ETHOS

By Chloe Wayne

I’m a little late on this, but check out this photo a blogger at Daily Kos, “the largest progressive community blog in the United States,” made and posted on the site (only to be taken down hours later):

What can be worse than the overt racist is the well-meaning, “colorblind” white liberal who is “down for the cause” but is seriously ignorant. I was shocked to find that the blogger in question posted the photo as a medium of support for Michelle Obama, and an attack against the Republican Party for their campaign tactics. The person even wrote underneath it: “Copy and send out as you wish.” Are you serious??????

In the question of Black freedom, the textbook answers are 1863 and 1964: the years of the Emancipation Proclamation and a landmark Civil Rights Act, respectively. But when, if ever, have we been emancipated from the mental and psychological stronghold our racially muddied history has had on us? It boggles my mind that the poster could not foresee people’s outrage at such an image, as if the pain of such atrocities no longer weighs heavily on our hearts and minds, as if racism and white supremacy are vestigial flickers of decades past that bear no implications for today.

James Baldwin once railed against that brand of conventional wisdom in a letter to his nephew marking the centennial anniversary of emancipation: “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free” (my italics). The they he refers to are “the innocents”—some of whom are our amicable and ostensibly non-racist (white) countrymen, oblivious to the continued causal correlation between black skin and plight. They are not free because they have yet to understand and fully grapple with their history that continues to shape their present. Why are they oblivious? Why don’t they understand? Because the days of slavery have passed, and according to Baldwin, they weren’t allowed to talk about its ills anymore.

His words ring true today, almost 50 years later, when the daughters and grandsons of those 1960s liberals proudly carry on family tradition, oblivious to inescapable ways that race continues to color America’s identity (no pun intended). Why are they oblivious? The days of de jure racism have passed, so we’re not allowed to talk about race anymore, of course. And now, we have aspiring graphic artists-slash-pundits running rampant with their designs on a blog that gets 600,000 hits a day…because, quite simply, they don’t know any better.

I mean, lynching is so last century, right? So that means white bloggers who have exhausted the conventional political pandering methods for titillating their audiences are allowed to reappropriate images of America’s homegrown terrorists branding and lynching a Black woman (none other than FIRST LADY-HOPEFUL MICHELLE OBAMA)…right?

Wrong. Aside from the many other issues this brilliant horribly misguided Photoshop idea brings to the fore, the salient one, for me, is that America’s obsessive footrace to distance itself from its heinous past (and, let’s be honest, its not so pleasant present) has proven triumphant. People seem to believe the past is, well, the past, and that the passage of time sufficiently obscures our connection to things we would rather forget, such as lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. And consequently, they are horribly careless with the ways they remember and reference them.

Again, Baldwin will say it much better than I can: “It is a sentimental error to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him” (Notes of a Native Son). Today, Black folk may not be strung up on trees every week, but the scars from Jim Crow certainly still sting, not least because we have yet to quash the forces and structures that sanction excessive brutality as a form of “policing” Blacks.

America has insisted on forgetting this part of its past, at the expense of those trying—impossibly—to heal. And we have pretended that its relative omission from history books and quotidian conversation can sever our ties to it; it is normal and normative to believe America’s history of racism is a non-issue today. So as a result, Barack Obama’s invocations of race in his campaign are supposed to be aberrant missteps for “playing the race card”…

…and a white blogger, in defense of the Obamas (are you serious???), fails to see his error in posting such an abomination. I’m appalled.