" ...[T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory."
Toni Morrison
I sometimes feel like an exile in Wisconsin. Born and educated in Chicago, the political, social, and cultural milieu makes me think of James Baldwin, walking streets alone among Scandinavians" Here in America, I was having one of those conversations with the medical van driver, on the way to my oncology appointment in Milwaukee. The 30-minute drive between Kenosha and Milwaukee, when the driver is Black, seems much too short a time, particularly when we talk about living while Black in Wisconsin. America, for that matter.
On one of these rides, the driver recalled an encounter he had with an older white man who happened to be sitting at the entrance of a grocery store. As the driver was about to enter the store, the white man looked at him. He told my driver about this fear of his, this fear of a future America because it looked so unreal . And that was it. The man had spoken.
In the silence between the driver and I, we both looked on at the trembling of many in fear.
It's a fear that has never receded but has always been the back bone of this nation. Fear of contamination, fear of that "one drop" of Black blood, fear of an imagined reverse of the racial hierarchy. What if they do to us what we did to them ? Standing on the side of that imagined narrative favoring the supremacy of hatred and the justifying no-holds-barred violence against Black American, has been in an effort to steady the collective trembling"
In the 1870s, Southern "Redeemers" felt the trembling of the ground beneath them. It's was the era of Reconstruction, of Black senators, Black landowners, Black business owner, Black pastors, Black educators, and educated Blacks. However rational it might appear to some to see the progress of a people once enslaved, white fear of "imagined racial equality," writes historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory , "coupled with economic insecurity and increasing hostility toward the activist state," halted the momentum toward a truly democratic society.
In fact, writes Blight, activists white supremacists encouraged Americans to feel the unnatural order of things, for the reality of jubilant Blacks simply made the narrative of a white Christian nation for white only nonsensical. But the activist knew how to appeal to the fears of their fellow Americans, who, Blight writes, shared in the feeling that "the Negro has got about as much as he ought to have." Little by little, the "activism" of the Republican Party, waning since the end of slavery, trickled to a halt. "Memories of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism."
What was good for Black Americans was a nightmare for America's white supremacists.
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