When Diana Souhami's No Modernism Without Lesbians finally went to print, I don't think she considered herself the author of a socialist manifesto... but she kind of...
A White Girl Visits the National Civil Rights Museum: My Argument in Favor of Reparations.
by Stephanie Ann Devito
There are a lot of museums in America that claim to tell our national story, but very few manage the truth. A visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee might be the first time you see your country for what it really is. Once you do though, you’ll immediately understand why we’re long overdue for reparations.
Don't feel like reading? You can listen here.
“The only thing I know about Memphis is Elvis”
A sentiment everyone else in the hotel room agreed with. Everyone, except Sean, that is, who sat there quietly. Apropos of the man, I have to admit, but this time had the quiet energy of disagreement. And while dissimilar to his otherwise even-keeled silence, I didn’t stop to think much of it.
“And I don’t care if it makes me a bad American, I hate Elvis. And I’m certainly not paying $60 to see his living room.”
Now that was something we all agreed on before deciding on The National Civil Rights Museum instead. Three Jersey girls and a San Francisco lovechild; each one of us as white as the day was long. And Sean, a Jersey transplant now living in Harlem, who was not a white girl, but a black man.
None of us had explicitly agreed to be in each other’s company, that’s just the nature of a touring contract. Luckily, we all liked each other which made it simple to maintain peace in our van. And thank God for that since we were together always. Just as we were together leaving Arkansas, crossing the Mississippi into Memphis, Tennessee.
The streets of Memphis lacked the full force of time in the same way the moon lacks the full force of gravity. We moved through the streets suspended in the energy of our own strides. Façades of buildings made derelict in the 70s gave the feeling that any progress we have made was a façade too.
With giants of the Civil Rights Movement peering down from the walls several stories above about us, I read the words written beneath them: “I AM A MAN”.
I should have contextualized it much earlier on, however, my liberal-white brain was pacified by some pretty simple math:
“Memphis is in Tennessee. Tennessee is in the south. The south is racist as hell. Put Civil Rights stuff here because that’s where the racists are. Adds up.”
But then I rounded the last corner, walking face-first into a wall of recognition that knocked the air right out of my lungs. I could finally see the museum and it immediately brought me back to Sean and his quiet disagreement. My mouth began watering with the bitter taste of my own words:
“The only thing I know about Memphis is Elvis.”
This is the Lorraine Motel.
This is where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Having previously thought Graceland was the sole obligatory pilgrimage for Americana, I had accidentally wandered onto more hallowed ground.
Inside, Sean kept his distance from the rest of us. Honestly, I don’t know what he was actually thinking. To this day we never talked about it. But at the moment I filled in the MadLib of his body language.
It told me a story of a man who wanted to occupy this space without us.
Then I felt it. A knee-jerk reaction manifesting my own problematic whiteness.
I was upset and I wanted it to stop. If I was right in assuming Sean didn’t want to stand next to me, that would mean he didn’t want to look at the damage done by white people with white people. And that might mean there is no discernible difference between me and the shouting white women on the poster board in front of us.
That might mean I am not a *Good White Person.
Like many other white people, I can’t control the desire to be exonerated from racism. Why wouldn’t I want to be?
Being indicted for the crimes of systemic racism would mean the life and identity I pride myself on would be marred by theft and bloodshed. The bloodshed that’s so viscerally illustrated throughout The National Civil Rights Museum in ways I hadn’t seen before.
Usually, when the issue of my own racial identity comes up, I am comfortably tucked away in a liberal pocket of New Jersey. One where I am able to believe in the power of *Good White People.
But this was a place where the soothing lullabies of *Good White People were drowned out by slave ships, illness, and violence in the form of the piercing soundtrack that underscored the first room in the museum: The Journey to America.
The path out of this room was obscured enough to make you feel cornered. It is only by finding a cramped, darkened hallway that you can keep moving through the exhibits.
I remember feeling relieved when I thought this might be it. A profoundly nonsensical thought. In a very practical sense, this building was way too big for this to be the only one room. But more to the point, I knew the journey to freedom was far from over.
There it was again. I was upset and I needed it to stop.
In learning how much tobacco a human was worth relative to their gender and age, I could feel my humanity rejecting its host. I believe I am a good person who feels empathy, but that is transplanted into a racial identity that relies on me disowning those feelings of empathy.
