Growing an Economy of Truth
Integrating My Story, the Great Migration, and the American Story. An Afterward.
When art collides with the new rules of racial civility. How the fear of cultural appropriation impinges on our humanity.
A Capstone Essay for My Great Migration Trilogy.
As you may recall, a few months ago, after belatedly reading Isabel Wilkerson’s the Warmth of Other Suns, so moved by her masterful storytelling and character development, I determined to comment on her contribution. Almost immediately, I found myself interweaving my family stories with her narrative. As my reaction grew more unwieldy, as I found I had more to say, I determined to break this novella-size response into three smaller posts with an afterword:
PART ONE. The Warmth of Other Suns.
PART TWO. “Play That Funky Music, White Boy.”
PART TWO. “A Little Town with a Big Heart.”
Not too long ago, Spencer Klavan, with a hat tip to Cicero, asserted that great art does three things: it delights, instructs, and moves us. Moreover, great art delights us because it teaches us; it teaches us because it moves us; and it moves us because it delights us.
Wilkerson’s masterwork did all three.
Great art also reaches out and demands a response.
Great art provokes us to engage in a way that enriches and widens the humanity of both the observer and the subject.
Can we truly understand another person’s “lived experience”?
At the risk of employing a straw man, I think I hear some folks castigating such notions as privileged and paternalistic—and maybe even malevolent. I take the point. We are all unique individuals who defy a false empathy or “whitesplaining” based on crude stereotypes and overly broad generic thinking. My kitchen fire does not equal your tragic wildfire catastrophe. The myriad intricacies and contingencies of any single human life limit our full understanding. But such verities cannot contain the whole truth.
Great art questions, investigates, and reveals something we had not previously considered. The contemporary sanction to stand aside and not interrogate a person’s lived experience represents a preposterous and unconscionable dead end. If I cannot know you, it logically follows that you cannot know me. Why bother? If this is true, why read Baldwin? Why read Dostoyevsky? Why read Shakespeare? Why engage with a fellow human being? Such folly seeks to paralyze our humanity.
Why engage Wilkerson’s masterpiece of epic storytelling?
In response to Great Art, I confirm “I see you.” I am compelled to respond in some way. Now maybe I see myself in a new way. I hear you, and I call back.
Why engage a monograph by an African American about the Great Migration? Why add to that story other personal stories of a white family on a parallel track albeit in a different but complimentary key?
Because the story of the Great Migration is part of Our Story. We are looking for lessons. We are looking for truth. What will this piece of our collective mosaic mean to me? What will this story mean to our national narrative?
Perhaps you do not trust me with this particular story. Perhaps you worry that I mean to shade the story to my political bent. Perhaps you suspect I have already come to a different conclusion than the one approved.
As is my human right, I intend to take your true story and add my true story and increase the gross universal product of truth. And, perhaps, I mean to engage in the ancient conversation concerning larger meaning made slightly more accessible with the addition of new information and interpretation.
When Abraham Lincoln famously entreated, “with malice toward none and charity for all,” he was surely beckoning a spirit of reconciliation between North and South. But many scholars believe Lincoln, as our great intercessor, also pleaded for the forgiveness of the four million Americans who sunk 250 years of unrequited toil into the American Project. If we burned down the great experiment in a tribal fight to the finish, as we might have done and still might well do, no one could say we did not fully earn divine judgment for our egregious sins. But Lincoln urged a more excellent way.
TJ. The wheel is going to turn.
Of course, Lincoln as he often did, even as it might seem counterintuitive to our academic shortcuts on their respective philosophies of government, built on the collected musings of Jefferson:
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!”
In some ways we have lived to see not only a day of jubilee but a “revolution in the wheel of fortune” and an “exchange of situation.” What Jefferson predicted in 1784 and Lincoln implicitly contemplated in 1865, after doubling down on our original sin for an additional and gratuitous 100 years, eventually transpired. The regime of white supremacy finally reached the point of unsustainability and collapsed on itself and fell upon the throne of judgment.
By far the most popular attraction of the thirteen or so Smithsonian museums nestled around the National Mall, the Museum of African American History and Culture is one of two sites that still require a reservation. Once inside the facility, entrance to the main exhibition hall often requires an additional wait of approximately one hour or more. Time spent in close quarters moving forward by inches offers a moment for quiet contemplation and an opportunity for people watching. The last time I visited, the entrants were diverse, mixed equally between white and people of color, all showing natural signs of anxiousness and anticipation. On the various sober faces I read pride, dread, guilt, pain, triumph, anger, and always a cohort of stony countenances projecting studied impassivity.
But something palpable in the line among the white congregants “putting in the time” to pay their respects to the history of their fellow Americans who are Black was the admiration for the story of African Americans in the United States. We are a people intensely interested in this story of tragedy and triumph, a story of perseverance and overcoming, tribulation and deliverance. For some of us, the tale illustrates the greatness of the American promise rather than the mendacity or hypocrisy of our founding creed. But, more basically, it occurred to me that a vast segment of white America languishes in a liminal space desperate to be forgiven, desperate to regain moral equality, and desperate to love our Black neighbors and have them love us back.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
In my life, I have been blessed by people of good will in all varieties. A remarkable succession of Black friends have dealt with me patiently and with much grace. I continue to believe we sit atop a great reservoir of goodwill in our present American culture.
We should heed the words of Lincoln and love one another and seek healing and reconciliation. Let us together pursue and fashion for ourselves and our posterity a just and lasting peace. May our mutual stake in a more harmonious American future and our common human heritage as imperfect beings, created in God’s image, triumph over our righteous indignation and warranted misery over past evils.
May grace, mercy, and peace abide with us in truth and love.