"It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed…The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day."
This volume is a collection of essays originally published as individual standalone articles in The Atlantic. As such, they do not exist in this collection as a preconceived idea with an organic and strategically planned unifying theme. Nevertheless, a theme does slowly develop over the course of the book. Actually, several themes develop, but the overall unifying theme connecting all the essays together is an analytic consideration of the nature of recording black history. The significance of this particular quote demonstrates how this theme is approached. Even when the central subject of a historical document is black or related to “blackness” in American society, the history is inevitably filtered through a white consciousness in one way or another. This reality seems to be an inescapable fact regardless of whether fiction or non-fiction, entertainment or history lesson. The Civil War resulted in the deaths of more white soldiers than black slaves, but that fact does nothing to deny the irrefutable truth that the war only came to be because the enslavement of human beings from Africa was codified into law right from the beginning of this bold experiment of self-governance. Though they do so in distinctly different ways, both of the movies mentioned in the above quote only present the black history associated with the Civil War through the distorted perspective of a white lens.
"More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders."
This collection includes the work that is usually identified as bringing the author’s name to worldwide recognition and substantively altering the course of his writing career. “The Case for Reparations” did not become singled out as one of the most influential works of journalism in the second decade of the new millennium because its arguments were so impossible to refute that they changed the minds of the opposition. It was at the time and remains not just the most famous essay the author has published, but the most controversial. And one thing above all else remains clear: there is nothing contained within it that is likely to change many minds already steadfastly opposed to the entire concept of reparations. Most of those opponents reject the fundamental necessity for reparations based upon the simplistic notion that not one single black American alive today was ever a slave. This quote gets right to the heart of that opposition with its softly worded assertion that reparations are kind of like a lawsuit awarded to the family members of a loved one killed due to corporate negligence. It’s not about the money, it’s about the admission of guilt and the subsequent apology.
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.”
The place where this quote was spoken was aboard Air Force One. The time was shortly after Columbus Day, 2016. The impetus was the very recently leaked audio recording of Donald Trump bragging about how when one is a rich and famous white man, one is given unspoken permission to go up to women. The closest Donald Trump came to an apology was to dismiss the conversation as standard “locker room talk.” Pres. Obama’s response to that “apology” cuts deeper than it may seem. In the first place, it goes a long way toward proving the underlying contention that if Obama had been the one openly bragging of committing felony sexual assault on multiple occasions, the reaction generated among those very same evangelical Christian Republican voters would have been considerably different.
