Some say that ignorance is bliss. Myself, I prefer this quote from Derek Bok, who was president of Harvard for nearly 20 years: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
If you’ve read this column before, you know there’s a “case in point” coming, and here it is...
A friend of mine here in Maine recently decided to get a small tattoo on her hand, which is an outline of Africa. Someone she encountered recently noticed it and asked her if she had family back in Africa or was herself originally from Africa.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to slam the person for some racial affront here; my target is a lot bigger and broader than that. And the question itself isn’t that bad. After all, if some white guy had a tattoo of Italy, the question might come up as to whether he had direct roots back to there.
The problem is in the conversation about race and Africa that followed. During that talk, the woman expressed surprise to my friend that modern-day African-Americans are descended from the slaves. And this is truly scary, because it means that our educational system is failing us even more than I thought it was in terms of race in America. It also means that many white people somehow manage to remain completely insulated from our country’s dirty past, despite the fact that it is by far one of the youngest among the many first-world nations. The sins of our past weren’t that long ago; yet people just motor on with no sense of history or how it impacts the present.
My father is still in his 50s. That means he’s a fairly young man for a guy with grandkids and two grown children. Yet even he can recall vividly as a youth seeing a black man hanging dead from a tree: a man lynched by white racists. So, when you take into account how many black folks there are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who witnessed and experienced even worse racism, it’s a little scary to think that there are people in this country who don’t realize that blacks can trace extremely recent ancestors back to slave times.
For someone not to know that African-Americans (and by that I mean blacks in this country who didn’t immigrate here from Africa in recent generations, like the Somalis in Maine) are the descendants of slaves boggles my mind.
It’s like getting through the entire elementary- and high-school system without realizing that Indian reservations are the hunks of land we finally gave to the Native Americans we didn’t slaughter, after we stole all the good land from them.
The frightening truth is, though, that many white folks probably do think the Native Americans somehow sold whites their land and chose to be on reservations. Our nation, as great as it is in so many ways politically, socially, and economically, has a great deal of dirty blood on its hands. I consider it despicable that our history books can spend so much time of the great achievements of whites while giving so little attention to both the achievements of (and the sufferings inflicted on) non-whites in this country, from the blacks to the Native Americans to the Mexicans to the Chinese immigrant laborers of the 1800s and so many others. Why can’t it own up to its sins enough to admit that a lot of people paid unfair prices socially speaking and were stepped on brutally to get us to this point? Why can’t it teach its children well enough for them to respect what is good here and also know what was done wrong?
I don’t know the answers. But I wish I didn’t have to ask those questions to begin with.
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Shay Stewart-Bouley: diversecity_phoenix@yahoo.com
