I witnessed so much complicity in the 1980s. So many black and latina opted to join the status quo rather than refuse to give up the achievement of a democratic society. I experienced injustice and witness plenty. I knew too much about the workings of white supremacy, imperialism, and genocide. The US was complicit when it wasn't the instigator, supplying the capital and the weapons for a struggling nation to incarcerate, torture, and kill its own. It's patriotic to say that this isn't the country fit for anyone to fight for, let alone live in, raise a family, and become educated in values and beliefs that don't require the oppression or the slaughter of someone else.
While black Americans confronted a draconian justice system and others pursued anything that didn't remind them of the slavery, white scholars eagerly accepted courses in African American studies or latino studies, thus fulfilling the government quota of offering electives in race studies, but without the discomfort of having to imagine the cruelty and violence of slavery or Jim Crow or the Trail of Tears from someone experiencing the legacy of those events.
It's always possible that a white teacher, such as the former students I had who are now professors, to confront the violence of the past and render an honest interpretation of texts focusing on the experience of the historically oppressed. It's possible to be white and teach the dirty parts of Beloved, without, as one Madison librarian suggested in 2006, on radio, eliminating any discussion on those what might be too painful for the professor or for the students.
Currently, however, the policy put forth by an authoritarian regime in the White House takes away the decision such as Beloved, one way or the other. Once eliminated, it's difficult to initiate a discussion about the dirty parts, that is, about the terrorism surrounding a culture of rape. The defilement of young teens, routine during slavery, is now a topic that is in violation of the authoritarian regime in Washington D.C. The elimination of any discussion of the dirty parts from the university classroom is intended to leave today's youth with the impression that pedophiles and child-sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are newcomers on the block. Altogether, the banning of Beloved or Fire Next Time or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, send whole generations of young Americans down a memory hole while leaving the lie that the black experience is limited to the justice system, courts, and prison cells to represent truth. After all, black people are predators and criminals but never the historical victims of hundreds of years of systemic rape and sexual abuse.
Black Americans are being erased while Confederate villains are being declared heroes. I'm dare to be upset. Dared to speak out. I sit surrounded by the books I once taught. Is this nation headed towards a world like that in 1984, in which my memory, too, is to be repressed, or will I be committed to declare 2 + 2 = 5, and, ultimately, my love for Big Brother?
In the novel, They, the authority has the right to enter the homes where there are still libraries and remove books from shelves, until none exist.
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Recently, I read professor Rashid Khalidi's letter to the acting president of Columbia University. In the letter, Professor Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of Modern Arab studies at Columbia, explains why he has decided not to teach his course in Modern Middle East history, his scholarship for 50 years. It is impossible, Khalidi writes, to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Doing so, Khalidi continues, would acknowledge that he agrees with the IHRA's deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflating Jewishness with the policies of the nation of Israel in Gaza. Any criticism of Israel's policies toward Palestine is a criticism of Jews. While the ancient evil of Jew-hatred is to be condemned, it's not, Khalidi, argues, the same as calling out genocide in Gaza.
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