Truth Telling
Across the country, in countless ways, people are reckoning with the truth of violence in our land. For the first time in our history, the majority of people can no longer pretend that they do not know the depth of brutality that is routinely required to protect an ever smaller number of white, privileged, powerful people.
For most of our history, white America, and those who support them, have bought into what James Baldwin so called the “lie.” As Eddie S. Glaude explained in Begin Again:
Baldwin’s understanding of the American condition cohere around a set of practices that, taken together, constitute something I will refer to throughout this book as the lie. The idea of facing the lie was always at the heart of Jimmy’s witness, because he thought that it, as opposed to our claim to the shining city on a hill, was what made America truly exceptional. The lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose. If what I have called the “value gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.
Now that lie is unraveling rapidly. While some of us targeted by the lie understood the desperate contradictions in white supremacy and the democracy, it took the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 to force the beginning of a broader reckoning with violence. The decision of his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, to have an open casket and of Jet magazine to publish the photos of his disfigured body seared the consciousness of the country. It energized a generation of activists for black liberation and provided the moral authority for much of the movements of the 60’s to transform this country.
By 1980, the right wing forces of white supremacy had reasserted themselves. The election of Ronald Reagan, the Cowboy President, in reaction to the power of the civil rights era, and dedicated to overturning the “Vietnam syndrome,” reasserted the myths of American “greatness.” Reagan and subsequent presidents expanded the US military forces around the globe, intensified the use of “black ops” and subversive tactics, encouraged global torture and terrorism and advanced weapons of mass destruction. They justified preemptive war and the bombing of entire cities. They expanded the prison industrial complex and increasingly criminalized public protests.
But the myths of the powerful are unraveling. Truth is being told again and again. It began a decade ago with the killing of Trayvon Martin in February 2012. And it emerged these last two weeks in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa. Young people have been taking to the streets for peace, for protection, for new ideas of justice, safety and global responsibility.
Today the reality of violence, required by the state, encouraged in our people, absorbed as normal in our relationships, is visible for all to see. We are being forced to reckon with who we have been and who we are. The words of our poets, historians, activists and artists, are documenting the distortions and debasement of our hearts. The bodies of our children ripped apart by bullets cannot be denied. Now we urgently face the question of who we will become. Can we, with a deep understanding of the truths of our past, begin again to create a new future?