Yesterday was the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress.
An insurrectionist attempt to overthrow our government, led not by immigrants or wage laborers or formerly enslaved people or foreign terrorists but by the white male President who had just been voted out.
Same guy who almost 50% of the country appears to support for re-election.
I am surprised that this somber "anniversary" was not more well marked -- in the mainstream media, or on social.
As writer and philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, in a quote that bears frequent repetition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I worry almost incessantly about our nation's lack of historical education.
American philosopher and educator John Dewey published Democracy and Education over 100 years ago, in 1916. Yet his thoughts on the critical role of public education in modeling, building and sustaining democratic freedoms remain relevant today. He wrote:
"The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."
We are all equal as learners and learn best together in communities of other interested learners. This is why the U.S. institution of free public education for all -- once unique in the world -- is so entwined with universal suffrage.
If you don't know and you can't learn, your vote is meaningless -- or worse.
With the nation's divisions and acrimony heating up as we careen toward the 2024 election, in few areas is our need to deepen our understandings of the past more critical than in our how we view the institutions and contexts that launched the nation's first -- and we hope only -- Civil War.
Because many of these same dynamics and tensions continue to plague U.S. society.
I was so aware of this in a recent visit to the new International African American Museum in Charleston, SC.
Schools are not the only, nor even, for many, the best learning communities.
Located on Gadsden's Wharf where an estimated 40% of African captives entered this country, this Museum "honors the untold stories of the African American journey at one of our country's most sacred sites:" documenting "a journey that began in Africa centuries ago, and still continues today" -- shaping every aspect of our world.
The Museum surrounds visitors with the African diaspora, immersing you in vivid, side-by-side examples of the ways African cultures are alive in today's U.S. music, art, design, fashion, food, and more. These cultures differ so dramatically from western European cultures that one can sense the tension between them even on the museum floor.
Did you know that white Europeans became the minority population in South Carolina, where the Civil War was launched, as early as 1708?
South Carolina planters' envious duplication of British systems of brutal enslavement to cultivate sugar cane in Barbados created the state's huge reliance on enslaved labor to develop its "Carolina Gold" -- rice -- and thus its enthusiastic participation in the trade of enslaved peoples.
Yet South Carolina's former governor, Nikki Haley, now also a Republican presidential candidate, could not accurately answer a question regarding the causes for the Civil War, nor why her state was the first to secede from the Union.
The story in which the Museum immerses its visitors is one of both triumph AND trauma.
We as white Americans too often don't know or disregard the degree of trauma the enslaved ancestors of today's African-American population endured. And we avert our faces from their continued economic, political, and social oppression. At the same time, we aren't well learned enough about the triumphs of innovation and ingenuity and resistance that helped these same people to survive and to extend the legacy of African cultures into the U.S.
I continue to seek out these voices and experiences in multiple ways. I believe we need to immerse ourselves in understanding the experiences that make up the fierce, jagged mosaic of this nation.
As several of the exhibits noted: despite every effort to annihilate, enslave, and oppress African Americans in the U.S. -- they are STILL HERE. Still determinedly connected to place. Still honoring their ancestors, their ancestry, and the land they have had continuously to fight for.
On the anniversary of January 6, with a Presidential election looming -- I urge you to go, and to take your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and students, to the International African American Museum in Charleston. Or to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Or to read a novel by Jessmyn Ward. Or to watch the award-winning movie, 12 Years A Slave, based on the true story of an African-American man born into freedom who was kidnapped and sold as a slave.
Experience the brutality, the greed, the trauma and denial and triumph on which large parts of U.S. culture -- including Trump's MAGA movement -- are erected.
Educate yourself and others deeply before you vote.
"I think it's important that every institution in this county, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a) Donald Trump does not succeed and b) the MAGA movement is extinguished."
-- Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer whom the January 6 insurrectionists beat and tasered, causing both a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, quoted in Politico
#january6
#democracy
#africanamericanhistory
#survival
#insurrection
#newblogpost
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