Good old days????

(9 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Whenever people talk about getting back to the good old days in this country I get confused. I immediately wonder what days they’re talking about. I think that what we refer to as “good” is all too often in the eye of the beholder.

Most times the pull to some mythical wonderful past in this country takes us to the glory days of WWII and its aftermath in the 50’s. Those were the years of my childhood, and yes, there were certainly some good things about that time.

But when we open our eyes to historical facts, we learn a different story of those years and the reality that they were anything but the “good old days” for far too many.

I just recently read an article by Tim Wise that was written in the aftermath of the Jeremiah Wright controversy. He has a powerful story to tell us about how we think of history. Its titled Of National Lies and Racial America.

Wise opens by addressing the insincerity of the outrage most Americans felt when they heard Rev. Wright’s words.

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago…for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

After walking through exactly what Wright said and providing some historical context, Wise zeros in on the different way 9/11 was viewed by white people and people of color in this country.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock–though make no mistake, they already knew it–is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life…No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that “everything changed.” To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

Wise then does an amazing job of tying these lies we have been taught about our history to  the current delusional thinking about our place in the world.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget…Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that “Leave it Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

…

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager’s textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon “this great country”…it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one’s nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they–the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land–who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it–when our nation does–we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

Some pretty powerful words for us all to hear and absorb. And all I can say in closing is that my hope is that our “good old days” are still to come.