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# 2024-12-08 - The Lost Cause by Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
When Between the World and Me Faced a School Book Ban, Ta-Nehisi | |
Coates Decided to Report It Out | |
> The only book learning we ever got was when we stole it. Master | |
> bought some slaves from Cincinnati, that had worked in white | |
> folks' houses. They had stole a little learning and when they came | |
> to our place, they passed on to us what they knew. We wasn't | |
> allowed no paper and pencil. I learned all my ABCs without it. I | |
> knows how to read and ain't never been in a school room in my life. | |
> There was one woman by the name of Aunt Sylvia. She was so smart | |
> she foreknowed things before they took place. --Mark Oliver | |
The summer of 2020 now feels like distant history, and it is easy to | |
be cynical about that moment given the backlash that has followed | |
that season of protests over the parade of Americans murdered by the | |
forces we pay to protect us. But I remember an even more distant era, | |
when the names of those killed died with the people who carried them. | |
Those 2020 protests succeeded in implanting some skepticism in | |
people who were raised on the idea of Officer Friendly. I think | |
that is what the white supremacists feared most--the spreading | |
realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense | |
among Americans that there was something rotten not just in law | |
enforcement but maybe also in the law itself. That fear explains the | |
violence of the response to the protests, but even that violence | |
redounded to the benefit of the protesters because it confirmed their | |
critique. What was the justifiably noble interest that required | |
tear-gassing protesters blocks from the Capitol, or the deployment of | |
secret police in Portland, or the literal cracking of heads in | |
Buffalo? While violence was never forsworn, by the end of summer | |
white supremacists had learned a lesson: The war might be raging in | |
the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they | |
were ultimately fighting was the word. | |
Around the same time George Floyd was killed, Nikole Hannah-Jones won | |
a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in the 1619 Project, which argued | |
for America's origins not in the Declaration of Independence but | |
in enslavement. Nikole is my homegirl, and like me, she believes that | |
journalism, history, and literature have a place of honor in our | |
fight to make a better world. I had the great fortune of watching her | |
build the 1619 Project, of being on the receiving end of texts with | |
highlighted pages from history books, of hearing her speak on the | |
thrilling experience of telling our story, some 400 years after we | |
arrived here, in all the grandeur it deserved. Seeing the seriousness | |
of effort, her passion for it, the platform she commanded, and the | |
response it garnered, I knew a backlash was certain to come. But I | |
can't say I understood how profound this backlash would be--that a | |
"1776 Project" would be initiated by the president, that the 2020 | |
protests would be dubbed by some on the right as the "1619 riots," | |
thus explicitly, if in bad faith, connecting the writing and the | |
street, and that the White House would issue Executive Order 13950, | |
targeting any education or training that included the notion that | |
America was "fundamentally racist," the idea that any race bore | |
"responsibility for actions committed in the past," or any other | |
"divisive concept" that should provoke "discomfort, guilt, anguish or | |
any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her | |
race." It's true that the order was revoked after its author lost the | |
next election, but by that time it had spawned a suite of state-level | |
variants--laws, policies, directives, and resolutions--all erected to | |
excise "divisive concepts" from any training or education. The flag | |
of parental rights was raised. In Tennessee and Georgia, teachers | |
were fired. School boards in Virginia were besieged. And in North | |
Carolina, Nikole's tenure at the state's flagship university--where | |
she herself was an alum--was denied. | |
I guess it's worth pointing out the obvious--that the very governors | |
and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among | |
the most aggressive prosecutors of "divisive concepts." And I guess | |
it should be noted that what these politicians--and even some | |
writers--dubbed "critical race theory" bore little resemblance to | |
that theory's actual study and practice. So I will note it. But the | |
simple fact is that these people were liars, and to take them | |
seriously, to press a case of hypocrisy or misreading, is to be | |
distracted again. "The goal," as their most prominent activist | |
helpfully explained, "is to have the public read something crazy in | |
the newspaper and think 'critical race theory.'" It worked. Today, | |
some four years after the signing of 13950, nearly half the country's | |
schoolchildren have been protected, by the state, from "critical race | |
theory" and other "divisive concepts." | |
It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now | |
moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal | |
policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and | |
art. But in the months after George Floyd's murder, books by Black | |
authors on race and racism shot to the top of best-seller and | |
most-borrowed lists. Black bookstores saw their sales skyrocket. The | |
cause for this spike was, in the main, people who had been exposed to | |
the image of George Floyd being murdered who suddenly began to | |
