On the CBS This Morning show, September 23, 2016, anchor Gayle King discussed the grand opening of Washington DC’s Smithsonian National African American Museum of History and Culture with her guest and friend Oprah Winfrey.
They were discussing the history of the enslavement of Africans in this country as depicted in the museum, when the TV viewers’ eyes were drawn to a plaque with a quote by Ida B. Wells (1862‑1931), an African American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, feminist, and an early leader in the Civil Rights movement: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
That quote resonated deeply with me. While neither Kathryn nor I would begin to equate our comparatively privileged white, middle-class upbringings with that of Ida B. Wells, who was born in slavery, orphaned at sixteen, and still managed to get herself educated and financially independent, a fiercely intelligent Black woman who lived a life of courage and selfless action her entire life, her statement could be our motto too. Indeed, both Kathryn and I have tried to shed the light of truth in all of our books, separately and together.
Our co-authored book, Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government, offers solutions to address the institutionalization of dominant—or dominating—views that persist in our nation, which makes those political statements appear as established custom or an accepted part of a what America is all about, when actually, it’s simply a political statement, not established as American doctrine as such. By revealing that such discourse is subject to challenge, such change can occur more readily. While political solutions might only make a dent in the implicit and explicit racism that Black and Brown Americans continue to experience in the twenty-first century, getting money out of politics, career politics out of Congress and the court, corporations out of the Bill of Rights, and equal application of the law for politicians into them, we allow actual engagement between government and people to take place. Perhaps then, we can actually start deconstructing or uncovering our history of racism at a policy level. Maybe for the first time ever.
We will do these things by invoking what we call the simple truths of life: integrity, empathy (which may lead to compassion), and being service-oriented—what men might experience as other-centered and women as connected—our cardinal principles for righteous living. By conducting our lives with those principles on top, it is our hope that, ultimately, in Ms. Wells’s lexicon, the darkness that blinds us will turn into light, that beacon of truth that provides the direction for extinguishing senseless, cruel prejudices and practices, injuries and injustices that not only People of Color experience, but all those whom the dominant group considers other, different, deviant: gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks; old people; people with disabilities; immigrants with non-Christian religions, and every other group that has had to endure humanity’s senseless degradation and debasement through the ages and are still having to endure even as I type these words on this page today.
Kathryn and I came to write Political Straight Talk through a lifetime of working for our own and everyone’s right to, in Oprah’s words, “be who you are.” That’s what she told her friend Gayle was the only thing every slave ever wanted, to be allowed that rather than the inferior caricature of what one could become. As white people, we feel it’s important to point out that such a caricature of cruelty was created in the imaginations of those who would only benefit by restricting the natural freedom of Blacks and then contorting the story of their characters to justify it: the white men of means and power of that time and to this day. For that is exactly what people who are involved in controlling other people’s lives are doing when they practice political discrimination in the forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and hatred of minority groups of all kinds, twisting and inventing the story that justifies it. And it distorts the humanity of us all. These phobias and supremacist beliefs serve to squelch human growth and potential on both sides of the power equation, even of those doing the fearing and hating. Any time you impose your will and power on others, you are limiting what you could have received from their wholeness. You are limiting your own wholeness when you believe keeping others down is the only way to raise yourself up.
We might ask how discrimination would be possible if politicians and ordinary citizens related to others not only using their heads but their hearts as well. If we did that, wouldn’t we be embracing the goodness and wholeness of people so they could experience being revered and loved for being just as they are—and then trusting that such reverence is real enough to create policy? Wouldn’t that be preferable to always wondering if words of acceptance and equality were those of imposters who can’t be treated as creditable? Of course. But as white people, we know we must also educate ourselves about the conditions that have brought us to the divisiveness and mistrust of these times in the first place. It didn’t start with the division inherent in a two-party system, but certainly, partisanship exacerbates the habit of creating an us-versus-them mentality around which we organize our identities. The discrimination of “us vs. them and we’re superior” is intrinsic to our Western Civilization; the Puritan settlers brought it with them; it’s been at the basis of all our dealings with the indigenous peoples who were already on this continent and the Africans that were brought here, enslaved, and freed as Black Americans. We know we need to look at that to deconstruct the implicit and explicit racism that some say is the engine that drives this country. We’re hoping there are alternative engines that we can rely on, like those in the simple truths of righteous existence.
That’s why we need politicians from any party or ideological position, from every party and ideological position to put aside these allegiances to party and ideology, whether they’re thinking like a Republican or a Democrat or a Green or a Libertarian or none of the above and think instead about what’s best for the people who live as one People on this land. Our country as a whole. They can only do this if they are (1) willing to tell the truth about their own interests and (2) willing to listen to the points of view from those with different interests from theirs and believe these as the truth as well.
Let’s just talk about the two major parties for a moment. As things are, if you think like a Republican or a Democrat, your ability to listen to others is suspect, your ability to think beyond these two perspectives is suspect. Views different from your own are quickly not tolerated, because those views clash with what you believe in, therefore, creating cognitive dissonance, an unconscious process that feels like intolerable anxiety. By automatically defending against the inclusion of such anxiety-producing thoughts in conscious awareness, anxiety is suppressed to a tolerable level. It’s not just Democrats and Republicans who do this, of course. This is the process white people are undergoing as a group when we deny the truth of Black and Brown and Indigenous peoples’ experiences. It is how men can out and out deny the validity of women’s experience. It is how the affluent automatically dismiss the concerns of working people and poor people. The fact that those in power, whether Democrats or Republicans, also do not cop, or acknowledge a wrong doing to the whole truth of their experience—the benefits they expect to receive from winning, the fear of losing a modicum of power, and so on—makes the need to avoid that anxiety of cognitive dissonance all the stronger. And the stronger you’re emotionally wedded to being a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat, for example, the less inclined you’re going to be able to accept views that are contrary or not seen as real to those views that your party espouses.
Meanwhile, neither party is grappling with the deep and widespread system of institutionalized racism, as expressed through policies, customs, and practices that benefit whites to the detriment of people of color. So being entrenched in either of them pretty much guarantees that the combined dominant power structure is not dealing with the fabric of white supremacy that has paradoxically held the classes in place and apart at the same time, and the richness of diversity at bay while exploiting it as cheap labor and marginal culture. What we could learn about community, humanity, and leadership from these marginalized cultures could actually save us. Let’s hope we’re not too late.
In our next blog, we’re going to talk a little about the importance of learning our history, and specifically the way that American History is taught in our schools that leaves us in the dark about how we got where we are today.