Often, in our American history, when we are on the cusp of learning from a mistake made, we take a dramatic and violent step back into White supremacy
The country has been here before.
Maybe not in my lifetime. Maybe not in the lifetimes of the majority of Americans, but we’ve been here before.
We may have never had such a baldly ambitious and simultaneously bumbling autocratic demagogue as we had in Trump, but then again, I wasn’t alive to see Andrew Jackson genocide the native peoples of America in order to make more room for slavery.
That the backlash to even the mildest Coronavirus prevention protocols will prevent our country from moving forward in ways like: using this as an opportunity to start Universal Basic Income trials, or 4-day-work-weeks, is not so much a case of “this is not who we are” but of “this is who we’ve always been”.
In 1954, Brown v. Board forced American schools to integrate. Not by giving Black teachers jobs of course, but by forcing children to the front lines of America’s most foundational tensions.
And by 1988, the year I entered the public school system, we had peaked. It was all down hill from there:
1988 School integration reaches its all-time high; almost 45% of black students in the United States are attending majority-white schools.
…
2001 White parents in Charlotte, N.C., schools successfully seek an end to the desegregation process and a bar to the use of race in making student assignments.
2002 A report from Harvard’s Civil Rights Project concludes that America’s schools are resegregating.
2003 The Supreme Court upholds diversity as a rationale for affirmative action programs in higher education admissions, but concludes that point systems are not appropriate. (Grutter v. Bollinger; Gratz v. Bollinger)
A federal district court case affirms the value of racial diversity and race-conscious student assignment plans in K-12 education. (Lynn v. Comfort)
A study by Harvard’s Civil Rights Project finds that schools were more segregated in 2000 than in 1970 when busing for desegregation began.
School re-segregation was a slow march away from justice but, as we’ll see, America doesn’t usually take that long to backlash. (And by the way school integration has proven benefits for everyone, “On average, students in socioeconomically and racially diverse schools—regardless of a student’s own economic status—have stronger academic outcomes than students in schools with concentrated poverty”.)
The 13th Amendment, which couldn’t even get halfway through its only sentence before fatally contradicting its purported spirit, was probably America’s quickest turn from teachable moment to rejection of teachable moment.
Neither slavery nor indentured servitude, except as punishment for a crime..
The first 11 words from the 13th Ammendment
It was as though the White land-owning men making the laws couldn’t even bring themselves to offering African Americans rights without South Park-ing them.
“Here’s your freedom…
WWII, The Great Depression, & Motherless Brooklyn
Even when America wins a war, we learn the wrong lesson from it.
As Macolm Gladwell documented in his 4-part series on Curtis Lamay’s role in WWII’s Pacific theater, even the veteran General knew that his tactical approach to attacking Japan during WWII (basically, fire-bombing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the middle of the night) was wrong,
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Season 5 Episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”
In a candid moment, Lamay once told one of his subordinates, ‘if we lose, this war we’ll be tried as war criminals’, which is almost certainly true.
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But they didn’t lose. They won. After the war, Lamay joined the Strategic Air Command SAC, where he was responsible for most of America’s nuclear arsenal at a time when war with the Soviet Union seemed imminent. Then in 1961, he became head of the whole Air Force, standing next to Kennedy on the podium as the president.[00:03:06]
LeMay didn’t get tried as a war criminal. He got promoted.
After World War II America didn’t seem to talk much about how we used a nuclear weapon, and we have discussed even less, as Gladwell explores, about the way we used other weapons (namely, napalm) to kill civilians on a level possibly never seen before in humanity’s long history of war.
It was with this context in mind that I watched Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn: a film-noir that unravels over the backdrop of Robert Moses’ New York.
Edward Norton’s character Lionel Essrog speaking on his mentor, Frank Minna, played by Bruce Willis, says,
Frank was the only person I knew who thought the way we won the war was gonna cause us problems, he said, “after the crash we were digging ourselves out by taking care of each other. Now that we’d seen what we could do with our brute strength there was no going back. He said from here on out the games gonna be about power from top to bottom.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard World War II put in that perspective in a (relatively) major Hollywood film.