suspect that they had not been taught the entire truth about justice, | |
history, policing, racism, and any number of other related subjects. | |
The spike only lasted that summer--but it was enough to leave the | |
executors of 13950 shook. And they were right to be. | |
History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates | |
the present. And framed a certain way, a story can be told that | |
justifies the present political order. A political order is not just | |
premised on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to | |
say on what unrealized possibilities can be imagined. Our | |
possibilities are defined by our history, our culture, and our myths. | |
That the country's major magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, | |
and social media were suddenly lending space to stories that | |
questioned the agreed-upon narrative meant that it was possible that | |
Americans, as a whole, might begin to question them too. And a new | |
narrative--and a new set of possibilities--might then be born. | |
The truth is that even as I know and teach the power of writing, I | |
still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the | |
real world. Maybe it is the nature of books. Film, music, the | |
theater--all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and | |
cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, | |
mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only | |
the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that | |
even its authors don't always comprehend it. I see politicians in | |
Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work, | |
tossing books I've authored out of libraries, banning them from | |
classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and brought into | |
another age, one of pitchforks and book-burning bonfires. My first | |
instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is | |
filled with men and women as lethal as they were ridiculous. And when | |
I force myself to take a serious look, I see something familiar: an | |
attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and | |
remake them in a more orderly and pliable form. | |
What these adults are ultimately seeking is not simply the | |
reinstatement of their preferred dates and interpretations but the | |
preservation of a whole manner of learning, austere and | |
authoritarian, that privileges the indoctrination of national dogmas | |
over the questioning of them. The danger we present, as writers, is | |
not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma | |
but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their | |
own. | |
I know this directly. I imagine my books to be my children, each with | |
its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The | |
Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son. He has that | |
union job my father once aspired to, four kids, and a wife he met in | |
high school. My second son, Between the World and Me, is the "gifted" | |
one, or rather the one whose gifts are most easily translated to the | |
rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, enjoys the finer things, and | |
talks more than he should. I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the | |
insecure one, born in the shadow of my "gifted" son and who has never | |
quite gotten over it. He has problems. We don't talk about him much. | |
All these children suspect that my daughter, my baby girl, The Water | |
Dancer, is my favorite. Perhaps. She certainly is the one that is | |
most like me--if a little better, more confident, and more | |
self-assured. I see my books this way because it helps me remember | |
that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They | |
leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own | |
impressions. I've learned it's best to, as much as possible, stay out | |
of the way and let them live their own lives. | |
My loyalty to that lesson is dispositional--I am often struck by | |
secondhand embarrassment watching writers defend themselves against | |
every bad review. But it's also strategic: My work is to set the | |
table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then | |
leave. Some people will like it, others won't, and nothing can change | |
that. I am at my worst out there defending my children and at my best | |
out of the public eye, enjoying the pleasure of making more of them. | |
But in the months after George Floyd, it became clear that this was a | |
privilege. Out in the real world, teachers, parents, students, and | |
librarians saw in this man's murder an America they had not | |
previously known. And with this new knowledge of the world, there | |
came an urge to understand. When these people spoke out, they found | |
their livelihoods imperiled. They did not have the luxury of | |
declining to defend themselves. I think a lot about this one note I | |
received from Woodland Park, Colorado. The school board was trying to | |
ban Between the World and Me. A resident wrote urging me to reach out | |
to one of the teachers who was fighting it. "He believes in you and | |
your message (as do I)," the resident wrote. "And he has been | |
suffering for it." Suffering. It felt inhuman to let that pass. So I | |
sent along a note of support. I even went on TV to call out the | |
school board. But after that I retreated into my own private space of | |
bookmaking. | |
And then I read about Mary Wood. The outlines of the case were not | |
much different from others I'd heard about: She was a teacher in | |
South Carolina who had been forced to drop Between the World and Me | |
from her lesson plan because it made some of her students, in their | |
