"The moral turpitude of the institution of slavery attaches to those who engage in it, not those who fight against it or are victims of its harsh acts. "

The Deception of Success
Frank A. Jones

For many success is like a drug. It makes them forget the hard times and those who have not achieved to their level. This is an historical phenomenon that often hurts and diminishes a people. Jewish people understanding that they cannot afford to forget the Holocaust coined the expression, Never Again, as a mantra. 

Among Black Americans, the loss of memory because of a modicum of success is particularly tragic; we are not out the woods by that modicum of success. But because of an ignorance of our still precarious social position, some move away from the true history of the long struggles Blacks have fought in this nation for mere human dignity, as they are beckoned by those would-be conservatives now posing as comrades--of course, on their own terms. The problem with their beckoning away from our informative history is that there are too many aspects of the African American community that need addressing before we can go to that "color-blind society" that the would-be conservatives would have us move to.

No intelligent people can simply by-step their long struggle for human dignity when there are still as many forces arrayed against them as we see against us opposing Black progress toward human justice and simple human dignity. It is not time to celebrate, it is still time to prepare to help those would have not had the success that other African Americans enjoy. It is still time for a freedom train and an underground railroad to justice and equality and human dignity in this nation.

No one of us should be content until all of us are lifted to the heights our fore-parents purchased for us by their labor, blood, and their struggles.  The cost of freedom is not eternal vigilance for those who do not yet have complete equality and freedom. The cost for our freedom is eternal struggle--two steps forward and one behind, bringing the one less fortunate than ourselves with us.

But we have seen that as we move further away from our painful history in the United States, many tend to bathe in their success too soon. That bathing, we understand, is the opiate mass media serves up for us--Splurge! You deserve it! You're worth it!  One of the problems with that concept is that it is not time to rejoice; the Red sea, as it were, is still ahead of us, not behind us.

We still have a 27% underclass that needs help; of that 73% that is not underclass, many of them need a set of right-seeing glasses because their views on who they are and who we are as a peoples are still being conveyed to them by a mass media that has and continues to stereotypes us negatively. And with such a diet, they will always have a Shelby Steele and Ward Connerly view of Black America.

So, any rejoicing now is premature for a people with so many forces arrayed against them--forces from within and without. To fail to see those forces that would deny us full human dignity is to be willfully ignorant, which is the worst kind of ignorance. 

Sadly, many African Americans willingly disavowal a history they want to distance themselves from, often because of its pain or their shame and embarrassment of a distorted American told history of Blacks in America. This latter aspect of Black shame and embarrassment is an odd twist of logic. The painful history of Africans in America certainly is not something they should be ashamed of. The pain was not self-inflicted then, as much of it is today. And in spite of the rigid afflictions and the systems of aggression that have been set up against us, why not take solace in the fact that we still we survived, albeit with haunting afflictions but still as a people in tact?

If slavery is the focus of that shame, as it is characterized by American history and frequently raised by mass media (surely as some type of reminder) true world history teaches that all people, at some point in their histories, have been enslaved in one form or another--the Romans enslaved the English, from which Americans like to tout their heritage, and made sex and other forms of slaves of their boys, girls, men, and women; in young America, slavery was not confined to Africans, whites were slaves, Chinese and others were slaves.

But, the moral turpitude of the institution of slavery attaches to those who engage in it, not those who fight against it or are victims of its harsh acts. 

Today, a number of black and white conservatives are encouraging African Americans to disassociate themselves from the slavery and apartheid part of their history in this nation and just move on. As if to just move on assures us that historical obstacles that we have had to overcome will not encumber us again. It is the painful part of our history, which many are exhorting us to disassociate ourselves from, that has given us the impetus to grow. The strange twist of logic is this that this part of our history is shameful to Blacks when it should be shameful to whites--indeed it is but they are good pretenders. Here is why, slavery as practiced in America was the most despicable of all forms of slavery practiced. That is a concept of human indecency that white America wants to gloss over and put behind them without dealing with it. They would like for us to also pretend that it did not happen, as they now pretend for conscience's sake.

The American brand of slavery was one which the nation decreed that African slaves were not human beings with souls was another act in a series of despicable acts, after the genocide of Native Americans that occurred and continue to occur wherever Americans are armed with Christian Conservatives making up biblical justifications for any act they care to do and still stand in good stead with God, as they supposed they are.

Conservatives have a propensity for doing evil deeds and then declaring, "Let's put the past behind us." There is never any truth and reconciliation, never any addressing and redressing the past, never any restitution for the past; just the offer of putting the past behind us and starting from now. Let us forget the pain, the disadvantaging, just move on to the future.