Not only have we not been learning, or even discussing, really, what it means to have “firebomb(ed) and destroyed all but five Japanese cities” with “The extent of the destruction…ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama.” but it doesn’t seem like America ever really digested what it meant to survive the Great Depression only to find our saving grace, our upward national mobility, through the use of never-before-seen levels of violence.
Was it any wonder that the methods we used to defeat Japan (napalm) would become our go-to method of destruction in our next two wars?
(If you wonder why North Korea is North Korea, part of the reason is that we destroyed “as estimated 85% of its buildings” in our Korean war).
Vietnam and This Is Us
In This Is Us, also known as “Cry Time” in my home, the brother of the fallen father, uncle of The Big 3, is a secluded alcoholic traumatized by the war and his part in it when we first encounter him.
The tragedy of Vitenam cannot be measured only in the 58,220 names etched in stone at the monument in DC (as of 2018), but the x-fold number of veterans who came back to a country whose infrastructure to support them was rapidly being dismantled by the far Right (also known as “the right” in America).
The struggle of the returning Vietnam soldier has been documented on film for decades, from The Deerhunter to Dead Presidents to This Is Us.
What I haven’t seen documented as thoroughly, is the phenomena Rick Perlstein spoke to Chris Hayes about: how the nation used the bicentennial celebration as a chance to forget any and all self-reflection the Vietnam war may have induced.
The biggest thing in the world when I was a kid, was the bicentennial…the dominant opinion among the elites was – and probably on the grassroots too – why are we celebrating the nation’s 200th birthday? We almost don’t deserve to celebrate, we’re so screwed up.
And the thing that was so remarkable about the bicentennial, July 4th (19)76 comes and it’s like universally acclaimed as the greatest party ever.
And what this symbolizes to me is the nation’s willingness to turn away from the reckoning with these traumas and these ordeals, which really was kinda was happening in a very interesting and very mature way.
I narrate the rise of this kind of liberal patriotism in which asking very hard questions about the nations institutions was seen as a moral imperative, and people feel like they have permission to kind of act like children, and the nation gets to act like children, and a big part of this is the rise of Ronald Reagan and his presidential campaign.
Rick Perlstein on ‘Why Is This Happening?’ with Chris Hayes
The nation gets to “act like children” during the bicentennial, Reagan is swept into office on the feel-good (but do, pretty terrible things once in power) Make America Great Again slogan, and now people are protesting because “we’re tired of shopping while wearing masks“.
What Would Queen Elizabeth Do?
After World War II Britain gave its citizens Universal Health Care. Not universal health insurance coverage. They completely removed the truly unnecessary group of people known as health insurers and gave everyone socialized medicine.
America could’ve used this terrible virus as a chance to advance long overdue societal change: the 4 day work week, Universal Basic Income, oh, and I don’t know, maybe HEALTHCARE FOR EVERYONE.
Instead, we have to deal with Nazis who think they’re patriots, fascists who think they’re fighting for the oppressed and marginalized conservative White man, and dumb people who are mad at smart people so they take it out on everyone by believing in conspiracy theories.
In the Season 2 episode of The Crown, “Vergangenheit”, the Duke of Windsor is, let’s say, exposed for some ole-timey Nazi shit he did.
And while some bad things happen to him because the Duke may have colluded with Nazis (not really enough bad things it feels like?) the ending of the episode is one only to be believed if its characters are British, or at least, not American.
During a long, steady zoom shot, we see the Duke playing cards or engaging in whatever posh forms of entertainment his vast wealth afforded him, but, what’s this? He can’t focus on having fun? He, instead, glares at himself in the mirror as the camera gets closer and closer, almost overdoing the metaphor?
That is indeed what happens at the end of “Vergangenheit” (“the past” in German), and I couldn’t help but be struck by the British idealism of it all: that the true reckoning is with one’s self, even if you don’t have to face any other consequences as a royal White man, you still have to live with yourself.
In America, we do away with the latter, and are left only with the former: a national amnesia thrust on us by our most violent White supremacists, a White supremacy that is foundational to our country, an oppressive force that keeps us from advancing every time history has given us a chance to do so, one that dares the rest of us to call it out lest we be beaten with an American flag.
I love the way you explain stuff. How helpful!