An elected leader in Portugal raises his arm in a Nazi salute while declaring that the country is not racist. In New York state a man in a small town declares that he would raise a Confederate flag if he had one because both sides were just fighting for what they believed in- making what they were fighting for not just equal but the same thing. Both of these were in the Guardian Monday morning.
They both illustrate people’s unwillingness to acknowledge the realities in which they live. In which we live. I refuse to believe that a European enacting the Nazi salute does not understand what it means. The man in New York is better, or worse, depending on how you look at it. According to a February 2018 article in US News only 8 percent of high school seniors could identify slavery as a central cause of the American Civil War. This is because it is not being taught in schools. As whole, the hundreds of years of American race-based chattel slavery endured by African Americans barely makes it into American textbooks. It makes people uncomfortable.
Not Black American Non-Immigrants. It’s a part of our history the torture of which is impressed upon our DNA. We don’t obsess over it. It just is. Just like we see how its influence still assaults us today through the institutions that were built upon it. The bricks of America’s foundation may be made of the hopes and dreams of our founders and the millions who have immigrated since. But the mortar is made from the crushed bones of indigenous people mixed with the blood of enslaved Africans. White Americans typically react to this knowledge in three ways: ignore it/pretend it is not true, trivialize it as “the past”, or distance themselves from it (My ancestors didn’t even come to the US until (insert date after the Civil War here)!). All of them manifest as anger.
In many ways it is just as bad in other colonized and colonizer countries as the antics of the Portuguese politician illustrate. According to Wikipedia “right-wing politics represent the idea that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, or tradition.” Theoretically, the social orders and hierarchies protected or promoted by the right-wing could be those that strive to stabilize social inequality, ensure universal access to opportunity, and seek to judge based on merit.* That rarely seems to be the case. Somehow it always seems to come down to Nazi salutes and Confederate flags or their international equivalents.
The main difference is that though the US is not that much more violent than our wealthy counterparts we are fifty times more murderous thanks to our abundance of armory. Owing to guns violence in the US is far more likely to escalate into murder. Having active shooter drills in elementary schools is not considered normal anywhere else in the world that is not experiencing active warfare. This makes the American version of racism, systemic and otherwise, particularly deadly. And this is when things are going well.
Today we have agents of the state dragging nonviolent protestors into unmarked cars. We have a president who dehumanizes those who disagree with him or are different from those in his base. Murderous vigilantes have GoFundMe accounts opened by those who purport to be Christians. The accounts amass hundreds of thousands of dollars. Children are kept in cages and separated from their parents. Women are forced into sterilization.
None of this is new to the American Black. This is the America experienced by Black people for the first 350 years. When the Black Civil Rights movement of half a century ago forced the government to acknowledge that it would have to provide civil and human rights to the members of the lowest castes, the state literally gutted itself in response. Funding was stripped from education, from state hospitals and mental health facilities, from vital infrastructure projects, and funneled into police and military.
That is largely how we ended up here.
Back in the day Secretary General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld said the UN was “not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell”. That’s kind of what truth commissions or truth and reconciliation commissions are about. The process is to hold public hearings to establish the scale and impact of past injustice and make it part of the formal public record. Both victims and perpetrators are officially recognized. The idea is to create a safe space for people to share their experiences. Ultimately, it is about both catharsis and accountability. It is only when the truth is known and acknowledged that people can move past the damage. Americans have absolutely no interest in this.
This is tragic on several levels.
Recognizing these realities is the first step in moving beyond problems that may otherwise seem insurmountable. These issues run the gamut from dictatorships to genocide. One of the barriers is that the US doesn’t have a one-time shocking event. Instead of a Holocaust we have colonialism. A fact-finding mission would uncover centuries of genocide, enslavement, and systemic, nationwide, federally enforced bigotry that white America would rather unsee as the reaction of many to the 1619 Project illustrates. (I still have so many problems with that date and the NYT project does have problems.)
The Republicans have proved over and over again that they have no interest in a truth that does not support their narrative. The Democrats have proven over and over again that they lack the juevos to stand up to the Republicans for the long term. The Squad, Maxine Waters, and others have exhibited ovaries of steel, but they are still a power minority. As of now there is still a lack of political investment on all sides.
For our nation to heal and become a more humane place, we had to embrace our enemies as well as our friends. The same is true the world over. True enduring peace—between countries, within a country, within a community, within a family—requires real reconciliation between former enemies and even between loved ones who have struggled with one another.
BY DESMOND TUTU | SEPTEMBER 1, 2004
There is a lot of rhetoric on both sides claiming we are on the brink of civil war. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was held in large part to stave off civil and/or international war involving what was at the time a nuclear power. Our Civil War remains the conflict that cost the most American lives. Now imagine if both sides were nuclear.
Sources
https://theconversation.com/do-truth-and-reconciliation-commissions-heal-divided-nations-109925
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/16/does-america-need-a-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-395332
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/truth_and_reconciliation
*Not saying that left wing authoritarianism/extremism is not also a thing. I would call the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution left-wing extremism. Communism as it is often practiced is an example of left-wing authoritarianism. And there is always Venezuela.