberal without great incident — unless anyone tried to change anything about anything of course.

But oil fights and composting toilets, naked beaches and salvage barns and damnable carob, all happened on one white side of the red lining of America. Red lining and race restrictive covenants was/is just one more carving off of the black economic trajectory from the white economic trajectory through the systematic segregation of real estate for ownership or for rent. The Color of Law is a stunner book that had my usually silent reader husband barking out one appalling passage after another. Now he relates, they are pulling deeds throughout the town where his elementary school lives, as a project teaching kids the invisible history of (my words not his) Why My Town’s So White all around them. Though no longer enforceable since federal actions in 1948 and 1968, these old race covenant deeds are still inscribed.

So many of those barefoot, bearded or braless, smart and charming young radicals I knew as a child were there in their driftwood shacks and jumpstart trucks by choice. Many left northeastern colleges and jobs and good home bases earnestly, but by choice. Those I knew read and thought and wrote deeply, and a favorite rode with the Freedom Riders. But from today’s lens, with no malign intent and plenty of ignorance on my part, this town’s identity looks built fighting the man from invisible islands. As penned by E.M. Forster’s character Margaret in his masterwork Howard’s End,

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize…”

Today we stand (I’m that stupid I have to write it down) upon white as upon invisible islands. With freeform parents, I grew up not having money and missed sight of my own big island. It’s so not economic! Generations of advantage in access, everywhere safety, and higher ed are a reason some — not all — of the men and women of the 60s and 70s could choose to tune in and drop out. I’m glad and grateful they did, and many took valiant part in the civil rights fight, but others raised kids like me who somehow equated a liberal consciousness with actually aware.

So it is only after reading and reading ongoing; after getting my ass handed to me over and again by Black American films, plays, songs, humor, news, books and people; and now after seeing these lessons of apartheid with Cass. It is only now I am asking with the appropriately extreme degree of flabbergasted, just this one question to start:

How, how have we not memorialized the truth of slave history and oppression here at home, until remorse and comprehension were laid in our bones like lead?

How on holy earth can we balk at toppling Confederate statues, or better yet we circle them in a giant pony ring with a banner arching over, says, “Don’t F’g Do Any Of This Again!”

The only argument, on our white knees, should be where to put the 2000 new slave history statues and Jim Crow monuments and Black American hero commemorations. Looking ahead to 2020, yes winning is the thing. But given the claim white supremacy now has on too much of our commons, it’s going to be a rough and festering road to Reconciliation between Red and Blue if whites don’t step up and get honest, schooled and ready, for true reconciliation between white and black.

Being white today is peeling the everlasting onion of how stupid.