Yet this is the difference between Sean and me, isn’t it? I can buy into this idea of the*Good White Person and give myself the privilege to curate what my skin color should mean to other people.
Black people, however, have never enjoyed that privilege.
They cannot walk in any space deciding to feel exempt from white hate. So in what realm of equality should it be permissible for a white person to face off with America’s bloody history wearing an asterisk on their skin saying: This history isn’t mine, I’m a *Good White Person?
This, however, was specifically my problem. Before I ended up at The National Civil Rights Museum, I had a long childhood living in the capital “N” North, being fed a specific brand of American identity.
I was taught that this history wasn’t mine.
We were The Union, bravely fighting to abolish slavery. On field trips, I went to the Liberty Bell, Gettysburg, and the Statue of Liberty. I went to Ellis Island where I found my grandmother’s name on the stone commemorating her passage from Scotland.
I was taught that America was a golden city on a hill where the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free can come to be free. And I believed it.
Right up until November 9th, 2016 when I woke up to Donald Trump as the President-Elect.
“There aren’t enough racists in the country to vote that man into office,” I remember the confidence that brimmed over my lips with every spoken word of that sentence. I feel it sting still.
This was the first time in my white life that I truly felt the failings of *Good White People. Because it was ultimately them who put a white supremacist in the White House.
The past three years of the Trump Administration has been teaching white people all the things the black community has been trying to teach them for centuries. That destruction is the only thing that happens when white people get to write their own version of American history. All it does is reinforce white people’s ability to have their own version of America too.
If Sean walked with me into The National Civil Rights Museum and gave me that asterisk, what would I have learned?
Being upset, feeling shame, struggling with a sense of disgust is EXACTLY how white people should feel when confronted with the true American story. This was never a place where *Good White People fought for liberty and justice for all and it is a painful process unlearning that lie.
But that pain is abhorrently incomparable to the pain of never being able to believe that lie in the first place.
As children, Sean and I listened as this country spoke the language of white supremacy. It told each one of us that “this is not for you”. What that meant for him was the full rights owed to him as an American citizen is a debt yet to be paid.
What that meant for me was that the responsibility of American racism is a debt that was not meant to be paid by me.
Disgust. Shame. Guilt.
At once my version of American history is a shield protecting me against these feelings and a partition separating me from the humanity that makes me feel them.
Because fundamental to the Atlantic Slave Trade and enduring racism is the psychological dehumanization of black people. This long-fought, ongoing campaign by white people is meant to quell their raging sense of morality that manifests itself as guilt and shame.
Dehumanizing someone is the only way to sleep comfortably knowing that you’re the monster in their nightmare.
Leila Fielding elaborates this concept succinctly when she wrote,
“As the oppressors sought a justification to explain their immorality, they unwittingly demonstrated that the majority of human beings are unable to commit insidious acts, without first being able to psychologically justify them.”
Establishing white supremacy started by dominating the narratives white people heard about black people, about themselves, and about America.
Regardless of why I alienated my guilt, shame, and disgust, the very act of doing so only strengthened the might of white supremacy’s grip on America’s psychology. Because even if I didn’t want to support the cause of white supremacy, believing in American exceptionalism meant I would ignore it at the very least.
If I care about being different from those white people in The National Civil Rights Museum, I need to feel exactly what white supremacists don’t want me to feel: guilty.
In the shadow of unrest George Floyd’s death has cast on this nation, it’s easy to think we are in the middle of a new civil war. But we clearly aren’t. We are engaged in the same civil war.
The struggle for civil rights in America has caused far too much bloodshed. It’s the responsibility of White Americans to wage this war within themselves and the halls of Congress.
In this war, we will suffer casualties in the way of preconceptions and comfortable lies, but better that than the continued loss of human life and dignity.
It’s about time we acknowledge that, by merit of our white American inheritance, we’ve been drafted to fight for Reparations.
I’ll lead with this disclaimer: to say I came up with this idea would be like saying Christopher Columbus discovered America in that I didn’t.
Lots of people of color have built this argument for centuries and I have no intention of waltzing in and claiming it as my own. But like Columbus, I do want to tell as many white people about it as I possibly can.
