I was amazed–well, maybe not amazed, but certainly baffled–during the presidential campaign when the whole Reverend Wright controversy drew such scrutiny. I thought perhaps some scrutiny was due, but for actually the inverse reason of what actually drew the reactionary attitudes to their regular volume of jeering stupidity in what passes for public media. In his sermon, Jeremiah Wright analyzed the heavy, dim-witted, and short-sighted militaristic response of the U.S. to the blatantly uninvestigated catastrophe of 9/11. In his sermon, he also digs deeper into the history of America, exhuming for his audience the reality and legacy of racism in the United States.
http://essence.typepad.com/news/2008/03/the-full-story.html
This country was built on genocide and slavery. This is a painful fact, but this is history. History defines, shapes, and informs our lives.
Many white people in America still are not willing to look at history. The American history that is taught and institutionalized in public schools is an embellished, gold-plated, shiny sit-com soap opera, a condensed Reader’s Digest version of candy-coated myths shored up out of selected historical facts and fables. And this is what children learn from a young age: happy Indians shared their harvest with struggling colonists (no mention here of puritan slaughter of Indians); slavery was ended by Abraham Lincoln (no mention here of Lincoln’s political motive of preserving the Union); The Underground Railroad becomes some kind of actual subterranean route to freedom (no mention here of the fact that Harriet Tubman carried a gun); Lewis and Clark are models of cultural fusion and pioneers (scant mention here of the decimating, genocidal consequences for the indigenous peoples, animals, and land of the opening of the West to homesteaders and development and railroads); students are taught about the heroics of John Brown and have to scavenge to find information about Nat Turner.
White privilege indeed. Whitewash. Brainwash. It’s a white wasteland: suburbia and all its trappings. And this is what children, no matter the color of their skin, are taught to aspire towards: material gain, security, a stable career that sedates the soul and bloats the body. The curiosity of the creative mind is stifled by freshly-printed textbooks and mechanical routines. Welcome to the Machine.
What does white privilege serve? It doesn’t even serve white people–not really. It’s a state of blindness and intellectual death that serves only the machinations of the status quo. If people were actually to begin to educate themselves on the history of the United States, and if we began to have public discussions about what the United States of America represents–which is the colonial expansion of a haunted people disconnected from their own humanity–the whole system might begin to break down into self-reflective parts that simply do not serve the commodity-producing aims of the machine.
Ack!
It’s enough to make a person move. Some people will continue to choose not to look at these roots, deluding themselves with falsities and comfort; others are more willing to look closely at the roots. Those that look at the roots of our dystopian society may begin to pull them out, or think about the best ways to do that. These are the radicals. The roots they pull out of the ground are invasive and not healthy for the Earth community and ecosystems. As we pull out these roots, we also begin to free up space to plant more nurturing roots. This is the joy of our work: tilling the ground and charging it with the nutrients that our souls hunger for, tending the tender shoots, nurturing them, protecting them against the rampant proliferation of the invasive species by pulling those imbalances and injustices out by the roots. This is long-term work. This is also work that demands teams and work that demands decentralization. Many actions must be taken in many different places, and only the people who call those places home will be able to act appropriately to care for their homes, their ecosystems, their cultures.
This is why the very idea of American culture as we have come to know and practice it is toxic: it’s too large. It’s too large to be authentic for the local realities of our communities and lives. This same toxicity, obviously, pours out of the idea and practice of globalization, which may be better understood as economic imperialism and neo-colonialism.
Reverend Wright is a preacher who was preaching sense and justice to a particular set of people, his local congregation specifically. We may generalize and suggest that he was preaching to African Americans in particular. If we’re serious about social justice, I think we have to understand that Reverend Wright’s sermon, which has come to the attention now of the national American psyche and the media-sedated public, is a piece of spoken literature that can be appreciated in the context of American history–but not the history that has been institutionalized and officially sanctioned. We must approach Reverend Wright and Malcolm X , as well as Ward Churchill and Paula Gunn Allen, as well as Inga Muscio and Gore Vidal, as well as many others, as wise perspective-shifting friends who are attempting to help us free ourselves of the constrictions of our own mis-education, which we received as captive children–much as the many children of the many tribes of our nation’s first peoples received their education as captive children in schools that were completely out of context and synchronicity with their culture and heritage. In many ways, our ignorance of our culture–whether our skin is white, black, red, green, yellow, or striped–is deeper and more disturbing than the ignorance of uneducated black slaves and mis-educated tribal peoples. We are a motley bunch of mutts, us Americans. Each of us has a tangled heritage of immigrant-laced history to discover and understand and put into context. We are all dislocated peoples, and we are all disenfranchised by an imperial system that does not serve us.
