History

Kara Walker, Burn, 1998

Do we Americans have some particular knack for lying to ourselves?

That question arose, most recently, during the imbroglio over Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his association with Barack Obama. What did Wright say that caused all that furor? He said this:

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo….We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear….We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost….Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism.”

I don’t see the problem. Is any word of that statement untrue? Of course not. If anything, the facts are worse. This country was founded by men who saw nothing wrong either with owning other human beings or with systematically dispossessing and then killing those who inhabited the land before us. And those facts have haunted our history ever since.

And the worst of it is how easy that history has made it to lie to ourselves today. Maybe we have no choice. Maybe if we confronted our present conduct for what it is we would also have to look at who we are and how we got here. Or maybe self-deception just becomes habitual. I don’t know. But I do know that if we can’t recognize what Wright said for the truth, we’re lost.