Why Don't They Just Get Over It: A Beginning Conversation

A question that is crucial for me has been in my head and heart for some time now. The question? Why do white people not get the significance of slavery and its impact upon Black people? I realize that that question has a whole slew of answers and answers that correlate with other answers that form some unified whole. Statistical calculations are far beyond the reaches of this blog, so I’ll keep things simple.

Generalizations will follow. Yes, I’m sure that you’ll take issue with all or some of them.

It occurs to me that some people know the answers. Yes, some people already know the answers. I have long believed that Black people know white people better than we know ourselves. Why, you ask? They had to study us to learn how to keep themselves safe around us. They had to know the societal rules and the laws and then they had to know how to negotiate the streets and the highways and the bi-ways with us. To do otherwise, might get them brutalized, even lynched. Check out Environment Justice Initiative’s latest report. It has some compelling things. Lynchings were both a local and an area-wide phenomenon.

We don’t get it, I think, because we have not had to get it. The laws of this country, the structure of things from local government to national government was built by and for us. Yes, I said it.

We don’t get it because our defenses are terribly high. Ask Robin Diangelo in her book, White Fragility, and she has some things to say. Ask Austin Channing Brown in her book, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, and she’ll have some things to say. Read the book, Reconciliation Reconsidered by Tanya Smith Bryce and let her and he co-authors coach you up.

One thing that I hear and have been pondering for some time is stated as “That was a long time ago. Can’t they just forget it and move on?” Sounds defensive? I think so.  Sounds judgmental? I think so. 

So, I thought about how long ago it was for our country and for me given my family tree.

You see, I have three grandfathers who fought for the CSA during the Civil War. My great-great grandfather Joseph R. Vann (1847-1919); a great grandfather James Tyler Creel (1843-1926); and a great grandfather James Ransom Hinson (1842-1928). My father and mother were born in 1913 and 1923. I was born in 1949. I am now 70 years of age. Those soldiers fighting for the CSA were doing that three and four generations ago. That is just 150 years ago. I was being influenced by these matters back on day one in 1949. That would have been some 80 years earlier. 

A bitter irony is that several of the African American farmers I've interviewed through the years have been able to trace their ancestors back to enslavement. While their ancestors were enslaved on the plantations, yearning to be free,  my ancestors were fighting to keep them there. Yes, you heard that right. 

If there is anything to family legacies, with respect to Dr. Murray Bowen and other multigenerational family therapists, then some of those CSA genes reside in my DNA. And they reside in my siblings. They reside there because the enslavement of Black people only happened a few generations back. And since we are southerners, it is no wonder that those monuments get us going. That’s a post for another day.

There were no magical erasures of attitudes toward people of color in any of my family lines that I know of. My people did what was usual and customary. We used the N-word in some settings and not in others. We did have some decorum about ourselves. We told racist jokes in some settings but not in others. We knew when it was not proper and we knew when we could get by with it.

So, one thing that I don’t think we should tolerate is the non-sense that says, “That was a long time ago. Can’t they just get over it?”

It was not a long time ago. And, no, you have no right to tell anyone when to get over what.

Our job is to respect and honor and engage the stories of people of color.

After all, we are all citizens of the USA. Better than that, all of us have had the breath of God breathed into our nostrils. We are all children of God.