Page 49 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

We live in very strange times. Whether you are liberal or conservative. Or too afraid to say. Anti- Trump. Anti-Biden. Pro Crazy-Kennedy dude. Putin is evil. Putin is a hero. Wherever you are— these are strange times.
Americans are so suspicious today, that we don’t even have confidence that the coach teaching American History down at the high school is telling the truth about the most basic aspects of our past. A candidate for President of the United States is afraid to say that the Civil War
had anything to do with slavery.
We are banning books again. Making it a crime for teachers to discuss any part of our history that might be “uncomfortable” to anybody. We’re even trying to ban ideas, like “Critical Race Theory” or the concept of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” There’s been
an explosion of these things in the last few years.
But truth be told, all this has been cooking for a while. A decade ago, Slavery By Another Name was banned by the Alabama Prison System. If you were the Alabama Prison System, you would have wanted to ban it, too.
Behind all this doubt and worry about how to discuss history—there are questions I have been asked endlessly:
What does all the history of racial discrimination, segregation, and injury accomplish in an era like the one we live in – when African Americans have held our highest office and served as the nation’s chief law enforcement officers, and when an eclectic and diverse group of people like all of you can gather collegially at an event such as this one?
In this extraordinary new time, after so much has been accomplished in terms of racial equity, what do we do with the past? Is it time to let a new generation rise unburdened by the pain and scars caused by the errors and evils of an earlier generation, an earlier time? Should we stop talking about uncomfortable history like the one described in my book?
My answer is two words. Carrie Kinsey.
That’s the name of a barely literate African American woman who lived outside Bainbridge, Georgia, 125 years ago. She was about the same age as my great grandparents. People I knew in my childhood. This is not ancient history.
In July 1903, she wrote a one-page letter describing how her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to the plantation of one of the most politically powerful families in the state of Georgia.
How could that be?
She described in her letter how her brother was sitting on the front porch when a man approached and promised him some kind of work that sounded reasonable. Somehow Carrie learned he had ended up at this plantation. She went there and found him chained, with dozens of other young men, forced to work on the plantation.
Americans have always disagreed about a lot. But today we doubt everything. We don’t trust the police or schoolteachers. We doubt soldiers fighting for their country. We doubt the politicians on the other side. We doubt the politicians on our own side. We doubt scientists. We doubt our preachers. We doubt lawyers and judges. Even the best and the brightest. We doubt the media. Historians. Professors. Right now, some of you are doubting me. We doubt everybody. In these strange times, we even doubt the past.
SUMMER 2024 JOURNAL 48