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

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