words, "feel uncomfortable" and "ashamed to be Caucasian." Moreover, | |
they were sure that the very subject of the book--"systemic | |
racism"--was "illegal." These complaints bore an incredible | |
resemblance to the language of 13950, which prohibited "divisive | |
concepts" that provoked in students "discomfort, guilt, anguish, or | |
any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her | |
race or sex." And it was not just the students' complaints that | |
resembled the executive order--the South Carolina 2022 budget | |
contained a prohibition lifted, nearly word for word, from 13950. | |
The connection between the legislation and 13950 was obvious. Still, | |
for the first time I began to think about the vocabulary being | |
employed--discomfort, shame, anguish--and how it read like a | |
caricature of the vocabulary of safety that had become popular on | |
campuses around the country. I suspect this was intentional. | |
Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it | |
is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the | |
oppressed themselves. The strategy banks on the limited amount of | |
time possessed by most readers and listeners and aims to communicate | |
via shorthand that is just as often sleight of hand. It's not | |
surprising that everyday people grappling with laundry, PTA meetings, | |
and bills do not always see the device and the deception. But the | |
difference is clear--Mary's protesting students were not looking to | |
attach a warning to Between the World and Me about its disturbing | |
imagery or themes but to have the book, by force of law, removed from | |
the state's school altogether. | |
Literature is anguish. Even small children know this. I was no older | |
than five, crying in the back seat of my parents' orange Volkswagen | |
while they argued up front. When they turned to comfort me, they were | |
shocked to learn that I was crying not about their argument but about | |
the grasshopper who starved in winter while the ant feasted. The wolf | |
devours Grandma. The gingham dog and the calico cat devour each | |
other. I was not born into a religious home, but I knew that my peers | |
had been raised on stories of God casting Adam and Eve from paradise | |
for biting an apple, that he had destroyed all life save that | |
contained in the ark on a whim, that he had condemned me and every | |
other nonbeliever to eternal suffering. I suspect these believers | |
would say that the anguish, this discomfort radiating out of their | |
own gospel, is not incidental but is at the heart of its | |
transformative power. For my part, the anguish of the story of the | |
grasshopper and the ant was in the moral of the story: that laziness | |
and foolishness made one worthy of starvation. This kind of | |
retribution left me empty, and even then I felt I wanted no part of a | |
world that called starvation just. That was my personal | |
revelation--and one that apparently ran contrary to the story's | |
intended message. But in my anguish, in my disagreement with the core | |
of the text, I found my truth. And that, I suspect, is the real | |
problem. Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college | |
students, it is neither anguish nor discomfort that these people were | |
trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment. | |
I tracked down Mary's number. We spoke for about a half an hour. She | |
talked about the whole ordeal--the paranoia incited by anonymous | |
complaints; the school board meetings where she was pilloried; the | |
threats to her job. She spoke of the conservative tilt of the area | |
where she taught, Chapin, South Carolina--a lakeside town to the | |
northwest of the state capital of Columbia. She spoke of her own | |
enlightenment, of going off to college and reading postcolonial | |
literature until she felt the puzzle pieces of the world locking into | |
place. She talked of George Floyd's murder and how she'd formed a | |
book group with her department in that watershed summer. That was how | |
she found Between the World and Me. We were the same age. We both had | |
children who drove us crazy. We both practiced yoga for sanity. And | |
she needed it now, more than ever. All this she said in an accent | |
that told me that she was not just from someplace but of that | |
someplace. I have an accent just like that, remarkable as a facial | |
scar. And there was something else just as remarkable. Mary didn't | |
teach civics or current events. She taught writing. Advanced | |
Placement language and composition, to be precise. For the exam, | |
students would have to write an argumentative essay themselves, and | |
to help them learn how, she'd called upon Between the World and Me, | |
my loud and boisterous second son. Perhaps I am straining the | |
metaphor, but I really did feel like one of my children had gone and | |
gotten someone else into trouble. | |
"What will you do next year?" I asked Mary toward the end of our | |
phone call. | |
"I'm going to finish the lesson I started," she said. "I'm going to | |
teach Between the World and Me." | |
I sat on the phone, silent, for eight seconds. Writing is all process | |
to me, not finished work. It begins in the kind of anguish South | |
Carolina sought to forbid, sometimes originating in something I've | |
read, but more often in the world itself--in peoples and systems | |
whose declared aims run contrary to their actions. And through | |
reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That | |
moment of comprehension is ecstatic. Writing and rewriting is the | |
attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. | |
It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want | |
