Even in the context of civil rights, we focus on the heroism of civil rights leaders without focusing on the intense resistance to integration by white political leaders. And that’s what we’re trying to do: trying to engage this country into a more honest accounting of what it means to be a slave society, what it means to be a place where terrorism and mass atrocities took place, what it means to have been an apartheid country for decades. If we have that appreciation, things will change. We won’t be able to celebrate Jefferson Davis’s birthday as a state holiday — as we do in Alabama — or celebrate Confederate Memorial Day or celebrate Robert E. Lee day without being seen as offending the notion that slavery is wrong. It would be unconscionable for Adolf Hitler’s birthday to be celebrated in Germany.
Your efforts to set up markers of lynchings and other sites of racial violence, for instance by commemorating a major slave market in Montgomery, were sometimes met with fierce resistance by local leaders. Are they actually denying that this history is real?
They are denying it. They are saying, “Slavery was wonderful for black people. The Civil War was about state rights. Black people were treated well during enslavement. Lynching was just tough justice; they were all criminals who deserved lethal punishment. Black people were better off in segregated schools; we just all wanted to be in our own place.” This process of truth telling will push some people to try to deny it. And if there’s not complete denial, there’s certainly no shame. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that looks like a public expression of shame about slavery, or lynching, or segregation.
When we present the history, people have a hard time saying it didn’t happen, they just say we shouldn’t talk about it. When we tried to put up markers in downtown Montgomery, local historical officials said it would be “too controversial” to put up markers that talk about slavery. They didn’t say that didn’t happen, they just said it would be controversial, it would be unsettling, it would be uncomfortable for people to be reminded of slavery even though we have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in the same space.
You argue that understanding this history is essential to understanding not only acts of overt racism and hate happening today, but also the ways in which racism has become engrained in virtually every aspect of our society. Has that narrative of racial difference become institutionalized?
I don’t think there’s any question that our failure to deal honestly with this history has made us vulnerable to tolerating bias and discrimination in virtually every sector. It’s not just the overt acts of hate that we see on campuses — although I think those are a direct manifestation of this. It’s also the way in which you can have the Bureau of Justice Statistics saying that one in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime and nobody cares. That’s not a policy or a political issue that our leaders are talking about. There is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to black or brown people and people just see that as well, that’s America. We tolerate bias and discrimination and bigotry in ways that we wouldn’t tolerate them if we had a higher shame index about our history.
That certainly is evident in the way we’ve seen some of this rhetoric and demonization of people based on their ethnicity or religion or any of these other things; that’s clearly an example of that. But it manifests in other ways too. That the two largest high schools in Montgomery are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High is a manifestation of this failure to confront history. That people are actually trying to eliminate the Voting Rights Act is a manifestation of this history. That people resent when we talk about bias and discrimination because they think that’s all we talk about is a manifestation of this history. I think it’s hard to find things that are not implicated by our failure to deal with this history more honestly. I really can’t identify many parts of our popular life, our cultural life, our social or political life, that are not haunted by this history of racial inequality.
The openly hateful rhetoric of the election, and then the election’s result itself, have shocked many who might have liked to think this country was “not as racist” anymore. What you seem to say is that this is all very much part of a continuous history that was never truly interrupted?
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/02...in-america-an-interview-with-bryan-stevenson/
Your efforts to set up markers of lynchings and other sites of racial violence, for instance by commemorating a major slave market in Montgomery, were sometimes met with fierce resistance by local leaders. Are they actually denying that this history is real?
They are denying it. They are saying, “Slavery was wonderful for black people. The Civil War was about state rights. Black people were treated well during enslavement. Lynching was just tough justice; they were all criminals who deserved lethal punishment. Black people were better off in segregated schools; we just all wanted to be in our own place.” This process of truth telling will push some people to try to deny it. And if there’s not complete denial, there’s certainly no shame. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that looks like a public expression of shame about slavery, or lynching, or segregation.
When we present the history, people have a hard time saying it didn’t happen, they just say we shouldn’t talk about it. When we tried to put up markers in downtown Montgomery, local historical officials said it would be “too controversial” to put up markers that talk about slavery. They didn’t say that didn’t happen, they just said it would be controversial, it would be unsettling, it would be uncomfortable for people to be reminded of slavery even though we have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in the same space.
You argue that understanding this history is essential to understanding not only acts of overt racism and hate happening today, but also the ways in which racism has become engrained in virtually every aspect of our society. Has that narrative of racial difference become institutionalized?
I don’t think there’s any question that our failure to deal honestly with this history has made us vulnerable to tolerating bias and discrimination in virtually every sector. It’s not just the overt acts of hate that we see on campuses — although I think those are a direct manifestation of this. It’s also the way in which you can have the Bureau of Justice Statistics saying that one in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime and nobody cares. That’s not a policy or a political issue that our leaders are talking about. There is a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to black or brown people and people just see that as well, that’s America. We tolerate bias and discrimination and bigotry in ways that we wouldn’t tolerate them if we had a higher shame index about our history.
That certainly is evident in the way we’ve seen some of this rhetoric and demonization of people based on their ethnicity or religion or any of these other things; that’s clearly an example of that. But it manifests in other ways too. That the two largest high schools in Montgomery are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High is a manifestation of this failure to confront history. That people are actually trying to eliminate the Voting Rights Act is a manifestation of this history. That people resent when we talk about bias and discrimination because they think that’s all we talk about is a manifestation of this history. I think it’s hard to find things that are not implicated by our failure to deal with this history more honestly. I really can’t identify many parts of our popular life, our cultural life, our social or political life, that are not haunted by this history of racial inequality.
The openly hateful rhetoric of the election, and then the election’s result itself, have shocked many who might have liked to think this country was “not as racist” anymore. What you seem to say is that this is all very much part of a continuous history that was never truly interrupted?
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/02...in-america-an-interview-with-bryan-stevenson/
