America is a crime scene, a promise, and a living possibility. It is also a long conversation, an extended argument about what human beings owe each another. If we love (or want to love) America, we have to look hard and humbly at the data of where we are lest the argument prove to have been more like a long, catastrophic con. Our history, as James Baldwin teaches us, can’t be bracketed away any more than breathing can be put to the side of speech. We live in and by the fact of what happened: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.” The work of remembering is the work of awakening to our own lives, our own context. To meaningfully respond to available data is to enter a state of responsibility, the lovely and constant task of a responsible people. To know the felt joy of responsibility is to refuse at every turn the “protective sentimentality,” Baldwin’s phrase, that prefers a mythic American innocence over a clear-eyed index of violence perpetuated, suffered, and, from time to time, unmasked in our land’s history. To challenge the script of protective sentimentality in an age of white supremacist memory laws can pose certain risks, but these are the very risks that make democracy possible within and in spite of moneyed interests, foreign and domestic, that appear hellbent on reducing us to a population of passive spectators each alone in our informational echo chambers. The new seriousness invites us to wake up to our own context and to explore with compassion and curiosity the context of others; the history that is our collective present. To be incurious or closed concerning these stories for fear of having our minds changed is to belittle ourselves & to cut ourselves off from the joy that is the reality of other people. Let’s not do that.
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Beautifully written, thank you!