European Americans have a funny way of confronting this nation’s history of violence. Shock is followed by awe: “Oh, but that was a long, long time ago. You can’t believe we have not progressed since.” Or “you really believe there’s racism? NOW?” I become the subject. My beliefs are on trial now. I have witnessed another curious phenomenon among some of the liberal or self-proclaimed progressives. If I mention the benefits they receive from white privilege, they will pause briefly and inhale, only to exhale facts and dates and even precise times of events such as the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee, the 1898 Massacre of black residents in Wilmington, North Carolina Massacre, and Japanese Concentration camps. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade…

Oh, no. Slave traders used cargo boats, actually, in the year…

They obscure the recalling of suffering and outrage with an encyclopedic list of facts and dates to drive away the memory of complicity. But look at the eyes. Eyes are far away. Their hearts are even further away. They become as hyper-articulate as Condoleezza Rice—or is it Rice who has learned from them to be hyper-articulate about the insanely inarticulate? I recall the unbelievable humidity in the bow of ships where captured Africans were stacked, some on top of others, and chained hand and feet, and they speak about dates, specific ships or cargo boats and routes…

The route to the Caribbean, it was actually the Caribbean… in the year…

I can imagine Senegalese mothers waiting and waiting for the return of sons and husband only to discover the white man had kidnapped them. I can imagine Benin women pulled from the hands of their children. And all the screaming, all the crying out for help, and all the crying out for God’s help because look—these were fellow humans ordering them to a life of death. Meals left uncooked and uneaten in the home of an Ibo family. Fields left unattended in the middle of harvest in Ghana. Children left without parents in what is now Togoland. And they are now talking about innocence (something that happened long ago and are we not different from those people?) and violence (drugs, drive-by shootings, and broken families in the black community). 

Let’s take broken families…

More precisely, let us talk about the irresponsibility of fathers in the history of this nation and the injustices suffered by children whose mothers happened to be black women, that is, the down right criminality of white slaveholders against the infants and small children they fathered and then sold to other slaveholders for profit or punishment—sold these children on the auction block after they were torn away from the black arms of screaming, crying mothers. Oh, this is not a good image to imagine, let alone contemplate. The facts and dates, the precise beginning and end of events elude them, and they begin to stumble on their own attempt to respond in the usual self-assured manner, with words rolling down the mountain at you a mile a minute. Breathing stops. Thinking. Processing… Only a deafening silence. 

So I will continue before they recover and come to again. Speak in this silence. 

Let me back up a little. Consider the Moynihan Report of 1965 which painted the picture of the African American family as one where the father is absent from the home because he is “burdened” by domineering women and children (born of immaculate conceptions). The “traditional” family, the Report explains, is one in which each generation of young men “learn the appropriate nurturing behavior and superimpose upon their biologically given maleness this learned parental role.” If men “flounder badly in these periods” then the family becomes mother and child and the “special conditions under which man has held his social traditions in trust are violated and distorted.” Thus, the resulting matriarchal black family “is to out of line with the rest of the American society, [and] seriously retards the progress of the group [black community] as a whole.” Alas, the black woman burdens her man, causing him to relinquish his “nurturing behavior,” and the black man, without responsibilities to his family, becomes the poster child for criminal behavior in this country. Contrary to Moynihan’s image of the “traditional” with its traditional generation of young men who learn “appropriate nurturing behavior,” has anyone considered the egregious history of white patriarchal behavior that spoke not of familial bonds, but spoke of black people as being subhuman—even if this category included his own flesh and blood? Does anyone recall this crime against humanity? 

Our black children still suffer the indignities of irresponsible and reprehensible white leadership. We must see those auction blocks of children, along with those children now, who live without adequate health care, who are educated under No Child Left Behind to populate the prison industrial complex rather than contribute their talents and spirit to the population. And yes, the history of those children, sold by their white fathers in the midst of callus indifference, must be seen in conjunction with the sociological data about the “inappropriate nurturing behavior” of black men. Let us look at historical crimes committed against the family by fathers—starting with the Founding Fathers. 

This is daring, I know. They will cry out—long time ago—when they awake and glare at you. It is not me! It is not me! But, let’s not forget that it is the liberals and some of my white progressive compatriots who have controlled the discourse, particularly those academic discourses that determine what images and words will be used and not used to describe a past they, too, would rather forget. They dominate women’s studies, African American or Black studies, and sociology departments. Those who manipulate race discourse commit a kind of narrative sacrifice in which the goal is to control the historical reality of white violence in order to avoid an honest confrontation with white violence. Fears are minimized and self-interests are promoted with this practice of narrative sacrifice. In turn, fear and self-interest determine what perspectives are appropriate for graduate study and what perspectives will receive validation with a diploma. Fear and self interest determine what perspectives are carried into the classroom to stand before pre-dominantly white children, their children, future generations who do not need to be reminded of the past or urged to make connections with the patriarchal hegemony’s rhetoric of innocence and violence. 

I wonder what is said in the presence of wives, husbands, friends, and parents after you interrupt—so rudely interrupt the good feeling of being a liberal or progressive? Is it possible for them to say anything even then, in private?

Oh, what a funny thing happens when our memory of violence does not coalesce with the onslaught of manipulative facts and dates. 

Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Techical College, MATC.. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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