A colleague passed along a very good essay from the NY Times Magazine. It begins by talking about how the Soviets and now the Russians have tried to erase the brutal dekulakization in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Basically, Ukraine was the "breadbasket" of the Soviet Union and collectivization of agriculture there killed millions. The Soviets and now Putin's Russia has made understanding this act of genocide a crime.
I want to excerpt this part when the author starts to talk about how "normal" people become complicit in ethnic atrocities.
Atrocities begin in everyday life, so we need tools and concepts to peel away the familiar and the exculpatory. I started writing this essay after doing what I do most days, dropping off my children at school. After I arrived in Vienna last summer, I had to hustle to find a school for my kids. There was a pandemic; I was a foreigner; and there were some moments of uncertainty. It was a huge relief to me when my kids were admitted to a good school. What would I have done if I had then learned that the slots opened up because some other kids had been expelled from the school? Most likely I wouldn’t have looked too closely; a human reaction would be to presume that those other kids must have deserved expulsion, just as my kids deserve admission.
Now let us imagine that I am in Vienna, looking for a school, but it is 1938. Hitler has arrived, and the Austrian state has collapsed. Jewish children are leaving schools as their families flee the country. My children, who have been on a waiting list for a very desirable school, suddenly have places. What would I do? The school authorities spare my feelings by not mentioning just how the spots opened up. Perhaps I am not an anti-Semite, and perhaps the school director is not, either. But nevertheless, something anti-Semitic is happening, and regardless of how I assess my own motives, I am drawn in. For me and for the other parents in my situation, whom I would no doubt come to recognize and know, it would come to seem normal that there were no longer any Jewish children in school.
When we claim that discrimination is only a result of personal prejudice, we liberate ourselves from responsibility. Only our story matters, and what matters in our story is our innocence. The only way to preserve the neutral description of a situation like that one is to expel from the story the other people involved. The parents who want to think that what they did was normal could be drawn to think of the Jews as beyond the national community. The Jews become less than human so that we can tell ourselves that we are human. The anti-Semitism that grows from this conjuncture lies not just in the mind and not just in the institutions: It resides somewhere in between, in a system that is now functioning in a new way. We know where it led. Jews were excluded from the vote and from the professions. They were separated from their property, and from their homes, and from their lives.
What is persuasive about this is how Tim Snyder begins with a thing we all "know" is bad: the Holocaust. I bolded the critical insight that this passage carries. In America, we can freely teach that the Holocaust was awful, but increasingly, Republican led states are trying to erase the understanding that racism was central to America's development as a country. The latest hobgoblin of the conservative "imagination" is Critical Race Theory, which basically begins by asking why racism persists even after changing the laws in 1964-65. How do non-legal racist structures persist even after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts should have made them illegal.
Places like Florida and Texas are basically denying the ability of schools to suggest that racism is a pervasive social structure that has an impact on America today. Instead, it was a personal choice by some flawed people in the past and we don't need to talk about that either.
I am generally reluctant to participate in what I call "Dunking on the Dead" over the issue of race. I also believe it's really important to teach that men like Jefferson and Washington were white supremacists. How could they not be? Their entire worldview since they were children was based on the idea that it was right and proper that they should expel Natives and enslave Africans. It wasn't up for question. When slave owning Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death," he wasn't even aware of the contradiction he had introduced, because "liberty" was for white men and inconceivable for Blacks. The point isn't that Patrick Henry chose to be a hypocrite; the point is that the foundations of Henry's life made his position consistent to him and almost everyone else at the time who listened to him.
Ironically, these "Memory Laws" - based in spirit and form on Russian laws - seem to tilt in the Dunking on the Dead direction. I read that Conservative venerate the "Founders" of America and Liberal venerate the Foundational Ideals of America. As Obama often said, we are in a process of making a more perfect union; we do not live in a perfect union. The American project in this telling is an effort to constantly bring our actual country into closer alignment with the ideals articulated by men like Jefferson and Henry - even if our understanding of those ideals is different than what they believed.
If we teach that racism was a just a choice dead people made, that seems to consign Jefferson and Washington to a moral purgatory. If we teach that racism is systemic and pervasive, we contextualize their failings and understand better the dynamic contradiction that has driven American history from the Trail of Tears to Seneca Falls to Antietam to Greenwood to Montgomery to Selma to Minneapolis.
That contradiction is discomforting, as Snyder notes in his essay. Wrestling with that discomfort is precisely the point of studying history.
The political goals of the GOP in denying the central role of race in American history and understanding how that legacy informs the country we currently live in is obvious. If we understand racism properly, we might act on that understanding. And that would upset the snowflakes - white, frigid and fragile - that constitute the Republican electorate.
The Republican Party is currently the greatest threat to American democracy since Jim Crow.
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