BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS, JUSTICE, AND CONFRONTING WHITE MYTHS OF SUPREMACY, INNOCENCE, AND RECONCILIATION

 

BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS, JUSTICE, AND CONFRONTING WHITE MYTHS OF SUPREMACY, INNOCENCE, AND RECONCILIATION

©Wendell Griffen, 2021

 

 

The media report that white legislators are concerned that white children are being made uncomfortable when educators teach them the truth about systemic racism in the United States.

 

Arkansas is no exception. Earlier this year white legislators in Arkansas enacted a law, which Governor Asa Hutchinson refused to veto but did not sign, which bars public schools and state agencies from teaching "divisive concepts" during racial and cultural sensitivity training, including teaching that American is an inherently racist nation.

 

How many white legislators complained that public schools include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn on their reading lists? I read it in the tenth grade during the first year that Delight High School admitted Black students (1965-66).

 

In that book, the “n-word” appears more than 200 times. A Black man named Jim is referred to, repeatedly, with the “n-word” before his name.

 

White legislators do not complain about that.

 

My white eleventh-grade history teacher told our class that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about a clash between the agrarian economy in the South versus the mercantile economy of the North. Even as a teenager I knew he was lying.

 

White legislators in Arkansas have yet to complain about that lie.

 

We read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at Delight High School. Julius Caesar included not only the dramatic account of the assassination of Caesar, but his betrayal by Marc Antony. White lawmakers in Arkansas have not complained about children reading about murder being plotted and carried out by politicians.

 

I also read Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot). That work of fiction includes an account about opium addiction, betrayal, greed for money, marital deceit, and other painful realities. White legislators have not objected to its inclusion among the literary works students read.

 

White legislators have not complained about history books that treat the so-called “westward expansion” as the result of intrepid explorers. They have been content to ignore how the West was truly won (through land theft, wholesale massacre of indigenous people, and wars started and fought so white settlers could grab land).

 

Instead, white legislators in Arkansas and elsewhere are furious that the New York Times 1619 Project might be part of school curricula so students can know the truth about how the United States became the wealthiest society in North America thanks to wealth produced from the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans who had been kidnapped and trafficked across oceans.

 

They are furious that students might learn the truth about white supremacy and tolerance for violence by reading works by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

 

They are furious that the “legends, lies, and cherished myths of American history” – the title of a book by Richard Shenkman – are being exposed.

 

Racial injustice has persisted across the entire history of this society and continues – legally, economically, politically, socially, and culturally – because the white supremacy and racism these legislators defend is now – and has always been – sacralized. By sacralized I mean that white supremacy has always been considered sacred. Whiteness has always been the standard of “rightness.” Thus, it is a fundamental mistake to view and treat white supremacy as merely an attitude or a set of practices and policies. White supremacy is something approaching a theology in this society, if not the world!

 

The historical evils set out by the 1619 Project and continuing evils (such as mass incarceration, state-sanctioned abuse and homicide of Black, Brown, and indigenous people by police agencies, racist immigration policies that target people from South and Central America, South Asia, Africa, and Muslims, dislocation and other economic oppression of communities of color through gentrification and other commercial schemes, and the refusal to engage in the long overdue work of reparations) are based on that sacralized sense of white supremacy.

 

According to that mindset, worldview, and value system, white norms are superior, white culture is superior, whiteness entitles a person to a presumption of superior morality, dignity, intellect, and privilege.

 

Based on that white supremacist mindset, the only legitimate account of the past is whatever benefits and glorifies whiteness. The only legitimate remedies for racial injustice are those fashioned and/or accepted by white people based on white values and goals.

 

In that sense, race is more than a social construct. White supremacy is a theological construct by which white norms, goals, and aims define what is right, good, true, healthy, fair, and otherwise worthwhile.

 

The 1619 Project and critical race perspectives on history, law, economics, politics, and religion challenge that worldview. Those challenges to white supremacy frighten white supremacist legislators, educators, parents, pastors, scientists, and business owners. White supremacy is being defended so fiercely now because more people – including more white people – understand what Black, Latinx, indigenous, and other people of color have long known.

 

White supremacist notions of history, religion, economics, education, science, and culture are lies. Passing laws that force teachers to promote those lies in public schools will not stop people from challenging the lies.

 

The laws will only make people who love truth and justice (including teachers, students, and parents), more strongly detest the lies – and the liars that defend them. They will agree that the problem of racial inequality in the United States is “so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist, and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially.”

 

Nicole Hannah Jones didn’t write that statement. It is not taken from the 1619 Project. It was written by Martin Luther King Jr. and published, after his death, in the January 1969 issue of Playboy magazine.

 

White supremacists politicians can find it in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., edited by James Melvin Washington. I suspect white supremacist politicians and parents will try to prohibit public schools from including it among the readings students are assigned.