In the midst of another summer of senseless deaths, America again searches its soul and pursues its demons. The recent shootings in South Carolina compound incidents of police violence across the nation. In seeking culprits we have targeted the visible reminders of our difficult racial past. The signs are public and easily recognizable. Confederate flags and statues of southern politicians and generals decorate not only Dixie but even the federal capital. They are easily found and purchased on the Internet.
Symbols, like words, are important. They mark the fault lines that divide us. They represent a past not yet finished and a future still beyond our grasp. If these symbols are removed, we believe that we can again move our national experiment forward and find the harmony that has long eluded us.
This is, however, a delusion. Symbols are only symptoms. When furled or removed from public display, the past is still with us and the present will still be broken. Our problem is the failure to face a deeper reality. We have yet to confront the pervasive racism and in denial we lay on the extremists among us.
Our history is long and sobering. The seeds of prejudice were planted before our ancestors' enslavement of Africans in colonial Virginia and Massachusetts at the birth of the nation. The Constitution of the new United States recognized and accepted slavery as our leaders proclaimed human rights for all white Americans. Slavery proved profitable to North and South and spread west. As it did, slavery left scars on the backs of blacks and on the minds of whites. The most costly war in American history ended the institution of slavery but did not usher in an era of racial tolerance in the North or South. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, lynchings of black men and women spiked in a white effort to enforce the racial status quo through terrorism.
African-Americans seeking new lives in the North and West faced segregation and discrimination not by law but by custom. Blacks in the South found themselves in economic chains equally as binding as slavery. When Americans faced the threat of Nazism in World War II, we held to our racial prejudices. The Red Cross segregated black blood from white to prevent contamination. The Marine Corps would not accept black recruits. The Army created segregated units.
The civil rights movement, now seen as a part of the American pageant of progress, sacrificed its martyrs and realized only half of its agenda. Black men served and died in the Vietnam War disproportionate to their numbers.
Some among us now ignore race and preach the success of a color-blind society. They, too, are in denial, disregarding a history of inequities and its legacies of prejudice and discrimination. How ironic, that in our modern world public opinion polls counts large numbers of Americans who question Barack Obama's American citizenship. Isn't that what African Americans have been seeking for four hundred years?
Perhaps this summer's soul searching will bring significant change. Perhaps we will move beyond the symptoms of our illness to find the root causes that divide us into tribes. If we do, our focus must not simply be on the outward symbols of prejudice. We must re-examine our long history and ourselves.
Robert A. Goldberg is a professor of history and director of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
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