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Why Is It So Hard to Talk About America's Past? - Extended Interview | America Inside Out


4m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Why is it that we as a country have such a hard time coming to terms with our past and some of the uglier chapters? You think that saying "I'm sorry" makes you weak, and I think that's what has to change in this country. You can't actually tell the truth if you're not willing to confront the mistakes you've made.

If you go to South Africa, you see a nation that is committed to never forgetting a part of time. There's an apartheid museum. If you go to Rwanda, you see a country that is determined to not forget the genocide. If you go to the genocide museum, they actually have human skulls in there. That's just how powerfully they would express their pain and anguish.

I was in Berlin a month ago, and when you go to Berlin, you can't go 100 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed next to the homes of Jewish families that were adopted during the Holocaust. The Germans want you to go to that Holocaust memorial because they want to change their identity. They haven't pretended that there wasn't this thing called the Holocaust, and because of that, we don't have a healthy relationship with one another on the topic of race.

Statues, schools, highways—why is this symbolism so important? There are some people, I think, that you think it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter—what's the big deal? We honor people that tried to defend and perpetuate slavery. We create that same dissonance. We cannot legitimate slavery. We cannot legitimate lynching. We cannot honor segregation and racial hierarchy. We just can't do it and recover. That's the reason why those statues matter. Those street names matter.

Those statues and schools and highways are an incredibly powerful symbol that is really almost hard to describe. It is hard to describe, and the history around them makes that symbol even more disruptive, even more painful, because these monuments and memorials were largely erected to signal the triumph of a narrative war. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. They won a battle of never having to apologize for the violence and destruction of having enslaved people. It was designed to communicate to black people that racial hierarchy and white supremacy would still be the law of the land.

I don't think we've appreciated the heart of the psychic arm of what these symbols can do—not just to African Americans and people of color, but to all of us. Because when we are forced in this region to make ourselves proud of things that are not worthy of pride, to make ourselves proud of things that should really induce shame, we corrupt ourselves. We really do.

Should statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and other Confederate heroes be removed? I want to remove them because we all get closer to recognizing that they should have never been put up in the first place. I want us to get to the point where we accept and acknowledge that we're celebrating things that we shouldn't be celebrating. We should actually name some streets after white Southerners who tried to end slavery. We can name streets and schools after white Southerners who tried to stop lynching, and we can all be proud of that.

It would do something that these symbols don't do, which is that it could bring people together. How do you convince people who feel these statues are so associated with their personal stories that they don't want to let that go? My interest in talking about our history is to not punish America for this history. I want to liberate us. There is a way to be a white Southerner and proud of who you are and acknowledge the pain of this past. That's what restoration is about. That's what reconciliation is about.

Native Americans have to watch all this unfolding and think: when are people going to accept and acknowledge what happened to us? You can't live in a community like Montgomery, Alabama, without being mindful that the Creek Indian Nation was forced to cede 21 million acres of land to create this space. Then they were forced on a Trail of Tears to the west. Their burial grounds, their sacred spaces were destroyed to build hotels and banks so that black people could then be enslaved.

That story of the Native American genocide is a story that we also have to confront. We have to talk about that. We have to deal with that.

Are you optimistic we're at a moment in time that we can come to terms with the past? I'm optimistic because maybe we're in a moment where the silence is breaking down. If we can break down the silence, I have no doubt that something beautiful can emerge.

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