Comment: Those who would soften history are keen to erase it
Published 1:30 am Thursday, February 10, 2022
By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post
The past is not history. Not here. Not yet. Our history isn’t settled. It’s not something from which we seem to have taken any enduring lessons. And now, some citizens are working mightily to ensure that the actual facts of our history are so muddled, the edges of it so softened and blurred, that it will be nearly impossible for future generations to make sense of it.
The things once thought to be etched in stone are revealed to be merely scribbled on paper; readily erased if enough people are left feeling uncomfortable by unflattering truths. We keep trying to plaster over history’s fault lines with aphorisms and pablum, but the instability runs deep. The ground can shift suddenly and without warning. A few layers of blissful ignorance or patriotic gloss aren’t nearly enough to shore up a foundation that was never level and balanced to begin with.
The Supreme Court was once a place where history seemed to be venerated, where it was dealt with with some honesty and little emotion. The legal experts talk a lot about precedent and they quiz nominees to the high court to determine if they have respect for it. Stare decisis. One of the rare legal phrases that has seeped into the common vernacular and that’s uttered like a reassuring totem: Some things in this democracy are certain. History tells us so. Rest assured, fellow citizens, a few issues have been resolved and some arguments have been settled, perhaps not to everyone’s satisfaction, but they are no longer points of contention.
More than likely, the question of precedent will be posed in a multitude of ways to whomever President Biden ultimately selects to fill the seat that will be vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer, who recently announced his intention to retire. During previous hearings, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were keen to know whether the nominee considered Roe v. Wade, which protected a person’s right to an abortion, to be settled law. They wanted to know about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
The nominees were nothing if not enamored with precedent. They spoke of their respect for it, the importance of it and their intellectual understanding of it. But none of that meant that all of the prickly discomfort, resentment, anger or intolerance that spewed out in the past as these issues were wrestled into submission had been put to rest.
We have learned again and again that the emotions aren’t in the past. They are constant and exhausting. And over time, they’ve muffled history’s voice.
It seemed that we’d codified certain principles about democracy and access to voting in a nation that once denied suffrage to women and Black Americans: States that had behaved so egregiously in the past required federal review before they were allowed to change their voting laws. A state can’t carve out its districts in a manner that discriminates against Black voters. And yet here we are, some people still arguing about polling places, identification requirements, drop boxes and gerrymandering like petulant children trying to get around the clearly delineated rules. How many times will the question of affirmative action come before the Supreme Court? From Bakke to Bollinger, each case seemed to offer clarity and a sense that history was understood and acknowledged. This is how the country moves forward from Jim Crow laws and systemic discrimination.
But no. We keep chipping away at the things that seemed set in stone, the things that indicated that this was a country that knew its history, saw the cracks in its foundation and was prepared to get into the crawl spaces and make the repairs.
How much of that reinforced foundation will the current Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, be willing to review? We are a history-denying country grappling with vivid displays of white supremacy. Some white men have defined themselves as victims of a culture that celebrates diversity, even though this country continues to celebrate them in a multitude of ways even as it elevates lots of other people who are proud, hard-working and patriotic, too. Politicians in Florida, Texas and other states are willing to legislate a whitewashed version of the American story in order to not make white students uncomfortable, even if it makes Black and Brown students invisible. Which is worse: To be unnerved by facts or to be unseen thanks to a lie?
Without a clear-eyed knowledge of history, it becomes impossible to understand why separate is not equal and very easy to imagine an assault on Brown v. Board of Education as a matter of willful and mean-spirited ignorance. It becomes difficult to fully grasp the resonance of laws requiring that voters present certain forms of government-issued identification that require money, transportation or excessive time to procure, if they have no historical understanding of poll taxes that were used to prevent Black citizens from voting.
We are mired in our ugly history. It leaves us lead-footed, making it impossible for us to sprint toward the future. It robs us of bright promise. It robs some of their dignity and others of their very breath. Perhaps we could be forgiven for failing to remember the sorrows from generations ago, for our inability to recall the ways in which Black women were dehumanized or Black men hunted. But we can’t even call to mind the failures of two years ago or a year ago. In 2019, Anjanette Young was forced to stand naked and handcuffed in her own Chicago living room when a phalanx of police officers battered down her door after obtaining a search warrant that did not require them to knock and identify themselves before entering what turned out to be the wrong home. One of the officers even had the audacity to reprimand Young for raising her voice at the invading men. In 2020, police in Louisville burst into the home of Breonna Taylor using a similar kind of search warrant. They fatally shot her. And this month, police shot and killed Amir Locke when they stormed into an apartment where he was sleeping.
After each case, police departments made small adjustments in tactics. Incremental change happened. Apologies were offered. A financial settlement signed. But history, both recent and distant, keeps slipping our mind. It’s the specter that rots the present. And eats away at the principles we once believed were blessedly settled.
Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press. Follow her on Twitter @RobinGivhan.
