White Darkness: Raw Caucasian Truth

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there                    has always been.  The strain of anti-intellectualism has been                                               a constant thread  winding its way through our political and                                                  cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy                                                        means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

                                           --Issac Asimov

In Donald Trump’s America, the MAGA mantra has become, “My ignorance is greater than your knowledge!”  An American citizen by cruel default, I am descended from kidnapped Africans enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and in the South Carolina low country.  When the freedom came, freed slaves were never asked if they wanted to become citizens of the United States.  They were not asked if they wanted to be returned to their homelands or if they wanted to be sent to a new land where they could create their own new nation.  It is likely that many ancestors would have opted for all three options, which is to concede the diversity that has always existed within the African American community.  The ancestors were never asked to articulate or to fulfil their sense of their own destiny.

47 is not the first American President to lie to the American people.  The United States was borne out of the Mother of All White-Lies.  America has never been the nation it eloquently professes to be on paper.  Ten of the first thirteen Presidents—including Washington, Jefferson, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson—were slave owners.  Jackson’s Presidency ushered in the Age of the Common Man (so long as he was white).  It became a time when the mythology and the rituals of white supremacy were codified into law and into practice.  The United States was created as a society based on racial preferences and a system of social, economic and political advancement for white people.

There has never been a time during the African experience in the United States when black people have not lived under threat.   “Slaves” were not brought from Africa.  Diverse African peoples were targeted because of the skills they possessed and then enslaved throughout all of the Americas.   When the Constitutional Convention delegates agreed to the Three Fifths Compromise, they weaved their belief that enslaved Africans were no more than beasts of burden into the collective consciousness  and into the social fabric of this nation.  The Founding Fathers were willing to sacrifice black peoples’ humanity on the altar of what evolved into a capitalist political economy brazenly justified in the name of a Christian religion they debased.

Most Americans do not know America’s true history.  They only know the sanitized stories they have been taught.  No “Trail of Tears” or “Sand Creek Massacre.”   No Dred Scott decision, when the Supreme Court ruled the Founding Fathers never intended for “the slaves” to be considered citizens and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared, “A black man had no rights a white man need respect.”    No Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City when 146 mostly young immigrant women were killed.  No Japanese American citizens being forced into internment camps during WWII.  No LA Zoot Suit Riots when American servicemen and white Angelenos attacked Mexican Americans.

Most Americans (white, black or otherwise) do not grasp the Constitution beyond free speech and the right to bear arms.   They know nothing of the 13^th amendment (1865) which abolished slavery or the 14^th amendment (1868) which “granted citizenship”  and “equal protection” to the newly “freed slaves” or the 15^th amendment which essentially gave black men the right to vote.  They know nothing of this Radical Reconstruction era (1865-1877) when the experiment in American democracy was expanded to include African Americans. 

They have not been taught how Ohio’s Rutherford B. Hayes secured the Presidency in 1876 by agreeing  to remove Federal troops from the former Confederate south (Hayes-Tilden Compromise) which permitted the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.)and the implementation of a revitalized plantation economy based on a system of share cropping/tenant farming that was designed to lock the “former slaves” and poor whites into an entrenched cheap labor force. It also spawned white terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.  This period culminated in 1896 with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision which sanctioned Jim Crow racial segregation as the law of the land.

In “Still Strangers” (A Black Voice in the Wilderness), I wrote, “The specter of race is always played out inside the tragedy of black and white.  The dangerous life-dance between the people who identify themselves as white and the people they designated as black marks the social status of all the other marginalized groups and/or classes of people in relation to mainstream American society.”  Andrew Hacker asserts, “… members of all these intermediate groups have been allowed to put a visible distance between themselves and Black Americans.  Put most simply, none of the presumptions of inferiority associated with Africa and slavery are imposed on these other ethnicities.” (2024)

The MAGA backlash that exploded in reaction to the progressive coalition that produced the Barack Obama Presidency, was a desperate recognition that the dynamics of black life have provided the activist template for all of this country’s unwanted and rejected “tired and poor.”  Europeans and peoples of European descent have imposed their radioactive notions of religion, morality, class and racial differences on a world that has always been diverse—a world in which the people that identify as white have always been the true racial minority. The popularity of Barack and Michelle Obama only served to magnify the reality that sometime during this millennium, white people will no longer constitute the majority in American society and that Spanish will become the most widely spoken language.