them to feel that same private joy that I feel. When I go out in the | |
world, it's gratifying to hear that people have shared part of that | |
joy, but Mary didn't just enjoy reading the book. The book had | |
brought her into the fight. | |
I finally broke the silence. I told Mary that I had been thinking of | |
coming down there, but I feared making a tense situation worse. Still | |
she urged me to come. There was a school board meeting in a week, | |
which she and some of her supporters would attend. I agreed to join | |
them. | |
By the next week I was with Mary, eating salad and drinking iced | |
green tea at a restaurant near Chapin. She was the portrait of a | |
familiar Southern archetype--blond, kind, outgoing, homegrown, | |
daughter of the local football coach and a kindergarten teacher. Her | |
claim to Chapin was strong--stronger even than some of the parents | |
who despised her. The town had seen an influx of families looking to | |
live somewhere conservative and traditional. Mary wasn't that. She | |
was fighting for her job in the very school where she had earned her | |
own high school diploma. How much this fact would help was unclear. | |
Chapin High School was overseen by Lexington-Richland School District | |
Five. The district has long leaned conservative. During the Trump | |
years, it toppled. School board meetings had become an open mic for | |
reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, and attention seekers. The | |
visible radicalization began with the district's response to | |
COVID--local residents began queuing up at meetings to denounce | |
quarantining as tyranny. I've watched videos of these events, and | |
they feel formless--a rage in search of a cause. The rage went from | |
masking and vaccination to DEI and pronouns. Something called | |
"emotional learning" would catch an occasional stray. But mostly, the | |
great enemy of Chapin was critical race theory. It was said that | |
District Five had become a staging ground for "educational warfare" | |
on CRT, a doctrine that was held responsible for "anxiety, | |
depression, and self-hatred," that raised suicide rates, and that | |
made students "ashamed to be white." I was told that there was an | |
occasional air of menace at the meetings, as when one speaker warned | |
the board, "We are watching," or another claimed that the country was | |
under the sway of practitioners of "pagan ways" and exponents of | |
"child sacrifice" and the "drinking of blood." And it was quite | |
normal for such sentiments to be applauded by spectators. | |
That District Five school board meetings had become contentious was | |
reflected in the security that greeted me at the door. I had to empty | |
my pockets, permit my bag to be searched, and pass through a metal | |
detector. On the other side I saw two beefy men dressed in army green | |
with visible bulletproof vests. This struck me as a bad omen. But the | |
guards greeted me politely, and when Mary and I turned the corner | |
into the hallway leading to the meeting room, we were met by a woman | |
named Brandi, a middle school science teacher. She stood in front of | |
a table handing out flyers against censorship, and when she saw us, | |
she smiled warmly. | |
Inside the meeting room, people milled around and chatted. There were | |
tables at the front of the room, assembled in a U shape, with | |
microphones and nameplates for the various officers of the district. | |
We walked over to the side of the room opposite from the tables, | |
where Mary's mother, Kathryn, waited for us. I shook her hand and her | |
eyes grew big and she smiled. She pointed us to our seats, which | |
she'd reserved, and in mine I found a copy of Between the World and | |
Me. | |
"Would you sign, please?" Kathryn asked, still smiling. | |
I signed, sat down, and scanned the crowd. What I noticed was that | |
half the people in the room were wearing blue T-shirts. Mary | |
explained that blue was the school color, and Brandi had organized a | |
group of sympathizers on Facebook, asking them to wear blue to show | |
their support for Mary. An older woman named Bobbie sat next to me | |
and we struck up a conversation. She did not know Mary and did not | |
wear a blue T-shirt. But she explained that after George Floyd's | |
death, her church had created a reading group around race. (She'd | |
become a huge Colson Whitehead fan.) The head of that group read | |
about Mary and urged all the members to come out and show support. | |
This was the second time I'd heard of a reading group in this town as | |
the epicenter of political disruption. From bell hooks on, books by | |
Black authors helped Mary understand "why things are so fucked up." | |
And it was these books that had brought Bobbie out to support Mary. | |
I understand the impulse to dismiss the import of the summer of 2020, | |
to dismiss the "national conversations," the raft of TV specials and | |
documentaries, even the protests themselves. Some of us see the lack | |
of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But | |
policy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material | |
change is in our imagination and ideas. And whereas white supremacy, | |
like any other status quo, can default to the cliched claims and | |
excuses for the world as it is--bad cops are rotten apples, America | |
is guardian of the free world--we have the burden of crafting new | |
language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies | |
are possible. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it | |
is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun | |
that work of imagining. | |
The board chair gaveled the meeting to order at 7 p.m. sharp. She | |
noted the full house and seemed to be girding herself for what was | |
