America doesn’t like to look back. The future is part of our cultural DNA. Our collective wish to forge forward hides how our past enslavement of people with black skin by people born with white skin affects our present. We, especially white people who imagine human equality, thought that with the passage of Civil Rights legislation and the ending Jim Crow, the arc of history’s inexorable bending towards justice and equality would continue into the indefinite future.
Today we find ourselves in a second major whitelash against the social, political and economic gains of black and brown Americans. The first was the undoing of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow after Emancipation. Those same forces of privileged resentment now want to wipe out the gains of the Civil Rights movement that culminated in the election of a black president.
I thought that resentment could never again be part of our national discourse, much less guide government policy. Turns out that the effects of the brutal practices of our white supremacist past still linger in this American present. This movement song got it right: “Freedom is a hard-won thing. You’ve got to work for it, fight for it, day and night for it, and every generation’s got to win it again.” Until we have again bent the arc of history so it heads again towards equality and justice all other aesthetic concerns seem to me insignificant.