The Trumpian challenge to American democracy and perceived shared values is really about white people: college educated, non-college educated, working class, middle class, independents, republicans, democrats, liberals, conservatives, progressives, urban, suburban, rural and especially white women.  The current generation of decent, “I am not racist” white people must finally accept the degree to which their standard of living was created by the Europeans that colonized and terrorized, not just the so-called New World but the whole world.  It is time for them to stand up and to stop standing on the sidelines witnessing an unfolding drama they know is horribly un-American.

To only focus attention on the more extreme manifestations of white supremacy is too expedient.  It encourages people that benefit from a willfully ignorant white-privilege way of life to spurn any responsibility for the destruction inflicted on the decimated communities living just beyond their tranquil suburban neighborhoods, their rural small towns, their urban high-rise vistas.  It allows them to ignore the question of how a racially segregated society has negatively affected them.  The black experience in this country and the experiences of the colonized are rife with stories that chronicle the inhumanities not only Americans, but peoples of European descent will tolerate  to maintain the “benefits” of modern civilization.

Most Americans never question the origin of phrases like, “The Third World” or why millions of people have been relegated to impoverished lives in the colonies Europeans once ruled or why the descendants of the colonized are now so easily designated as “illegal aliens” by the descendants of the settlers and the colonizers.  Where is the First World?  Where is World Two?  Most Americans have no real idea as to how America became “a world power” or how the developed world became the collection of European nations that make it up today or why the Asian nations—especially China, India, oil rich Arab nations, Iran and a divided Korea—occupy a unique middle ground between Worlds One and Two.  Unfortunately, Africa’s natural resources remain the coveted prize and peoples of African descent are no more than fodder to be exploited.

America remains what it has always been: a divided nation, caught up in the throes of its own Puritanical vision, racism, misogyny, self-deception and greed.  Jim Crow has been rechristened, “James,”  and the new dog whistle to attack hard-fought-for gains of black progress is, “woke DEI racial preferences.”  Wokeness as a concept is a product of the Black Lives Matter movement that erupted in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.  “Black Lives Matter” is just the current name for a movement that essentially began in 1619 at the Jamestown settlement when Africans were first traded for supplies in the English colonies that became the United States.

The current attack on higher education, particularly on the disciplines of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, and Latinx Studies, is really about the “forgotten silent majority” retaking control of this country’s evolving narrative.  A culture war is being waged to determine what America has become, and more importantly, what is America becoming? After 250 years, we are still a wandering people in search of a mythical Promised Land and a healthy ethic identity as Americans of African descent.  It is sad but revealing that mainstream America expects African Americans to be blindly grateful to be Americans in the same way that slave masters believed their “slaves” were grateful to be enslaved.

Donald Trump and his cult following fail to understand that because of their arrogant attempt to deny the true story of the black experience in the United States, they have acknowledged it by bringing more attention to it.  The real MAGA fear is rooted in the realization black people are still here; that we have survived and that so many of us have managed to thrive.  The real issue is the extent to which the black experience has awakened the other marginalized communities that have always existed.  The Founding Fathers never envisioned the United States would grow into the diverse country it has become or that its diversity would reflect the diversity that has always existed throughout the world.

Donald Trump represents an element that has always existed in this society; that has always existed in the under belly of the Western world.  He has made it possible for all the world to see its reflection in the other side of America’s face.  Now that I have become an Elder, I smile when I hear myself say, “This, too, will pass.”  Even though the journey to reclaim a true sense of our own humanity is littered with broken bodies and damaged souls, now is the time for us to remember we are descended from ancestors who refused to die before their time and who learned how to make a way out of no way.

We have come this far by faith standing on the shoulders of giants.