My good friend, Fr. John Joe Lakers, dead nine years now, rather proudly defended “postmodernism,” that has captured the imagination of the intellectual elites for the last forty years or so. Religious people, among them leaders of my own Church, routinely savaged the movement, accusing it of denying truth altogether—“truth is dead” would have made a good Time magazine cover. John Joe would answer, “No, no, that’s not what they are saying.” I created my own translation of what they were saying: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out, because behind the claim there is likely to be a move to gain power over somebody else.”
However, we
intellectuals enjoy debunking things and startling the less enlightened; too
many of us still go around claiming there is no such thing as truth. Donald
Trump has put that claim into political reality, to where he can say anything
and his “base” will believe it and act on it. I think it is time to defend
“truth.”
The reason
it is time to defend truth is that we are on the verge of re-evaluating the
history of our nation. The story we have told of our nation’s past has not been
truthful. We need to get used to facing hard truths, uncomfortable truths.
Truth really exists, and we owe it to our sisters and brothers, especially our
sisters and brothers of color, to acknowledge the truth of what we white people
have done to them for the last four hundred years. We not only owe them the
acknowledgement of truth, but we owe them some reparation for the harm we have
done them. Example: the average Black family in this country has less than half
the wealth of the average white family. That is because for most of the years
since the end of the Civil War, we made it difficult for a Black person to own
a home in a desirable neighborhood, and home ownership is the main source of
wealth for people. After World War II, the “G.I. Bill” offered mortgage
benefits for returning war veterans, but the veterans had to be white. Black
veterans were excluded, even though they had fought alongside white veterans.
Farmers were excluded from Social Security, and in the 1930s, most Blacks were
farmers.
When your
parents have not been allowed to own a home in a good neighborhood, you are
starting life with a heavy bag on your back. We say you should pull yourself up
by your bootstraps like the rest of us did. But the rest of us were not
restricted to substandard schools and low-quality neighborhoods. Not only were
we not restricted, but our restrictive policies benefited us and cost you. The money
that should have gone to your schools went to our schools, and the
neighborhoods where you could not buy property were the neighborhoods where we
kept our property values high because we kept you out.
We white people need to know the truth of what a hundred years of Jim Crow did to every Black person in this country. Jim Crow is the label for the legal gimmicks that southern whites used to replace slavery with a practical servitude—preventing Black people from voting, restricting them to certain neighborhoods, denying them entry into labor unions and good schools, and on and on. “On and on” covers a lot of truth that we white people are blissfully ignorant of. We need truth so that we do not go on piling weight on the backs of our brothers and sisters and then blaming them because they move more slowly than we do.
We need
history. In the 90s we lamented the poor condition of much public schooling,
especially public schooling for people of color, so we decided to punish poorly
performing schools. In order to defend decisions about which schools were
“poorly performing,” we created tests designed to show up the bad schools. In
the process we forced teachers to spend a lot of time “teaching to the test”—it
was a matter of survival if you wanted your school to continue existing. Then
came the emphasis on “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and the
soft areas like history and literature and art were crowded into a smaller and
smaller space in the curriculum. We are raising a generation of children who do
not know the truth about the history of our country. They are defenseless
against those who want to keep their advantages and continue policies that
burden some of us more than others.
When you do
not know your story, you do not know who you are.
I am reading
documents from the Roman Catholic “Synod on the Amazon” that took place in
October 2019. It was a gathering of a few hundred representatives of indigenous
people from the nations that make up the Amazon River basin. The gathering was
preceded by a wide consultation of thousands of groups preparing for the
meeting.
One of the
recommendations that have come from the Synod is creating the goal of passing
on of the history of each of several hundred unique cultures in that vast
region. Too often the people involved have been driven further and further into
the rain forest, only to be forced finally to migrate to the cities, where they
form part of the urban underclass, poorly housed, poorly educated, lacking
political power and basic economic well-being, cut off from the stories that
gave them identity. These too are our brothers and sisters. If we cannot even
acknowledge the stories of people living among us in our country, how will we
welcome the stories of people living in Manaus or Rio or Belem?
How will we
help Amazonian people to preserve the rain forest which is so central to our
environmental survival without appreciating the value of those people’s ways of
life?
Bottom line:
without truth we will not survive. Our appreciation of truth has been wounded.
We need to heal. As we heal we will grow closer to all of our sisters and
brothers all over the world.
