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 How can we not feel deeply ashamed when atrocities like the one in Ahmaud Arbery’s case – a modern day lynching – and many other incidents keep happening? The Memorial Mural’s garage doors are filled with similar cases like this. How can we shrug it off – just because it causes us to feel uncomfortable? This unwillingness to feel uncomfortable, or even outraged, and the stubborn refusal to have our hearts be broken – what is it about? Does that perhaps make us silent bystanders – Mitläufer? This is a human weakness, and not just found with Germans in post-war Germany. Shame and guilt are necessary feelings, and useful, they will most often move us to deep sorrow and further on to great concern about protecting everyone’s humanity.  Make us allergic to being brainwashed and silenced. My parents raised us with it from a young age, and all of us three siblings turned it into action in our lives, wherever we were or are.  

For Americans, these feelings often seem to just apply to Germans: how could they have been silent, how could they have let it happen? How could they have been Holocaust deniers after the war? But for a critical observer from outside the United States – or inside the US, for that matter – these questions and musings apply equally to white America: how could they have stolen, conquered, raped, massacred, and committed a most atrocious genocide on the Indigenous People of this continent? How could they have practiced Slavery for so long, not just in the South? How could Jim Crow have happened? How could they have kept secret all the atrocities committed on the Chinese and Japanese? How could they allow mass incarceration and death penalty in a modern democracy? How could they allow criminalization of people of color, as a way of robbing them of their equal human rights? As a way of keeping them in prisons and in poverty…. How could they be so blind and inhumane? So racist and shameless? Be so in denial? So unwilling to remember…and change… so distracted by capitalism, consumerism… so seduced by supremacy?  

Quoting from Eugene Robinson’s opinion piece in the Washington Post: 

 

But I’m highlighting the vile words of Arbery’s killers for the elucidation of anyone who might believe that this kind of raw, unapologetic racism is a thing of the past. For the education of anyone who imagines that U.S. history can be taught in schools without teaching Black history, or that Black history can be taught without making anyone the slightest bit uncomfortable. For the benefit of anyone who fantasizes that we inhabit a nation where all individuals are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/17/arbery-killers-federal-trial-shocking-racism-text-messages/ 


 Eugene Robinson: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eugene-robinson/ 




Comments

Alex K said…
Powerful and hard hitting words! Timely and needed after reading in the news about school boards wanting to sanitize American history. You are right that shame and guilt at times are necessary and true responses to what one did or was a part of for how else can one do the necessary and difficult work of changing, growing, deepening so that something meaningful and healing can come from the loss and suffering. I have always known you to be a brave truthspeaker because to say these things will upset many people who could strike out because they are unwilling to feel the shame and guilt. I know this from my own experience in struggling with shame and guilt and wanting to attack and diminish the other instead of allowing it to break my heart open. Thank you for the clarity and strength of your words and actions (the BLM mural in the midst of your quite suburban neighborhood)
February 19, 2022 at 2:38 PM
Karina said…
I love the many many many wonderful individuals i have been meeting in America over the many years that i have lived and worked here, and the many people who do very good work, but at this point the cultural collective amnesia is very painful – our hearts need to be broken, we need to be very uncomfortable with the history in this country, the inequities, the violence, otherwise change cannot come about... We all are a part of systemic racism, just as the Germans were a part of fascism and antisemitism, took advantage when Jews were robbed, killed, deported, took their possessions and houses... there is so much i want to evoke in minute details! We THINK we know what it is was like back then, but we don't, otherwise Americans would try to "atone" by making reparations. The ugliest parts of American culture and politics have loud voices now, expose themselves nakedly, and here i see a chance for change! My neighborhood is not really suburban, it is educated, affluent and mostly white. How about you being Jewish? How do you see the parallels i keep drawing to the aftermath of the Holocaust? The idea (and ideal vision) of Human Rights was born after the Second World War for a reason. I can't help but at least try to understand tiny bits and pieces of the terror Black people have had to endure, and still have to face daily. And as of now, i can still speak out, or paint and remind others, without imprisonment in this country....
February 19, 2022 at 5:41 PM
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