One day in the early sixties when I was growing up in Virginia, I asked my grandmother why “colored people” — the polite term then — had to be kept “in their place.” My grandmother was a good person, and she never lied to me. She said, “we’ve kept them down so long, everybody is afraid, if we let them up, they’ll do the same to us.”
Sixty years later, many white people evidently still feel that way.
Why else would they react to efforts to tell the truth about race relations in this country by saying they’re “racist” and trying to make schoolkids think white people are inferior? Hello? Just admit it, you’re afraid of Black people. Admitting it is the first step toward overcoming this mental illness.
I know from experience. Don’t try to sanitize history. You can’t brag about your ancestry — Mormon pioneers, Revolutionary War patriots, Mayflower passengers, whatever — and then say white people now have no responsibility for slavery or Jim Crow.
Just as memories of my grandmother and the truth she told are part of me, history is part of all of us. If we erase the “inconvenient truths” from history, how will we sort out the good and bad in our lives today?
History can help heal us, but not if it must always make us feel good about ourselves. The truth hurts. The way to overcome the pain is not to avoid the truth, but to learn from it and try to do better.
Robert Argenbright, Salt Lake City
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