We have long said that knowledge is power, but the ability to obscure, erase or bury facts that stand in the way of what you want to do is a power of its own. The sunny optimism and complacency that is the American national character depends on that power. The dark truth is that the maintenance of white supremacy is entirely dependent on a specific kind of ignorance.
Our history is rife with examples of Americans clinging to that ignorance to maintain wealth, power and position. Time after time, Americans deployed every tool in their arsenal to insist that their alternate reality be accepted as gospel. Decaying urban neighborhoods were blamed on a Black “culture of poverty,” rather than official government policy that prohibited investment in Black neighborhoods, or an Interstate Highway System that systematically destroyed Black communities. Despite the fact that the first public schools in the South were established by Black people, who then waged a 50 year legal battle to regain access to those schools after Jim Crow, the so-called “achievement gap” is attributed to Black people not valuing education.
Willful ignorance allows Americans to view the Black/white wealth gap as a puzzle to be solved by financial literacy classes for Black people. They refuse to see it as the logical result of policy decisions that can only be addressed by an acknowledgment and an accounting of the cumulative impact of decades of the deliberate exclusion of Black domestics and farm workers from Social Security, Black Southern veterans from the G.I. Bill and Black families from buying homes in Levittown, (Source: When Affirmative Action Was White, by Ira Katznelson, (W.W. Norton, 2006)).
It is not simply that much of this country’s wealth was built on stolen land with stolen labor, although that is certainly true. It is that whenever Black people achieved any economic prosperity or built thriving communities, white people destroyed them through state sanctioned violence. It happened not only in Tulsa, but in Wilmington, North Carolina, Rosewood, Florida and Elaine, Arkansas.
This is the history that the dozen states seeking to outlaw the teaching of critical race theory are trying to suppress, (Source: “Nearly a dozen states want to ban critical race theory in schools,” by Caitlin O’Kane, CBSNews.com, 5/20/21). Despite relentless demagoguery by Fox News, “critical race theory,” is not being taught in elementary schools. Critical race theory is the name coined by
legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw for the “practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society.” It “acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation and the imposition of second class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation,” (Source: “A Lesson on Critical Race Theory,” by Janel George, Human Rights Magazine, American Bar Association, 1/12/21).
Thursday night’s Republican filibuster of the bipartisan bill to establish a commission to investigate the January 6th terrorist attack is the apotheosis of ignorance as policy and political strategy. Those stonewalling further inquiry know that an investigation will show that pernicious white nationalism was the animating force behind the insurrection, white nationalism that they stoked with their misdirection and lies. Remember that violence, silence and ignorance is the three legged stool that props up white supremacy. We would do well to remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” It’s the only thing that can.