coming. The board called for a moment of silence for "a great | |
tragedy," the specifics of which the chair did not explain. There was | |
a prayer and the pledge of allegiance and a report from the | |
superintendent on "academic freedom." From that point, allusions to | |
Mary's case crept into the board's business until about an hour in, | |
when, the undercard having been completed, the main event commenced. | |
The board was giving the community its opportunity to speak. | |
As the first woman approached the microphone, I scanned the room, | |
trying to ascertain the breadth of Mary's support. Only a few weeks | |
earlier, parents were queued up, at this same meeting, to demand her | |
firing. Now when I looked out, I saw that the blue T-shirts were | |
populous enough to indicate that her backers were deep. And then the | |
comments began. It was a blowout. Parent after parent lined up to | |
support Mary, most of them met by whooping cheers. A 14-year-old girl | |
stood up and quoted from Between the World and Me, noting that in all | |
her time in school she had never been assigned a book by a Black | |
author. Mary cried silently and whispered to me a running commentary | |
about each speaker--their family, their occupation, whether they had | |
kids in the district. No one, not a single speaker, stood up to | |
support the book's banning. I was initially surprised by this, but | |
later I understood--school board meetings, and local politics, are | |
small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that | |
night the faction was Mary's. | |
Sometimes I will be at a reception or an event or even out on the | |
street, and a brother will approach me to thank me for my work, and | |
his build, how he moves, his language, his haircut will inform me | |
that he has just finished a bid. I see these brothers and I remember | |
my time teaching in a prison. I see these brothers and I see that | |
shadow version of myself that my parents and teachers warned would | |
take shape if the notes in lipstick red continued, if my "conduct" | |
did not improve. The line between me and them, between me and the | |
shadow, feels thin. I don't think I have an intended reader--audience | |
is not something I think about directly--but if I did, it would be | |
those brothers, or rather that younger version of them trying to | |
navigate the line. There was not a single person like that in the | |
audience at that hearing, which was about what I expected. And I'd | |
spoken to enough audiences to understand that if you're lucky, your | |
writing moves beyond its imagined recipients. But I wasn't speaking | |
here. I wasn't even the subject. What I seemed to be witnessing was | |
less about a book as it was about something more localized--a kind of | |
referendum on the school district's identity. | |
Mary taught an Advanced Placement class, which is to say her audience | |
was not kids meandering off to college, as I had, but students aiming | |
for college credits and a head start in that world. There was a sense | |
in the room that avoiding "divisive concepts" was not just wrong on | |
moral grounds but that it represented a lowering of standards; that | |
to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for | |
Advanced Placement--one that validated the worst caricatures of | |
Southern whiteness often bandied by the kind of Northerner who | |
thinks, "We should have just let them secede." The room was | |
embarrassed. I remember one man, Josh Gray, a professor at the | |
University of South Carolina, standing up, his hair pulled back in a | |
ponytail, and bringing this self-inflicted humiliation into view in a | |
way that would never have occurred to me. "I can tell you, as a | |
redneck who's worked all over the world and met people from all over | |
the world," he said, "don't make the perception that [the students] | |
have to compete against worse by actions like this that do not | |
reflect well on our community." | |
This may seem self-interested, a stance taken more to avoid a stigma | |
than to break an arrangement of power. It's a legitimate | |
question--especially in the age of social media and loud virtue | |
signaling that followed 2020. But virtues should be signaled, and the | |
signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the | |
absence of the latter, not the presence of the former, that is the | |
problem. And I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of | |
charity. In this case, self-interest meant that here in the heart of | |
Jim Crow, and Redemption, ideas to the contrary could not be driven | |
from the public square. And that is progress. It just isn't | |
inevitable that such progress continues. | |
The following afternoon, I met Mary for barbecue. I was actually | |
giddy from the night before. I had expected to come into a den of | |
hectoring fanatics. And instead I'd found that there were allies | |
fighting back. Allies. When I started writing, it felt essential to | |
think of white people as readers as little as possible, to reduce | |
them in my mind to resist the temptation to translate. I think that | |
was correct. What has been surprising--pleasantly so--is that there | |
really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals | |
the human. Get to the universal through the specific, as the rule | |
goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels | |
abstract to me. What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to | |
understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job | |
over a book. | |
Mary's grandfather was a social worker and World War II vet who was | |
blinded disarming mines. He came home a ferocious advocate for the | |