And why is America hated around the world is the question. Why are they doing this to us, we ask. And the answer is always self-serving: Because we are a free people; we believe is fairness and justice for all; because of our good values; because we are rich. This is the tale of our history, so we will tell a history of memory, as historian Elliott J. Gorn writes in his History of Memory.

A few years ago, a flap occurred in Oakland when a number of Castlemont High School students were viewing the movie Schendler's List and laughed at the depiction of Nazis killing Jews. To those Jewish citizens in the audience, the high school students' laughter was very painful. While it is true that most students of that age are often insensitive to the pains of others, these citizens were, nevertheless, offended by their behavior. The consequences of these children s inappropriate laughter were taken to a crescendo Steven Spielberg, the director of the film, came to Oakland to teach on the Holocaust, Jews of Oakland asked students for an apology, numerous other activities took place, and I was asked by a colleague to talk about the matter with her college class. I discussed a number of issues related to that incident, but the issues related to this article are these.

There were two anomalous behaviors at work in that incident. First, the Jewish citizens in the theater were in too much pain to realize that children in the age bracket of these theater-goers laugh at most things they do not understand and that their laughter is of ignorance and quite age-appropriate behavior for them. It had no profound meaning that betokened anti-Semitism, and it was of no lasting import for them. It was what silly children and some silly adults also do when they do not understand a matter and are with friends. Certainly, it never should have been a flap in the first place, and it never should have reached the level of a request for an apology.

Second, and most important for this discussion, the truth is this, these young black people were so far removed from their African American history, they did not realize the afflictions depicted in that film were also a depiction of many of the afflictions they should have identified and empathized with, since their fore-parents suffered similar fates. Because they had a loss of memory and a false sense of modern success, they laughed.

The farther one gets away from his/her pain, the less empathetic he/she is toward others who are similarly situated; the closer one is to his/her own history of pain, the more one is appreciative of another's pain. In this instance, the loss of memory of those young blacks brought about a needlessly painful incident in a city that has relative racial comity. But the problem has more profound and harmful consequences to the black community directly than this incident, and that problem is not simply a high school level problem.

Today, African Americans spend over a half trillion dollars a year, primarily outside of black businesses; we are approximately 39 million in numbers; we have over two million businesses; we are judges, politicians, teachers, publishers, writers, doctors, engineers, chemists, millionaires, and all that America is. We are in all spheres of influence in this society. But in spite of the broad overlay we have in this society, there in an anomaly that is here and it is a result, in part, of slavery's legacy.

Any people having experienced slavery or oppression normally will cling to each other as a result of their comradeship generated by affliction, especially while still haunted by adverse societal behavior. This behavior is a safety mechanism. They hug each other, they love each other, they congregate with each other, and they support each other because they know that they are a threatened people and their strength comes from their closeness and support. But for many African Americans, the exhortation of those who encourage them to willfully forget their historical afflictions, or simply take no time to learn about them, is obeyed. And they conspire in the lie that America tells itself.

Certainly, while the playing field remains unequal, and excessive obstacles are still in our way, shouldn't there be a coming together to ensure survival and prosperity? The hugging, the loving, the helping, the vigilance, the struggle are still in order. Indeed, the cost of our freedom and opportunity is more than mere vigilance. An anomaly that exists among a number of blacks who have moved into positions of influence is this: too often they think that they have arrived at their position solely by their own strength, without the help of others. Therefore, since nothing has been given to them, nothing is owed. This type of thinking is shortsighted, illogical, selfish, and flawed.

The truth is, we learn from history and our present travel is guided in part by that history; our history encompasses more than our past. James Baldwin said, "History is not about the past. It s about the present. We take it with us; we can not escape our history." It is through the prism of our history that we see the world. What was done in the past and the present affects us now, whether directly or indirectly.

A flawed sense of success can afflict the Black community in America and make it think that there is some safety it has that does not truly exist. Blacks in America are still stand precariously in this society and no sense of forgetting or allowing others to distort history for their own good name will reshape the present disposition of things. The beckoning to move away from that history is usually an attempt to deny that history, to distort the logic of that history, to white-wash that history, and/or to make us deny who we are as Black Americans.

One should never be stuck in history, but until the struggle for real human dignity for African Americans is achieved in this society, the 73% to whom the offer is made should ignore it and see it as another attempt to rewrite history and blot out the shame that history holds.

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