The Life in My Years

Banner photo: Detail of a mural in Oakland, painted in the aftermath of the slaying of George Floyd

Tim Scott said it. Nikki Haley said it. Both are running for president and both are out on the campaign trail road testing the lie that’s become a GOP shibboleth. That these two are people of color is what causes my eyes to bug out and my head to shake.

“America is not a racist country,” they said.

Taken at face value, that statement is a myth.

In the interest of transparency, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have said essentially the same thing. It is after all, the realpolitik thing to do.

That said, there are differences. While Biden, Harris and other Democrats might say that America is not a racist country, they recognize that racism exists in America and they are quick to call out its instances. Republicans, on the other hand, not only consistently refuse to call out racism, some have been busy little bigots in their promotion of policies that are clearly racist.

From the Democrats, ‘America is not racist’, is a statement describing values and hope tempered by the reality of existence. From Republican mouths, ‘America is not racist’ is fantasy and campaign hooey.

There are examples aplenty but one need only focus on two recent events to prove that the GOP is doing everything but making the white sheet its party uniform to demonstrate that it has a race problem.

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Alabama, like the rest of the former Confederate States, has been trying to disenfranchise Black people since, well, the founding. They even went to war over the rights of Black people. After getting their gray asses whipped in the Civil War, it took the Fifteenth Amendment to set things right and give ALL Americans, not only the right to vote but to keep states from “abridging” the right to vote.

The Fifteenth Amendment worked for a short time until the former Confederate States constructed obstacles, such as literacy tests, poll taxes and bogus residency requirements. When those didn’t work, they turned to physical intimidation and violence.

Over the decades attempts to squash voting rights by the former Confederate States was, for the Federal Government and voting rights activists, a frustrating game of whack a mole. When a war and a constitutional amendment weren’t enough, Congress passed, and Lyndon Johnson signed, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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For decades, one of the more tried and true methods used by the Republicans for retaining power and quashing the Black vote has been gerrymandering. The party has tortured and twisted state districting maps for the purpose of transforming what should be majority Black and/or Democratic districts into majority White, Republican districts.
Take Alabama for instance, which has six voting districts. In Alabama one in four voters is Black, yet the Republican legislature managed to contort its map so that a disproportionate number of Black voters were concentrated into one district, leaving the other five majority white. The result of this Republican double dealing was to leave Black voters with little to no chance of electing representatives of their choosing.

In a recent ruling, the United States Supreme Court, which has been tripping over its own robes since Trump packed it, finally did the right thing and told Alabama to try again, and create a second majority Black district.

In response, and in keeping with the tradition of George Wallace, and Alabama’s segregationist/secessionist history, the Republican majority in the legislature created a new district that is 40% Black instead of majority Black as the Supreme Court’s ruling demands. Alabama essentially told the Supreme Court to go kick rocks. And so the battle continues and Alabama continues its practice of institutional racism.
Yes, take Alabama. Please, someone, anyone, take Alabama.

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Meanwhile in Florida, where a fascist governor and his department of education are busy rewriting history by painting it a two tone of lily white and Confederate gray, that state’s African American History section is requiring teachers in the sixth through eighth grades to include lessons on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

That’s right, every cloud has a silver lining, including the one that rains brutality, murder, kidnapping, rape and the buying and selling of humans.

The reaction from those not inextricably tied to the bullshit known as “the Lost Cause,” (The Lost Cause is a unicorn peddled by losers who continue to glorify the Confederacy, claiming that its cause was noble one and that the Civil War was not tied to slavery) was rightful outrage. Vice President Kamala Harris termed the lesson “gaslighting” and “propaganda.”