disabled, but Black disabled veterans particularly. Although Mary | |
knew her grandfather, he didn't talk about his history as an | |
activist. She found out from a book after his death. Her parents were | |
more liberal than the norm--the type who in a red voting district | |
still put out a Biden 2020 lawn sign. But what she mostly had growing | |
up was an ill-defined sense that the world, as it was conventionally | |
explained, didn't make sense. She'd been bred to be a Southern lady, | |
but it didn't really take. She had to be bribed into etiquette class | |
with Bojangles. In church, Mary did not obsess over being saved so | |
much as she wondered why there were no women in the pulpit. And then | |
in college, books righted the frame: She read bell hooks's Talking | |
Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. When she finished, she | |
called her mother and said, "This is why things are so fucked up." It | |
was exactly the experience that the purveyors of 13950, the book | |
banners, and those targeting CRT were seeking to prevent. | |
We finished eating and took a drive over to the state capital. South | |
Carolina was the first state to secede and also the state where both | |
Reconstruction and Redemption reached their most spectacular ends. | |
All through that period, South Carolina had been a majority-Black | |
state, and at the height of Reconstruction, before its undoing in | |
Redemption, the state was home to an emancipated working class and a | |
multiracial democracy. It's quite the story--but it's not the one | |
that the State House tells. There is a beautiful sculpture there | |
wrought by the astronaut turned artist Ed Dwight. But most of the | |
sprawling 22 acres of the State House proper are a shrine to white | |
supremacy. A collection of giant statues sits on raised platforms, so | |
that men like Strom Thurmond, who pinned his entire political career | |
on segregation, loom like gods. Wade Hampton, who enslaved | |
generations and then fought in a bloody war to uphold that system, is | |
there. So is Ben Tillman, who once boasted of lynching from the | |
Senate floor. Tillman knew of what he spoke. In 1876, Tillman pitched | |
in to massacre Black people in Hamburg, and in 1895, he'd rallied | |
white South Carolinians to write Black people out of the state's | |
constitution. The movement to erase Black people from politics swept | |
through the South and won the day in legislatures, state houses, and | |
courts. But if you just looked at the obvious organs of the | |
government, you'd miss the breadth of the attack. | |
We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with | |
a flaming cross for so long that we have sometimes failed to | |
recognize the political power of culture. But they have not. And so | |
the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by | |
trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons | |
trick-or-treating as African kings. The fear instilled by this rising | |
culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for | |
tomorrow--a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are | |
not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for | |
Liberty shrieking "Think of the children!" must be taken seriously. | |
What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her | |
right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and | |
sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a | |
hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her | |
country's ideas, art, and methods of education. | |
That is the heart of it. It is not a mistake that Mary teaches | |
writing at its most advanced level and has found herself a target. | |
Much of the current hoopla about book bans and censorship gets it | |
wrong. This is not personal--it is political. It is not about me or | |
any other writer. It is about all of us--writers and readers, | |
comrades, and the work we do together. To think. To question. To | |
imagine. I can't say I always knew it, but in my time teaching it | |
soon became clear that becoming a good writer would not be enough. We | |
needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a | |
reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell, | |
or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to | |
reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me | |
euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire, | |
as Mary had been set on fire since college: by words on a page. | |
As we walked the grounds of the State House, I thought about what it | |
meant for a young student to visit these same grounds. I thought | |
about what it must mean to walk amongst these Klansmen, enslavers, | |
and segregationists raised up on their platforms to the status of | |
titans. I thought about what it means to go back to the schools, | |
where work rooted in these truths is slowly being pushed out, to the | |
libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I | |
thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; | |
not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong | |
questions are never asked. | |
The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of | |
wars long settled and on behalf of men long dead. But their | |
Redemption is not about honoring a past. It's about killing a future. | |
From The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Copyright 2024 by BCP Literary, | |
Inc. Published by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division | |
of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. | |
From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message | |
tags: article,political,race | |
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