Free, White, and Twenty-one: Ever Hear That?

You've got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught

From year to year,

It's got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You've got to be carefully taught!

[Rodgers and Hammerstein: South Pacific]

We have been carefully taught.
All of us have been carefully taught
to hate and to fear; to be afraid.

If we learned it, we can unlearn it.
It was a god-damned lie, so if we learned it,
we can learn the truth, first about
the fact that we have learned a lie, and then
we can learn the truth about being human.

Part of what we have learned,
without knowing it, is how
to delude even ourselves
about what we think we know:
we think we did not learn it.

"We aren't racists!
There is not a racist bone in our bodies!
We are just White, Christian, and American.
It is just that way."

Yeah, the juices of White Christian Supremacy
just happen to run in our veins.
It comes with the territory.

White Christian Supremacy runs deep in our minds and culture.
It fueled slavery, it nourishes racism, it created a Civil War,
and it continues to run through our prayers, schools, and political rallies.

We were carefully taught.

Go ahead! Ask the person sitting in the pew next to you
if he or she is a racist, and a shudder of carefully-learned racism
will make you wish you had never asked such an outrageous question.

Nobody knows where all this White Christian Supremacy comes from.
We were taught carefully enough so that we deny what we learned.
Our denial of even a shred of racism is something we learned, too.

. . . before you are six or seven or eight,
to hate all the people your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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