The historical erasure of blackness strengthens this racially blind version of American history, makes it easier to make the argument that black folk never did a damn thing for the nation. Iowa congressman Steve King wondered in 2016 where in history “are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people . . . where did any other subgroup of people [other than whites] contribute more to civilization?” King said that Western civilization is “rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.”
Let’s be honest, my friends, this kind of sentiment is far more widespread than you may care to admit. It makes one thing clear: black and white folk are often speaking different languages with no common frame of reference, and therefore, no possibility of understanding each other. Thus the crudest conclusions possible in American history have stuck to black life. Black folk are often seen as simians at the high table of culture, aping white society. This poisons public discourse, distorting the history of American politics. Liberal professor Mark Lilla argued that Hillary Clinton’s “calling out explicitly to African-American” and other groups in the 2016 campaign “was a strategic mistake” because it left out the white working class and the highly religious. But the history of American politics is the history of accommodating whiteness at many levels, and while religiously influenced working class folk surely need to be heeded, it is odd that Lilla’s invective against identity politics appeals to the religiously rooted white working class at the expense of the black or brown religiously influenced working classes. Lilla’s view is amnesia with a bang, or really, a fang, an exposed snarl at the inconvenient messiness of real history.
Real American history is the sticky web in which black and white are stuck together. Stop trying to pretend that you don’t know this. You can kill us, even brutalize us, but history makes escape from us impossible. An even greater fear lurks barely beneath the surface. What horrifies many of you is that America, at its root, has been in part made by blackness. God forbid, but it may in part be black. Slavery made America a slave to black history. As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now. America doesn’t even exist without us. That’s why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America. America shudders and says to itself: The president’s supposed to be us, not them. In that light, Donald Trump’s victory was hardly surprising.
The one-drop rule, the notion to racial purists that even a speck of black blood contaminates one’s heritage, has always signified that white America believed that blackness was superior. Even the slightest presence of black blood was able to overcome and outsmart whiteness. Blackness had to be taboo because it couldn’t be vanquished or destroyed. Blackness feels like a curse to your view of history.
White America, you deliberately forget how whiteness caused black suffering. And it shows in the strangest ways. You forget how you kept black folk poor as sharecroppers. You forget how you kept us out of your classrooms and in subpar schools. You forget how you denied us jobs, and when we got them, how you denied us promotions. You forget how you kept us out of the suburbs, and now that you’re gentrifying our inner city neighborhoods, you’re pushing us to the suburbs. You forget that you kept us from voting, and then blamed us for being lackadaisical at the polls. Although it sounds delusional, perhaps more than a few of you feel the way Donald Trump’s former campaign chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, Kathy Miller, does. “If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” Miller said. “You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” She also said, “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected.”
Think of how the members of the House of Representatives, influenced by the Tea Party, opened the 112th Congress in 2011 by reading out loud on the House floor the Constitution in its entirety. Except they didn’t read the entire, or the original, version, which included Article 1, Section 2, which says that black folk equaled three-fifths of a white person. The representatives lapsed into calculated forgetting.
That sort of behavior is not limited to the mostly white men who make up our Congress. It bleeds into the general population as well. How many high school social studies textbooks, like the one prepared for use in Texas, forget racial terror by downplaying slavery and barely mentioning segregation, presenting a seamless transition from bondage to freedom?
Toni Morrison, in her great novel Beloved, replaces memory and forgetting with “rememory” and “disremember” to help us think about who, or what, the nation chooses to remember or forget. President Donald Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his 2016 campaign slogan. It sounded the call to white America to return to simpler, better days. But the golden age of the past is a fiction, a projection of nostalgia that selects what is most comforting to remember. It summons a past that was not great for all; in fact, it is a past that was not great at all, not with racism and sexism clouding the culture. Going back to a time that was great depends on deliberate disremembering.
One of the great perks of being white in America is the capacity to forget at will. The sort of amnesia that blankets white America is reflected in an Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman lyric sung by Barbra Streisand: “What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.” The second stage of grief flashes in the assertion “it didn’t happen.” Instead of “forget it,” there is “deny it.” Civil rights icon Joseph Lowery often says that we live in the fifty-first state, the state of denial. Denial is even more sinister than amnesia because there is some concession to facts that are then roundly negated. Here is where the gaslight effect goes wild. Black folk are made to feel crazy for believing something they know to be true.