Mr. Chetwynd:
You have offered a thoughtful and moving perspective on harm and forgiveness, but I think you have missed much of what the distinctly American experience, and Obama’s speech, are about.
Though there is a long history of persecution of Jews, the Nazi horrors you mention occurred in one specific, historically circumscribed time and place. Their impact was incalculable, but their temporal and geographic extent was in fact quite limited. They were a product uniquely, and solely, of the Nazi regime; when it ended, the German persecution of Jews ended. Though Jews had faced discrimination throughout Europe, the Nazi horrors did not begin until Hitler came to power, and lasted only in areas in which he had control, for only so long as he had it. At any time beginning with the Allied occupation of post-war Germany, and afterwards, it became safe for Jews to live in the same countries that had worked their destruction only a few years previously (though few chose to do so). Germany itself (with American prodding), as you note, undertook a remarkable self-examination and self-flagellation; it now harbors the most stringent anti-fascist laws and regulations in Europe, and has been a major supporter of Israel.
All this is distinctly different from the American experience. Anti-black discrimination in America is not limited to a particular time and place, or a particular political context. It predates our nation, and was incorporated into the founding structure of that nation. Slavery itself persisted for 90 years after publication of the declaration that “all men are created equal”. Obama – in a remarkably generous reading of the Constitution – notes that the founders who gave us slavery also gave us the tools to remove it, but it remains true that it was not removed for almost a century, and that half the nation living under that Constitution fought the other half in our bloodiest war to retain it. Slavery was then replaced by Jim Crow – official laws and policies restricting and limiting blacks to conditions often near enough to slavery as to be indistinguishable. That required a slow struggle for redemption that, arguably, is not complete. It was followed by a mass movement to simply exercise openly the civil rights the Constitution supposedly guaranteed – a struggle that was met with dogs and fire houses, bombings, arson, and murder, and beatings and lynchings of those who dared to sign black voters’ names on election rolls, or, as black voters, attempted to cast a ballot. Those crimes and murders were committed, often openly, not merely by leading white citizens but by officials of state and county governments. That period took place during the lifetime of the people condemned by those who rejected Obama’s speech about that history. And today, operatives of the GOP, acting as officers of state governments, have acted to falsely purge voter rolls of black citizens’ names, and have conducted elections in which, suspiciously, black – and always black – votes have been undercounted, and black communities have suffered lost or malfunctioning voting machines and closed polling places. As Faulkner notes, and Obama reminded us, this part of our past “is not even the past”.
But that is only the history of open and coordinated – and legal – discrimination and oppression against blacks. This is a history that spans not the dozen or so years of the Nazi regime, but close to 400 years of systematic American racial discrimination, from the founding of the nation through every change of government, affecting every single generation of black Americans and, through its impact on black family lineage, education, and wealth accumulation, and on other social factors, continues to affect the vast majority of black families today. Crucially, too, it affected every generation of white Americans, ensuring that they would always grow up and live without ever fearing being denied their Constitutional rights, never be lynched in daylight by mobs of their hometown neighbors led by the local sheriff, never see the most basic public accommodations closed in their faces, never wonder at the gaps in their family histories. But those overt consequences are only one way in which the American experience casts a uniquely long shadow.
In addition to the imposition of this great divide upon itself and its own citizens, and again in distinction to the Nazi experience, America has never grappled with its own past. There have been programs aimed at alleviating obvious examples of black misfortune. Usually those programs were grudging, mismanaged, and temporary (and against the entire history that has brought us to this point, what program could possibly have made more than a dent in the legacy of American racial history?- what program, however successful, could be regarded as other than partial and incomplete so far?); always they were limited to specific, visible consequences of discrimination – school enrollment, housing, money for college – and not the deep history of underclass oppression that haunts America today. Whatever they were, they were mechanical responses to a failure of social mores. America treated its black community not only as sub-par but sub-human, in one way and another: first the obscenity of slavery, later generations of color bars, literal starvation wages, abusive medical research, pathetic and incompetent education, and demeaning fables of inadequate IQ, excessive sexuality, and animalistic physical prowess offered to excuse it all. Those abuses continue unabashedly (one of the authors of the infamous The Bell Curve is a prominent member of National Review’s online writing staff).
America – while grudgingly admitting that certain specific practices, usually 100 years or more in the past, were wrong – has never admitted that the mistreatment of blacks has been systematic, pervasive, and grounded in the ideology and psychology of influential elements of the white population. But the discriminatory practices have been systematic, pervasive, unending (though changing over time), and defended by certain elements of white society and white politicians. Individual events or practices have sometimes been redressed – usually incompletely and usually very late – but the fact that white America could and did, and often still does, defend and excuse those practices, and virtually never apologizes for them, let alone grapples in its conscience with the fact that it was possible for one part of our society to do so to another, less powerful, part, does not change. This is not opinion or interpretation – it is simple observation. It is no more that obvious fact – facts that blacks are not blind to.
When America as a nation, openly acknowledges its guilt – its sheer and inescapable moral unrighteousness, extending in some way through every aspect of its being and contaminating every aspect of the history and treatment of its most visible minority group, every year and every generation back as far as it is possible to trace – then it will have begun to grapple with its own legacy. White Americans of today – like Germans of today – do not have to accept personal guilt for the actions of white Americans of yesterday, but they must acknowledge that white America as a group treated black America as a group in unconscionable ways, throughout history and in some ways still today. America need not, and perhaps should not, pass laws criminalizing praise for slavery or the display of relics of the Confederacy, as Germany has done regarding Nazism, but until white Americans stop displaying the Confederate flag as a (entirely unironic) symbol of their “heritage”, and conservative politicians stop seeking votes by pledging their commitment to that same flag – until America as a whole is as shamed and heartsick over references to slavery and the Confederacy as Germans are now regarding the Nazis – then America will only have pretended to try to come to terms with its own past, and sham American “growth” will in no way resemble the authentic soul-searching the Germans have given themselves.
There is simply no comparison, in terms of historical reach and pervasiveness (though a different argument might be made regarding their impact as actual genocides), between Nazism and American racism. Worse, there is simply no comparison between the openness, honesty, authenticity, and success of the overt German effort to acknowledge and purge itself of its racist inclinations, and America’s interminable insistence on minimizing its own, vastly more extensive and far-reaching, past. We have simply never admitted to ourselves who we ourselves are. And again – for the stupid among us – yes, it is true that to declare America blood-guilty in all the depths of its history and nature, as it surely is, is not to imagine that today’s living Americans are personally guilty of particular historical abuses, or the direct sufferers of those abuses. But today’s Americans are the inheritors, white and black, of the social groups who imposed and profited from, or suffered and despaired under, the discrimination that pervades our history. And yet whites deny the role of whites in that history, and they deny their place today as its inheritors. White America, throughout its history and today, has always pretended that its behavior was somehow accidental, incidental, not reflective of any actual decisions carrying the weight of moral responsibility. White America has succeeded at the seeming impossible: it has made itself less morally responsive than the ex-Nazis of Germany. And until America – which means white America – faces, claims and owns up to, and accepts its own past, that will remain true. Black America knows this, has always known it. It is the most minimal act of decency – an act that far precedes actual atonement – to stop lying to ourselves about it. Now is as good a time as any.
