The point of creating stuff for others' consumption is to move the needle; to bend the arc of history as it were. History's arc, as I wrote a few weeks ago, does not bend on its own. Effort must be made. And so, writers write; musicians compose; artists paint; jewelers create; sculptors sculpt; impresarios create shows that bring various works together to generate thought, thought being the parent to action.
All the writing and speaking of writers, comedians, musicians and thinkers of all stripes - color and otherwise - can bear no fruit if the land in which we plant is uncultivable; barren. Until the land upon which the seed falls is fertile, nothing will grow.
I really want to believe that the land isn't uncultivable. I want to believe that the land is in fact rich and fertile, so fertile that even before the seeds are planted, the land knows what it must do. The land knows, likewise, the minds into which writers and artists attempt to pour their seeds already know the truth.
So the question is to be asked: why then is there so much resistance to the knowing? Why so much resistance to new knowledge? Why so much resistance to hearing a perspective that differs from your own?
A brilliant friend of mine suggested that there was a 'collective dissociation' at work with denialists. "As human beings on an individual level, we can dissociate from the awful things that might happen to us or things we might do [or might have done]", he suggested. "That dissociation", he went on to say "is like psychic amputation [severing the self from the act]. If this can happen individually, it sure as hell can happen collectively." This behavior is an act of psychic self-preservation.
White supremacy knows what it has done. Supremacy knows what evil it has perpetrated and in whose name such evils have been perpetrated. Supremacy knows, but those who have benefited most from those acts don't want to. An entire industry of denialism[1] has sprung up to separate the beneficiaries from the roots of their benefits. Those who have even a passing understanding of the history really don't want to see in full; they don't want to hear the truth. And even before they've seen or heard the truth, they want to be absolved of all responsibility. They want the sweet comfort of forgiveness and forget-ness well before there is any acknowledgement of wrongdoing. This is why there is so much White fragility. No one wants to be confronted with the truth. And when confronted, ytpipo would rather say, as Tomi Lahren did on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, "What has the KKK done?". The rest of y’all ask, "What have I done, I never owned slaves?" when the truth is that what you want to say is, "Actually, you know what, I don't want to know, just forgive me and let's forget it. That's all so long ago, it hardly matters any more!"
White supremacy knows what it has done. Supremacy knows what evil it has perpetrated and in whose name such evils have been perpetrated. Supremacy knows, but those who have benefited most from those acts don't want to. An entire industry of denialism[1] has sprung up to separate the beneficiaries from the roots of their benefits. Those who have even a passing understanding of the history really don't want to see in full; they don't want to hear the truth. And even before they've seen or heard the truth, they want to be absolved of all responsibility. They want the sweet comfort of forgiveness and forget-ness well before there is any acknowledgement of wrongdoing. This is why there is so much White fragility. No one wants to be confronted with the truth. And when confronted, ytpipo would rather say, as Tomi Lahren did on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, "What has the KKK done?". The rest of y’all ask, "What have I done, I never owned slaves?" when the truth is that what you want to say is, "Actually, you know what, I don't want to know, just forgive me and let's forget it. That's all so long ago, it hardly matters any more!"
Some of us have so dissociated from historical truth that we are now able to deny its very existence. You deny genocide; you deny brutality, even yesterday's, claiming that it was too long in the past to matter. You deny verifiable facts because we weren't ringside when they occurred. All of which allows you to pretend that we live in a perfect equal and just world......and then a man caught on videotape shooting a fleeing Black man in the back and then staging the crime scene gets a hung jury and your center cannot hold. But still you deny. Still you dissemble and split hairs. "We don't know what came before (the bits we see on video)!", you bellow, because you are convinced that something that happened out of sight is justification enough for what you do see.
Having learned to deny the realities of history, and hell, the realities you see on video, those ‘realities’ no longer exist. There are no more facts. Didn't one of the President-Elect's surrogates say exactly that? Facts no longer exist. The truth is no longer a thing. Supremacy has created an entire narrative that gives its adherents plausible deniability of real, provable facts never mind that that denial is simply not plausible.
My friend hypothesized that "deep in the psyche of every racist [sic] person is a knowing. Their psyches know that their views and potential actions are detrimental to other human beings." A knowing. We know when what we're saying dehumanizes or otherwise negatively impacts others. We know.
We know when the policy we're advocating harms one group more than others as was the case with the surgically precise targeting of 'voter ID' laws in SC. We know. We know when our deals will likely negatively impact clean air or water supply but still we wail about the importance of such projects as Keystone XL and DAPL. We know. We just don't care. Or perhaps it is that we do know and the outcome is precisely what we secretly want but we have good sense enough not to say so out loud?
We know when the policy we're advocating harms one group more than others as was the case with the surgically precise targeting of 'voter ID' laws in SC. We know. We know when our deals will likely negatively impact clean air or water supply but still we wail about the importance of such projects as Keystone XL and DAPL. We know. We just don't care. Or perhaps it is that we do know and the outcome is precisely what we secretly want but we have good sense enough not to say so out loud?
The problem, at the end of the day, is not the knowing, it's the caring and if you live in a land of intellectual dishonesty, you are predisposed not to care. You're quite content to demonize, otherize and dehumanize. Your issue isn't dissonance, it's dishonesty.
Perhaps the land is, in fact, uncultivable. There are no words that I (or anyone else) can write to make another person care. The work required to reach a place of caring is not mine to do. I cannot write you a soul. That is work entirely yours to do. Good luck.
[1]
Industry of denialism: that would be the media – both traditional and non –
whose entire raison d’être is to present a fiction-based narrative that counters lived reality. Who are the greatest prponents of this alternate reality? The Tomi Lahrens; Alex
Joneses and Fox ‘News’-types
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