Love in the Time of Coronavirus
Past Patiently Waiting
“History has its eyes on you. The past isn’t done with us ever, ever, ever.” [Lin Manuel Miranda]
I sometimes wonder if previous generations of Americans – the ones we excoriate now for turning a blind eye to obvious prejudice – thought that the problem of prejudice in this country had been solved. Settled by the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Settled by the end of the Indian Wars and the treaty agreements with America’s indigenous tribes. Settled by the 19th Amendment.
I’m guessing they did. It must have been hard to be complacent, to explain away the “strange fruit” hanging from the trees of a newly enlightened nation, decade upon decade upon decade after the Civil War …
Pastoral scene of the gallant South:
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh …
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
It must have been hard to drive by the sharecroppers’ shantytowns so common across the South, and the reservation wreckage so common in Montana, to feel the poverty rising from the dust and glowing dully in the hollow eyes of dark-skinned children.
It must have been hard to see the girl disappear “to visit her aunt” during her junior year of high school; to ban her, bright as she was, from consideration for Honor Society because everyone knew why she left; to watch man after man use and abuse her because there was no law to prevent it; to stand idly by while she worked menial jobs for minimal reward so that she could feed the half-dozen children of fathers who no longer even dropped by.
We think of that as history, relics of the benighted past. Just as they did, I suppose. Every now and then, though, we see something so terrible that complacency is no longer possible: the battered remains of a 14-year-old Chicago boy who allegedly flirted with a clerk in some backwoods Mississippi store … the assassination of a civil rights leader on a motel balcony … the mangled bodies of a mother and her two small children after a "fall" from the top of a parking garage … the steely gaze of a police officer calmly squishing the life out of a black man begging for mercy.
Then we have to come face to face with the fact that the past isn’t done with us. The numbers have been telling us that all along: the wages women continue NOT to make and the offices they continue NOT to hold; the disproportionate arrests of American Indians in our communities and in our schools; the disproportionate loss of African-American lives in a pandemic.
I don’t know what the answers are. All I know is that the place to start is to ask obvious questions and to insist on better answers. If prejudice doesn’t account for numbers that are simply out of proportion to the percentage of a particular group in the population, what DOES? For instance, why are American Indians so disproportionately represented in our school suspensions and arrests, our traffic stops, our courts? Not somewhere else that gets us off the hook, but here, in Montana, in Great Falls? If prejudice doesn’t account for it, what DOES? And once you’ve convinced me something else does, what are WE going to do about it? Argue about monuments? Compare our wounds? Debate who's suffered more?
Maybe history isn’t ever done with us. But we can be done with it. I don’t want my grandchildren looking back at this moment and at me and asking why. We should be asking that now. And not settling for a slick, simple solution that lets us slide back into complacency. ... See more
