“This is not who we are”
In Montgomery, Alabama, there is a monument to the lynched, listing the names of the murdered – or at least the names they can verify.
There are over 4400 names listed. This, of course, is low.
“This is not who we are”
A woman posted pictures of her leg, filled with welps from rubber bullets, fired from police officers who she angered because she stood and kneeled in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Stood and Kneeled.
“This is not who we are”
Ruby Bridges had to be escorted into school by the national guard. Imagine what would have happened to this woman – then a child – had the people been allowed to indulge their basest instincts. Would the building have looked any different than the Capitol does now? Would this woman – then a child – have lived to womanhood?
Ta-Nehisi Coates began his run on Captain America with a coup. A group of military men, brainwashed fundamentalists, faces literally draped in the American flag, staged an assault on the capital. They were angry at the government for not remembering them and their sacrifices to an illegitimate, repressive regime that bore the nation’s name. They sought not simply revenge (though vengeance certainly satiated them) – they sought Legitimacy.
They considered (Captain) America traitorous. Not long ago he (or someone who looked and sounded exactly like him) led those same insurgents, with promises of pride and purpose. But now this man (who looks and sounds just like their old leader, but isn’t, supposedly) rejects them. And they fire upon him, with impunity, even as (maybe even because?) he tries to reason with them.
The revolt is put down (conveniently) quickly – an electronic weapon, in tune with the neurologics of the insurgents, was released, eliminating them, bloodlessly, in one fell swoop.
And then the nation was left to assess the damage. America and her Captain, already fractured, were left to pick up the pieces of another mess she caused.
The comic, Capitan America #1, was written in 2018. It is 2021. This is not new. This is not a surprise.
This is who we are.
This anger, this indignation at not getting our way is the literal foundation of our nation. black artists, from Coates to Billie Holiday to NWA, told us, pleaded with us, begged us to listen, not simply out of self-preservation but out of agape love for those we will never meet and still, STILL, we ignore them and feign surprise when that anger get redirected towards us.
This is exactly who we are. And this is who we will continue to be.
I understand clear and well how hard it is to acknowledge mistakes and missteps. How painful it is to say “yes, I did this. I was wrong. I ask your forgiveness.” Pride is powerful, intoxicating, blinding. But unless America is willing to own what she has done again and again and again and again and again, then we are doomed to be here again, sooner and sooner still, engulfed in anarchy, disoriented in denial. Until we can be honest about who we are and what we have done, we are doomed to repeat practices so predictable that a comic (a comic!) provided a play by play of today’s tragedy three years prior.
Coates is not a sage. He is not psychic. Black artists are not magical nor whimsical. They are practical. Realists. Observant. Yet until the nation is ready to face its own sins – until the nation stops lying about who she really is – we will continue to feign surprise at atrocities, large and small, that too many saw coming. That too many wrote and sang and painted about.
Atrocities that some were able to illustrate, letter, color and publish to stand simultaneously as predictors and ramifications of American exceptionalism gone not awry, but exactly as it was intended.
This is who we are. And this is who we will be, ironically, until we decide to acknowledge otherwise.
A proud New Orleanian living in the District of Columbia, Jude Jones is a professional thinker, amateur photographer, burgeoning runner and lover of Black culture, love and life. Magneto and Cyclops (and Killmonger) were right.
Find more of Jude’s writing here.
