Washington Watch
Every year during Black History Month in the USA, I recall a televised interview with Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier I watched over a half century ago. Discussing the importance of teaching Black history, they noted that its explicit teaching was necessary if our goal is to tell the full story of human history, as the contributions of Black American — in science and medicine, literature and the arts, and so many other fields— have been deliberately ignored or distorted.
They added that contributions of Black Americans are only part of what’s missing. Also absent is an honest treatment of the dehumanizing reality of slavery, the vicious legacy of segregation, lynchings, and the ethnic cleansing and systemic racism that have defined much of the Black American experience and that continue in different forms until today. Because the history we have learned has been so whitewashed and shorn of the Black experience, it is not only false, but also destructive and hurtful.
A personal example: While we’ve lived in Northwest Washington, DC for the last four decades, only in the last decade have I learned the story of my neighbourhood. Built a century ago by the Chevy Chase Land Company (CCLC), the entire area was “covenanted” white— meaning that by law no homes could be sold to Black families. As the neighbourhood grew, a need arose to build schools to accommodate the White families who had moved in. The land chosen for the elementary and high schools were areas that had been settled by freed Black slaves who had lived there since before the Civil War— long before the CCLC’s racist covenants. In an act that can only be described as “ethnic cleansing,” the CCLC secured a government order evicting hundreds of Black families from their homes.
When I first learned about this 1920s ethnic cleansing in my own neighbourhood, I was in shock. One of my children had gone to the resulting elementary school, and for a decade I had coached a baseball team that played on the adjacent field. We had been playing on stolen land and didn’t know it.
Whether it’s Americans who need to learn about what we did to Native Americans and Blacks; the British who need to understand the impact of their oppression of Ireland or the Indian Subcontinent; the French who must make recompense for the horrors they inflicted on the Arabs of North Africa; or so many others, too numerous to list— we need to remember and teach our children a full human history, to feel discomfort and guilt for what was done to innocents, and find ways to end the legacy of the injustices that were perpetrated in our names.
When we took this research to the city council and the mayor, none of them knew this history either. We found a Washington Post story from 1931— just two years after the evictions— that mentioned new schools being built on the “rolling green hills” in Northwest Washington as if the land had been vacant, erasing the evictions and demolitions.
As we learned more about this Black community and how its destruction had been written out of history, we felt shame and guilt at the injustice that had been done. We formed a group that was eventually able to get the story recognized, the name of the field changed to include the name of the Black families who had lived there, and historical signage erected on the site telling the story of Black American dispossession. It was small but needed recompense.
In this context, it’s striking that during this year’s Black History Month, 15 state legislatures are moving to pass bills that would limit the teaching of Black history. As an example, the legislation in Florida reads:
“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex… An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.”
The bill is dead wrong. We need to know Black history, about the Black Americans whose contributions have been left out, and about the horrific pain endured by Black Americans from the moment they set foot on these shores to the present day. Most importantly, we need to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish…distress.” We all need to feel it because we can never correct the sins of the past, unless we know them and then work to address their legacy.
While reflecting on this connection between history and guilt, I recalled a personal experience a half century ago. My wife Eileen and I were flying home from a visit we had made to Lebanon and Jordan for the purpose of conducting research for my doctoral dissertation. I spent considerable time in Palestinian refugee camps documenting stories of the Nakba. Palestinians told me of their forced expulsions, showed me faded pictures of the homes they left behind, and their fervent desires to return. One said to me: “The Jews say they remembered after 2,000 years. For me, it’s only been 23 years. How can they not understand that I want to go back to my home?”
With these heartbreaking stories still fresh in my mind, we boarded a connecting flight in London heading back to the USA. While on the trip back, a young woman approached me. She had been a student of mine a year earlier. I asked her where she had been and she replied enthusiastically, “I just went home, my true home.” I said, “But you’re from Philadelphia, aren’t you?” She acknowledged that was where she had been born, but a summer in Israel had helped her to discover her “true home.”
In the years after 1948, Israel had seized the homes of those urban Palestinians who had fled, turning them over to new Jewish immigrants, and demolished 483 entire Palestinian villages that had been evacuated. The Jewish National Fund had planted forests on the sites of these villages in an effort to complete their erasure from history and memory.
And so there I was, on a flight back to the USA still processing the loss experienced by so many Palestinians, speaking with a young euphoric American who had no knowledge of any of this. I did not use our time over the Atlantic to give her a history lesson, to make her feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish…distress.” But I did resolve to make this my life’s work.
Whether it’s Americans who need to learn about what we did to Native Americans and Blacks; the British who need to understand the impact of their oppression of Ireland or the Indian Subcontinent; the French who must make recompense for the horrors they inflicted on the Arabs of North Africa; or so many others, too numerous to list— we need to remember and teach our children a full human history, to feel discomfort and guilt for what was done to innocents, and find ways to end the legacy of the injustices that were perpetrated in our names.