In response to the deluge of criticism, many in the GOP returned fire. Governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis said he “wasn’t involved in it (creating the curriculum).” Maybe not directly, but this is an evil spawn of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Is DeSantis’ avoiding the issue as if it were a rattlesnake a preview of his presidential leadership? DeSantis did go on to defend the curriculum, adding, “I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

Others who jumped to the defense of the Florida curriculum offered examples of Black Americans who demonstrated some of these purported skills. The apologists offered educator Booker T. Washington as an example of someone who “parlayed” skills learned as an enslaved person. The only problem. and it’s a large one, is the fact that Washington was freed as a child and learned his skills at school after being freed. Like the example of Washington, most examples that were offered don’t fit the curriculum narrative. Most were already either free Blacks or learned their skills after they were free or were never enslaved.

Over on Fox, Jesse Watters, that network’s new motherTucker, was apoplectic, “This is historical fact, that slaves did develop skills while they were enslaved and then used those skills as blacksmiths, in agriculture, tailoring, in the shipping business, to benefit themselves and their families.”

Even if one grants Watters assertion that enslaved people learned skills, plantations were not vocational schools or junior colleges, they were labor camps. An enslaved man didn’t get the opportunity to pour over a catalog and choose his vocation. One learned the skill he was assigned and performed it under the shroud of torture or death. But why grant Watters anything at all? He’s just another Fox propagandist numbskull.

Watters’ contention that enslaved families benefited, overlooks the fact that roughly fifty percent of Black families were sundered, and those that weren’t split, lived under that very threat.

The notion that any significant number of enslaved people were even afforded the “opportunity” to learn a skill is preposterous. The vast majority (98 percent in Florida) performed back breaking, unskilled, sunup to sundown field work.

In fairness, the Florida guidelines do cover the brutality and dehumanization of slavery. Good on Florida for that – I suppose. So why even bother adding a unit that strains historical fact and insults the people who struggled through that awful period, along with their ancestors and those who will now be compelled to teach this bunk? What does it bring to the table? Why gussy up an abomination?

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Florida is just the latest example. In Texas, a group of educators proposed that slavery should be taught to second graders as “involuntary relocation.” Also in Texas (because that state just can’t get over its Confederate self), it was discovered that a social studies textbook called the enslaved people, “workers” (I just can’t wait for some book or curriculum to call the enslaved “associates”). A textbook used in private high schools, published by Accelerated Christian Education, terms the slave trade as “Black immigration.” In Iowa, Greg Wickenkamp, an eighth grade teacher, confused over what he could and couldn’t teach his students, was told that he could not say, ‘Slavery was wrong,’ as that would constitute an opinion and not a fact (This makes me wonder if Republicans would lose their shit if teachers would be banned from saying the American victory over the Nazis was a just fight because that would be an opinion and not fact).

Much of this has come in conjunction with a paranoid response to The1619 Project. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ brilliant work caused such apoplexy within the American right, that the reaction has been an increase in book banning and the institution of curriculum changes such as those described above.

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Granted, there will always be the racist nutjobs whose everyday vocabulary includes the “N” word. They are the creepy crawlers that hide under wet rocks. The pernicious, damaging problem is the racism that the right is trying to bake into the cake of our society and institutions.

The outcome of whitewashing American history and culture, and the denial of some painful realities will only serve to further a flawed vision of America. The children who grow up with the notion that slavery had silver linings, will grow up to be the apologists and the paranoid, the ones who will continue on to positions in the state house, the future legislators who will draw maps that disenfranchise, and that hearken back to post reconstruction and Jim Crow. They will be the future school board members who will inject the venom of revisionist history into the minds of future generations.

The alcoholic doesn’t correct his drinking problem until he looks in the mirror and says, “I’m a drunk.” America won’t solve its race problem until it admits it has a race problem.

A parent acknowledges her child’s bad behavior and takes the necessary steps to correct the fault. It’s what good parents do to ensure that the child becomes a good citizen. Good citizens acknowledge the sins of their nation’s past and present. It’s how a nation grows and lives up to the reputation of being “a shining city.”

As I was completing this piece, Tim Scott criticized Ron DeSantis for the Florida curriculum, saying, “There is no silver lining in slavery,” Scott said. “Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.”
That he made a statement criticizing a single instance of institutional racism doesn’t erase his previous assertion that “America is not a racist country.”