Before Memphis, I’d never explicitly disagreed with granting reparations to the decedents of enslaved people, but I also never considered it to be a mantle carried by modern society.
While I’m apologetic for my own dangerous philosophical stasis, it does go quite a way in illustrating just how vital it is to have reparations.
Despite being open to the idea, I hadn’t considered this act of reconciliation because I still hadn’t fully understood the scope of what we have to reconcile.
I’d only fractionally seen America’s racist theft of black lives, black dignity, and black wealth. Partly because I was ignorant, partly because I was comfortable and partly because I learned what I was taught.
Guilt and truth-telling. What we can learn from the people who should be constructing the dialogue about reparations is that this is where they must start.
White American’s need to hear stories of the black American experience in earnest.
Writing on passing Reparation legislation, Ereshnee Naidu-Silverman instructs the US government to
“prioritize African Americans’ access to services, institutional reform, scholarships for African American children, symbolic measures such as a public apology … accompanied by a public truth-telling project that addresses continued white denialism, exposes the reality of racism, and makes clear the consequences of decades of inaction.”
Simultaneously, her writing vanquishes feasibility arguments against these policies by harkening to South Africa’s recent past. Their Truth and Reconciliation Committee shows white Americans that we can attain the highest ideals of equality, not through the lies we tell but by the truth we tell.
Start with a “process of healing and rebuilding relationships, rooted in a shared past” Ereshnee writes. Our first step towards true reparations starts by having the same history. Forgiveness cannot be granted if it isn’t asked for.
Naidu-Silverman goes on to detail what psychological and financial forgiveness could actually look like, highlighting the direct payment of ~$4,000 USD to 19,000 victims of Apartheid made by then-President Thabo Mbeki. She notes, however, that President Mbeki failed to implement a wealth tax to generate the revenue for expanding reparations payments.
America should think twice before it suffers the same miscarriage of reconciliation, as it was the lust of capitalism that seduced white Americans into cheating their humanity, stifling their guilt, and enslaving human beings.
“America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”
Poignant words from Ta-Nehisi Coats’s powerful 2014 essay The Case For Reparations which I insist you read if you’ve come this far. Because if you do not have any sense of the extent to which financial war was waged against black Americans since they were first kidnapped and brought to Jamestown, you will.
Coats provides an extensive analysis of the ripple effects of slavery as seen in redlining policies, contract buying, and racially motivated crime in the 20th and 21st-century.
Most staggeringly, he writes “the income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970 … 4% of whites and 62% of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later … virtually nothing had changed.”
Ta-Nehisi goes on to explain the tactical ways white Americans have engineered a reality where white household net worth is 10 times that of black Americans.
All of this culminates in the indisputable conclusion that truth-telling, along with robust financial compensation, is owed to black Americans.
Equality now means Reparations now.
Ta-Nehisi Coats not only acknowledges there is a debt to be paid, but he is part of a growing coalition demanding that America begin to pay it.
In 2019, he testified to the House of Representatives that the United States “reject fair-weather patriotism… say that a nation is both its credits and its debits … that if Thomas Jefferson matters, then so does Sally Hemmings … Because the question is, not whether we will be tied to the “somethings” of our past but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.”
He spoke these words to urge Congress to finally pass Rep. John Conyers Jr’s HR 40- Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. Yes, in 2019 there was a serious conversation about Reparations.
Now that black activists have white America’s attention like never before, we need to join them in this conversation and we need to amplify their voices.
White people struggling through this moment in history are asking themselves the same questions I did in The National Civil Rights Museum.
They’re wondering if they’re any different than the racists, they’re hoping the guilt stops after slavery, they’re wondering why it hasn’t, they need to find that cramped, darkened hallway that will lead them forward, out of this moment.
They can find that in the truth-telling and financial restitution of reparations.
Passing formal reparations should be our ultimate objective, but the struggle to reconstruct the American identity starts first with white Americans grappling with shame and guilt.
We need to do what people of color have been urging us to do all along: re-educate ourselves about how America was built. If we refuse to take up this fight, the struggle towards civil and human rights will be like walking in Memphis.
Movements without motion.
A Legacy that would rather decay than change.
No justice and no peace.
America needs to pay reparations.
#Blacklivesmatter
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