On History and Legends
Francesca and I watched 13th (which you can now watch for free on YouTube) last night. I am still reeling this morning. Frankly, watching it is essential.
I normally do not have a lot of trouble putting my thoughts into words. It’s, after all, my job and something I’ve worked hard at honing over my career. This isn’t a brag, it’s just a truth, but right now the words can’t seem to come together. I am having trouble expressing what I’m feeling.
Because what I’m feeling is akin to being forcefully woken up for the first time to a fundamental truth that has been resting under the surface of everything I’ve believed since I was a kid, everything I was taught in school, everything I’ve been reinforced in popular culture, everything I’ve told myself at night to feel better about what I know isn’t right or told myself when I saw injustice in our streets but turned away.
As a storyteller, I have always felt like I had a strong grasp of America’s “story.” For many of you reading this piece, this story might sound the same to what you’ve come to understand as well. That America, while founded on two original sins, is a country that has largely moved in the pursuit of justice and the righting of those sins. That being founded on the ideals of freedom and liberty has somehow given our nation, almost like a superpower, a uniformly transcendent ability to make tremendous mistakes, learn from them, grow from them, and then go on to make the world better. It’s what we were taught in schools, as legends passed off as history.
We were taught that the founders were incredibly just people, despite owning slaves. We were taught that slavery, as an institution, largely only existed as a troublesome mechanism to get the country to its justified status and earned prosperity today. That the Confederacy were just people fighting for their rights and not fully about maintaining their system of exploitation that took away the rights of others. That the Jim Crow Era that persisted for nearly 100 years afterwards, and the Civil Rights Movement that followed were obvious instances of our country dipping and bending towards justice. That the Civil Rights Act was a watershed moment in our history where we more or less “solved” racism and thus it was over. I used to believe I was radical for thinking, perhaps naively, that while we still had race issues today that they were somehow not as bad as they were, and that the true underlying issue of our nation was merely wealth inequality. The 1%.
But, and this is the truth that I’m grappling with right now that undermines everything I’ve come to believe, slavery hasn’t ended. We still have slavery. It comes in new forms — specifically the prison system that uses a clause in the 13th Amendment to force into indentured servitude black and brown people for incredibly minor offenses. This use of the prison system to keep slaves enslaved started shortly after black people were emancipated — emancipated by a president whose legend says he was a forward-thinker bending towards justice, but reality shows that he still didn’t feel black people were truly equal to white people.
White people (even myself at many points in my life!) hand wave this inconvenient truth by saying that reality is often complex, without regarding the fact that these legends serve to provide comfort to whites and minimize the true struggles minorities face in our country today.
America makes up 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison system. Think about that. 1 out of every 4 people in prison, in the entire world, is in prison in the United States. And the overwhelming majority of those in prison in the United States are black and brown people. In fact, if African-Americans and Hispanics were jailed at the same rate as white people, we would have a decline in our prison population by 40 fucking percent. We don’t talk about this because it’s inconvenient to our narrative of American history. It adds complexity where there was previously simplicity.
We were taught that the things America has done, we have done because they were either bad choices we couldn’t have avoided, or they were good choices that were tempered with the reality of the times. The reality is that we were never given the full picture in school.
We were taught legends about FDR and the New Deal but we weren’t taught about redlining, a practice that marginalized black people into neighborhoods without investment and still continues in one form or another to this day. We were taught legends about the protests over Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement in the South, but we were never taught about the Tulsa Massacre and Black Wall Street. I had to learn about it in a fucking HBO comic book TV show. When I saw it, it seemed like something as fantastical and unrealistic as the rest of the show. I couldn’t even parse something like that happening in our history and us not knowing about it. We didn’t know about the Rosewood Massacre until the 90s. And white people, myself included, have been turning away from the violence perpetrated by the state against black people for years until, with George Floyd and the protests that followed, we couldn’t look away any longer.
I used to think the story of America was one of a country founded on original sins that future generations made amends for, as best they could. Now I fully realize that the story of America is one of a country founded on original sins it has never, ever actually reconciled with. We never really freed the slaves. We just gave slavery a different name — mass incarceration.
To my black and brown brothers and sisters, I am sincerely sorry it took me this long to see what you have been living with for your entire lives. The damage that has been done to your families and communities, and the dehumanization that has been done by the government and the media. I don’t know how yet, but I am dedicating the rest of my life to helping make it right. To do anything less, with what I know now, would make me as complicit in these systems as those who created and enforce them.
