The Tolerance Museum:
Lessons Learned?
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Frank A. Jones
4/9/07
A few weeks ago something occasioned my visiting the Tolerance Museum in Los Angeles, CA. This Museum is not your regular museum; it is the late Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's dream realized--a place where the world can come and realize the catholic wrongs human beings have done and do to each other in the name of any number of their gods: racial superiority, class, money-lust, malevolence, intolerance, hatred, etc.--gods that are still alive and as vicious as ever!
That day, hundreds experienced the testimony of Holocaust Survivor, Ms. Elizabeth Mann, a beautiful woman whom I briefly talked with thereafter about the moving nature of her testimony. She spoke for an hour and as she did, people wept and moaned is sympathy with the tragedy of her experience, as a pen could be heard to fall while she spoke; young high school and college students took notes for assignments; people sat on the floor as the small theater room was over-flowing. She was a moving and tender woman who spoke with a subdued passion of her family and the families of others as well having been taken away to death camps by the Nazis because they were Jews or "something else undesired" by the Nazis.
I sat and empathized with her as many wept openly. This was not Schindler's List, this was a real woman who had experienced some of the very pains depicted in Schindler's List and lived to tell us about them; she lived to make us remember and never forget; she lived to say "never again!"
It is impossible for a clear-thinking African American to sit and hear such testimony of torture without reflecting on the circumstances of our condition in America. For we too are a migratory people passing through this land in the history of our forced and brutish migration from our home. We too are a people who have experienced all the pains and inhumanities of those talked about in Schindler's List and by this tender holocaust survivor.
The Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta tells the story of the Civil Rights Movement and his role in that movement. Yes, that battle brilliantly articulated in that center, was also against one of the gods of intolerance that men erect against each other. Yet the MLK Center it does not delineate the long history of our involuntary Diaspora to this North American continent and the painful voices of our ancestors that are still heard and seen in the faces and lives of Black folks.
Sadly, our holocaust museums can be seen across this nation, as they have been erected with great care, costs, and reinforcement in every city, county and state in this union. They are the jails and prisons that exhibit an inordinate number of our young and old Black males. These are museums of intolerance that have been erected by states and counties and federal governments. In them young Black men locked away in the institutional systems America has erected to forget their inhumanity to Black people--an inhumanity that has not ceased, even though many want to look the other way as they have doctored some form of flawed logic that allows them the cognitive cover of blaming the robbed for having been robbed of their human dignity.
Blacks have been brutally robbed of their humanity and dignity by this nation in an ongoing pattern of indignities, but we need not look back to the odious brand of American slavery, we need only look honestly and with clear vision to see the present state of our affairs and understand that intolerance is still afoot.
And those who perpetrate their intolerance upon us vigorously urge Black people to not look back but to forget our past and just go on as if nothing in our history in America has happened. What fools would we be to accept that proposal, but that is a proposal of would be thoughtful minded Americans--the Bill O'Rilley Fox News types who have glad tidings toward Black people and other "undesired."
The intolerance memorialized in Simon Wiesenthal's museum does arrest one's attention and defines some of the inhumanities we wreak upon each other, but America and Americans have an enormous capacity for compartmentalizing, ignoring, and dismissing their own wrongs. They weep when being told of others' wrong-doings, but once they leave the weeping zone, the story that provokes their tears is as the Jewish Prophet Ezekiel said--a beautiful song capable of evoking their emotions---(1) and they continue along their way. Americans also have great capacity for seeing the flaws and short-comings of others but little capacity for seeing our own flaws, intolerances, and, God no!, our own atrocities! A painful and inglorious aspect of our history is a factor we prefer to forget rather than remember, learn from, and not make those mistakes again. Instead, we write and tell histories of memory, rather than histories of fact. (2) The truth, Baldwin said, is too crushing to our fragile American imagination; so we busy ourselves with defending lies rather than discovering truth.(3)
We ignore and cover up our mistakes and urge ourselves and others, especially Black people, to just forget and move on, as if we can forget and as if "simply moving on" is a balm that heals unethical and immoral behavior that inflicts traumatic stress upon us daily. This "forgetting and moving on" notion is an anesthetizing gestalt urged on Black minds as we publish our ongoing complaint. Yet we know that it is merely a cognitive gestalt erected by Americans to shield them from moral crises.
The Simon Wiesenthal Tolerance Museum is a well-thought out museum that brings people face to face with themselves, but one of the tragic facts of our history is this: Americans look into history and when confronted with their horrors, they fail to see themselves, as they continue to travel obliviously along the same circular road as their fathers.
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1.) They come unto thee as the people
come, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but
will not do them; for with their mouth they show much love, but their heart
goeth after their covetousness. And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely
song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument;
for they hear thy words, but they do them not.
[Ezekiel 33:31-32]
2.) Dr. Elliot Gorn suggests this in his potent essay, “Professing History.”
3.) Hear James Baldwin's statement about the fragile American imagination: James Baldwin Audio File
