Time for white America to take a ride in the back of the bus
Another Juneteenth has passed, and sadly, we find ourselves as a nation still guilty of grievous inhumanity.
June 19, 1865 was the day in our nation’s history when Texas announced the abolition of slavery and is celebrated as Freedom Day across the United States.
Freedom can mean a lot of things, of course, but in the context of slavery and racism, and although the shackles and chains are gone, racism thrives in this era of growing white nationalism, bigotry, and hate. They are a part of the nation’s DNA.
There has been a lot of talk the past week about a way to settle this lopsided score, including reparations for those bound into slavery that came to our shores even before the nation formed.
It’s certainly one of those hot-button issues, but although some claim a web of complexity in their arguments against reparations, the answer is simple: Reparations are in order.
Now, my family tree doesn’t have very deep roots in the United States.
My grandparents, except for my grandmother on my mother’s side, all came from Europe. Granny? She was first-generation American.
My people, on both sides, had nothing to do with the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that captured and shipped some 12.5 million Africans to the New World, 10.7 million of whom survived the journey. Only 300,000 of those ripped from their native lands came to the colonies before 1776, the remainder landing in the Caribbean and South America.
We have no ties to the antebellum South.
You won’t find a Yankee or Rebel anywhere in my ancestry.
My formative years were in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, technically neutral during the Civil War, but an enigma in all practicality that gets slimier with time.
You see, although as the war raged and slaves escaped the oppression of the Deep South, they often moved to or through St. Louis. Even so, slavery was strong in my hometown. In fact, I remember a field trip once when I was in grade school. We visited the Old Courthouse, now in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, and were told how slaves were sold on the steps of the building.
There were depictions of the sales, complete with whips and sobbing women.
I remember being horrified.
I came from a fairly sheltered, white, lower middleclass environment.
With the exception of one of my classmates, who came from an interracial marriage, there were no children of color in my elementary school.
We thought that the racial slurs we heard on the playground were how you referred to people of different nationalities and backgrounds because, after all, that’s how everybody — family, friends, and neighbors — spoke. The language we used as kids would have made Archie Bunker blush.
We had Amos and Andy on the radio and television and Heckle and Jeckle in our cartoons, and we flocked to the theater to watch Disney’s “Song of The South,” which brought the tales of Uncle Remus to full animated life.
Our schools, neighborhoods, and churches were segregated. So were our restaurants and diners.
This was, of course, how we were raised. It’s why we never sat in the back of the bus. It’s not an excuse, it is being pathetically ignorant.
There was plenty around us to inform, educate, enlighten, but we were so entrenched, as a nation, so immersed in this culture, that we ignored the realities of what was happening. The reluctance to change was so strong that we reacted in anger as the Civil Rights movement struggled and clashes between the races escalated to moments of unspeakable violence that shook our world.
We have a poisonous history in this country of white supremacy.
We did it to the Native Americans, whose lands we seized.
We did it to the African-Americans, who we enslaved and who we are still reluctant to treat with the equality and respect white America bestows upon itself.
We continue to do it to those of Hispanic heritage, demonizing them, wanting to build walls to shut them out, wanting to strip them of human dignity and brotherhood.
We continue to do it to members of the LGBTQ community because of who they happen to fall in love with.
We do this to Muslims and Middle Easterners because we do not understand their culture and beliefs.
We did this to the Japanese at the outset of World War II when we rounded up about 125,000 of them and placed them in what President Franklin Roosevelt himself called concentration camps. I’ve toured Manzanar — located in Independence, California — the most well known of those camps. It is and was a desolate place with no amenities where some of America’s hardest-working immigrants and budding businessmen and women were caged.
We rectified, sort of, that mistake in 1988 when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which compensated more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in those camps.
There was a formal apology and a miserly $20,000 in compensation paid to each surviving victim.
It wasn’t much, but it was an acknowledgement, which was enough for some.
And now, it is time to make reparations again.
It’s not a popular idea. In fact, 70 percent of Americans oppose the idea. And it will be difficult to pull off.
But it is the right thing to do.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is leading the opposition, of course.
“We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation,” he added. “We elected an African-American president.
“I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that.”
McConnell is correct in saying that no one currently alive was responsible for slavery.
But we are responsible for the blossoming white nationalism that is a continuation of the racism that spurred slavery.
We are responsible for tolerating the hate and anger spewed by those who attacked peaceful protesters in Charlotte and Ferguson, for the widening gap between wages for black and white workers, and for the discrimination that permeates our police departments that resulted in professional athletes taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem in protest of the egregiously unpunished crimes against people of color.
We are responsible for the arrogance of those who ignore the pleas of the oppressed.
We are responsible for our own minds, bodies, and souls.
We may not have owned slaves. We may not have blocked the doors of the schoolhouse. We may not have used the “n” word.
But it is up to us to make good on the promise of this country to not rest until there is liberty and justice for all.
And maybe it might be time to take a ride in the back of the bus.
It just might give us all a different perspective.
Peace.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not reflect those of The Independent. The Independent neither condones nor supports the racist statements made in this opinion piece.
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