In the first two parts of this series, we considered LGQBT issues and racism, fraught with passion on all sides, particularly in Red states where Republicans hold the governorship and have supermajorities in state and/or local legislatures. But hard as it may be to believe, these are pretty simple to recognize, although the politics are not simple. The anti-gay, anti-trans rhetoric is evident everywhere in MAGA land and among Republican presidential aspirants. It is only slightly more apparent than the overt (not to mention covert) expressions of racism.
While the right embraces its anti-gay campaigns, it simultaneously goes to ridiculous lengths to deny (and even forbid) any existence or even mention an awareness of color-aware racism. As an example of how absurd this is, consider the recent statement by the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in which some three hundred Blacks were slaughtered and 1600 homes and businesses were destroyed. “Let’s not tie it to the skin color and say the skin color determined that,” he said.
Why not? After all, in his pre-political life, Walters was a high school history teacher who had no problem relating the massacre to race or acknowledging that race was a factor in the riots. And even today, teaching about the event is mandated by the state. But in today’s political climate, teaching Critical Race Theory in Oklahoma is forbidden, as it is in several states. The label, CRT, has become virtually undefinable since it became mired in contemporary culture wars (and it had become subject to multiple interpretations before the political right decided to make it its own). All one can be sure of is that in Red states, it is very, very bad.
Returning to Ryan Walters’ view today, one can say that it would be wrong for Whites to have killed Blacks during the massacre, but it would also be wrong to say that race had anything to do with it. To blame racism for playing a role would amount to teaching Critical Race Theory, which is forbidden. Therefore, the massacre had nothing to do with race. There’s color blindness for you!
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at such absurdity. Maybe do both simultaneously. But you can’t help but wonder what Walters, the one-time history teacher, actually makes of it. Like many in the Republican Party, he has taken a bite of the apple and slid down the rabbit hole.
There’s nothing new about the whitewashing of history (pun intended). We Americans do it all the time. And so does everyone else, at least to some degree. But this is going pretty far, and one has to wonder, to what end is all this denying of the existence of racism both in the past and present trying to achieve? What message is it trying to send to White schoolchildren? What message to Blacks?
If, for Whites, it’s intended to say that they shouldn’t feel guilty about the past of their forefathers, all well and good. I thought we’d pretty much given up on collective guilt for past bad acts. We no longer blame current Germans for the sins of the Nazi era (although we insist that they keep it in mind). The Catholic Church finally surrendered the teaching of the collective guilt of Jews for Jesus's death (although plenty of Christians haven’t given it up). That’s not to say there shouldn’t be some degree of collective guilt regarding contemporary racism. That guilt will not be washed away by asserting that racism doesn’t exist or that no one is responsible for its persistence. We all do.
On the other hand, what does it intend to say to Blacks? That maybe slavery wasn’t too good (but maybe not too bad), and perhaps that Jim Crow laws have long been overturned, and the Civil Rights movement sort of happened spontaneously without anybody in particular trying to make it happen. No one died in the attempt, no one went to jail, no one demonstrated. It just sort of happened, and Blacks should be grateful that it did and just go away and not bother anyone. And racism today? What racism? We live in a color-blind society.
There may be some Blacks who will buy into this, but I think most will not. If one thinks that awareness of Black history will disappear by eradicating Black History departments in universities, they are dangerously naïve. The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s didn’t come about because of Black History departments. The Black Panthers didn’t emanate from classrooms at Yale.
My own view is that the denial of racism and the Black past will only encourage the radicalization of many Blacks and that we will return to the days of the Black Panthers and similar groups but even larger and more dangerous. Could that be what Donald Trump, Ron De Santis, Greg Abbot, and the right-wing terrorist groups really want?
On July 11th, 2023, Leslie Van Houten was released from prison, the latest of the members of Charlie Manson’s “family” to regain their freedom. Some others remain imprisoned. But it’s helpful to remember that in 1969, Charlie Manson tried to start a race war with his murders in the Hollywood Hills and failed. Maybe he was 50-odd years too early. Helter-Skelter.
Coincidentally, the day before Van Houten’s release, on Tuesday, July 10th, 2023, Milan Kundera, the émigré Czech novelist, died in Paris at the age of 94. Born in Czechoslovakia, his work banned, and always in danger of arrest, he fled to Paris in 1975, escaping the limitations and strictures of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain. One of his great fears was that the Soviets and their henchmen would stamp out Czech culture, and it’s not that they didn’t try.
I first read Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in 1981 while on an airplane from New York City to Washington, DC. The opening few paragraphs describe a photograph of the Czech Communist leadership. It was winter. The Communist Leader stood in the cold, haranguing hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. One of his associates, Clementis, stood next to him. He took his own hat off and placed it on the bare head of the Leader. The resulting photograph was distributed to many thousands of people. Four years later, Clementis was executed, and the picture was air-brushed so that Clementis no longer appeared. But his hat remained on the Leader’s head.
I’ve never forgotten the paragraph, which was both deadly serious and totally absurd. And that was Kundera’s stock-in-trade. The deadly serious in conjunction with the absurd, horror (particularly political horror), and the comic. But even more than that opening to the book, there is the very next sentence:
The struggle of Man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
It’s something that none of us dare forget.
I began this series talking about the underbelly of the 1950s and a reminder that it was not nirvana, the shining city upon a hill, that some have imagined, particularly if you were part of a marginalized group (including women). There are other aspects of those years that I have yet to deal with. Religion (as in the separation of church and state), for example, and censorship, not to mention women’s rights and voting rights, all of which have taken significant steps backward, at least in Red states. But I’m not going to deal with them now as part of this series. I’m sure they’ll both come around again.
However, since the whole 50s thing has been a mind game, I’d like to suggest that there are other possibilities to consider, namely the desire to return to the mid-19th century when there was a real split between the slave-holding states that became the Confederacy and the Union states—secession without actual secession. And certain members of the Supreme Court seem particularly enamored of the America of the 18th century. However, I don’t imagine (while they jet around in private planes) that they’d actually like to live then.
All this is bound to come up in the future, so if you think I’ve cut this series too short, well, you’re right, but don’t worry about it. I won’t forget any of it, and neither should you. And always remember Kundera’s dictum:
The struggle of Man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Thank you Michael. Your articles are always insightful, thought provoking and on point.
Right on the mark again. Thank you Michael. Anthony