JUNE 4, 2021, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A9
We should all be ‘woke’
other
VOICES
By MICHAEL GERSON
In the evangelical Christian tradition,
you generally know when you’ve been
“saved” or “converted.” It comes in a rush
of spiritual relief. A burden feels lifted.
But how does one know if he or she has
become “woke”? How does one respond to
this altar call and accept this baptism?
It’s a question that came to mind as
I read The Broken Heart of America:
St. Louis and the Violent History of the
United States, by Walter Johnson, a his-
tory professor at Harvard University. I
grew up in St. Louis, in a placid, White,
middle-class suburb. At school, I was
inflicted with classes in Missouri history
that emphasized the role of the region
in the exploration and settlement of the
American West. I visited the Museum of
Westward Expansion in the base of the
Gateway Arch, which glorified the sacri-
fices of American pioneers.
The Broken Heart of America is a
strong antidote to such lessons. In this
telling, St. Louis was “the juncture of
empire and anti-Blackness” and “the
morning star of U.S. imperialism.” It was
the military base of operations for the eth-
nic cleansing of Native Americans from
the Upper Midwest. It was the home of
vicious lynch mobs and racial redlining.
“Beneath all the change,” Johnson argues,
“an insistent racial capitalist cleansing—
forced migrations and racial removal, res-
ervations and segregated neighborhoods,
genocidal wars, police violence and mass
incarceration—is evident in the history of
the city at the heart of American history.”
William Clark was not only an intrepid
explorer, he was the author of treaties
that removed more than 81,000 Indians
from their homelands. Sen. Thomas Hart
Benton was not just the populist voice
of “the West,” he was the father of “set-
tler colonialism” and an apologist for
slavery. Abraham Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation—but merely
a few days before he had ordered the exe-
cution of 38 Dakota men, which “remains
the largest mass execution in the history
of the United States.” The 1904 St. Louis
World’s Fair was a festival of white suprem-
acy, in which the organizers “assembled
living human beings in a zoo.”
And so on. My first reaction, honestly,
was to bristle. Was every character in the
American story a villain? Must one accept
Marxist economic and social analysis to
believe in social justice? Is every institu-
tion and achievement with injustice in its
history fundamentally corrupt and worth-
less forevermore?
It is my second thought, however, that
has lingered. Historians such as Johnson
might dwell on historical horrors and put
them into narrow ideological narratives,
but the events they recount are real. The
U.S. government’s Indian wars were often
conducted by sadists and psychopaths
such as William S. Harney (who beat an
enslaved woman named Hannah to death
because he had lost his keys and blamed
her for hiding them). A White lynch mob
murdered a free Black man named Francis
McIntosh in 1836, burning him alive while
he begged his tormentors to shoot him.
Over two days in 1917, a mob of Whites
in East St. Louis murdered scores of their
Black neighbors and destroyed hundreds
of buildings, in a horrible preview of
Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre.
And it’s true that white-supremacist
ideology pervaded institutions and sys-
tems—labor policies, construction con-
tracts, city planning, racist policing, the
exclusion of Black children from public
pools. Place names I know well—Ladue,
Kirkwood, Webster Groves—were scenes
of exclusion, oppression and petty cruelty.
How to process all this? If being “woke”
means knowing the full story of your com-
munity and country, including the sys-
temic racism that still shapes them, then
every thinking adult should be. And books
such as Johnson’s are a needed corrective
to history as pious propaganda. But for
a fuller explanation of what patriotism
means in a flawed nation, there are more
reliable guides.
Frederick Douglass, for example, felt
incandescent anger at the “hideous and
revolting” hypocrisy of the free country
where he was born into enslavement. He
said in 1852: “There is not a nation on the
earth guilty of practices more shocking
and bloody than are the people of the
United States. ... The existence of slavery
in this country brands your republicanism
as a sham, your humanity as a base pre-
tense and your Christianity as a lie.”
For Douglass, however, this founding
crime did not discredit American ideals;
it demonstrated the need for their urgent
and radical application. He insisted that
the Constitution was “a glorious liberty
document.” He drew encouragement from
the “great principles” of the Declaration
of Independence and the “genius of
American institutions.” He challenged the
country’s hypocrisy precisely because he
took its founding principles so seriously.
How can you love a place while know-
ing the crimes that helped produce it? By
relentlessly confronting hypocrisy and
remaining “woke” to the transformational
power of American ideals.
(Washington Post)
PUBLIC SQUARE welcomes all points of view. Published submissions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Keizertimes
What we owe the Class of '21
By LYNDON ZAITZ
Next Wednesday, June 9, the
McNary High School Class of 2021 will
accept their graduation diplomas at
Volcanoes Stadium. Hundreds of our
students have completed their primary
education. Many will go onto higher
education at the college of their choice,
others will opt for service in the mili-
tary or to directly enter the work force.
What do we owe those who faced
their final semesters in front of a com-
puter screen at home, forgoing the
extracurricular activities that comple-
ment their classroom studies? Those
graduating are survivors—they, with
the rest of society— weathered a life
that was upturned. A hallmark of youth
is resilicency. Our youth can take hit,
shake it off and continue moving for-
ward. We owe it to them to let them
have their feelings, though. It is not
just adults who have been touched by
depession and loneliness over the past
year.
As safety protocols bring the pan-
demic under a semblence of con-
trol, we can all begin to think of what
comes next. Graduates have a life
ahead of them they can make their
own. For many their next step is set.
College life, like everything else, will
be different for today's high school
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graduates, more so than in previous
years. Different doesn't have to mean
bad, it just means different. It is diffi-
cult to lament something that one has
never experienced. The Class of 2021
will make their post-high school years
different in their own way. We owe it
to them to embrace their journey and
help them fit into the world.
We owe it to the Class of 2021 to rec-
ognize what they have been through
as young people. Once you've lived
through a global pandemic as well as
unrest and riots in our streets, any-
thing else from here on will be easier.
Graduation ceremonies next week
will be more of a celebration than usual
for students and their families alike.
From the depths of depair of corona-
virus a year ago, hundreds of students
will accept their diplomas with a sense
of survival and accomplishment. The
phrase "We did it!" will take on added
poignancy. They sure did do it. They
did it with distance learning. They did
it without athletic or arts events.
The Class of 2021 finished their edu-
cation in a way no one ever thought
could happen. Some may have stum-
bled along the way but school lead-
ership wasn't going to leave anyone
behind. The proof of that success
comes next Wednesday at Volcanoes
Stadium.
What do we owe the Class of 2021?
Start with hearty congratulations and
continue with love and support as they
make their own world.
(Lyndon Zaitz is publisher of the
Keizertimes .)
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