Move to Germany

March 17, USA Today: West Palm Beach, Fla. — A Florida English professor whose lessons about racial justice put him at odds with his university's administrators has been fired. 

“Racism is a thing of the past.” How I wish that this was true. Amongst the people I know, I would say we’ve made tremendous progress in my lifetime and if you look at the surface signs— people of color more thoroughly represented and included in TV ads, the Oscars, the bookstores, children’s dolls, emojis, Diversity trainings abounding, TV shows and movies from even 15 years ago making us feel uncomfortable, a black reparations proposal in San Francisco in yesterday’s news—you might agree.

 

But the country as a whole is so far from healing, mostly because of the refusal of a large portion of the country to want to heal. Healing begins by admitting the atrocity of Native American genocide and African slavery and taking the collective steps to acknowledge it, apologize for it, educate the next generation and begin to repair it. Precisely what so many Americans would rather not do because it takes effort, is painful and challenges our unearned privilege. Precisely what Germany has done in the face of its Nazi past. Here are some comparisons from Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste (pp. 346-47):

 

•In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi and hung outside courthouses and legislative buildings up until recently. It is displayed on the backs of pick-up trucks throughout the north and south.

 

• In Germany, few people will proudly admit to having been related to Nazis or will openly defend the Nazi cause. In America, at Civil War reenactments throughout the country, more people typically sign up to fight on the side of the Confederates than for the Union.

 

• In Germany, some of the Nazis who did not kill themselves were tracked down and forced to stand trial for crimes against humanity. In America, slaveholders and Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president and Jefferson Davis  wrote his memoirs from his plantation in Mississippi. Both were granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

 

• In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on black Americans over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers in lynchings, not only went free but rose to become leading figures—southern governors, senators, sheriffs, businessmen, mayors.

 

• Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces. America has well over 1700 and to this day, there is backlash every time one is removed.

 

• In Germany, it is a mandatory part of every school curriculum, even for grade school students, to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust and visit the death camps. In America, visits to plantations (ie forced labor camps) are mostly about landscape and architecture (black-run Whitney Plantation the one exception) and school children not only are not required to learn about the horrors of slavery, but now at least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism. (Boldface mine) With 2022 state legislative sessions underway, new legislation is in the pipeline.

 

Add to the mix above the Charlottesville riot with Confederate and Nazi flags proudly displayed and the American president publicly commenting “There were good people on both sides,” the Alabama bill making it illegal to remove any monument that has been in place for twenty years or more (ie, all Confederate monuments), the new laws restricting voting rights, the tidal wave move to ban books, today’s news of the Florida professor fired for teaching about racial justice in a University (boldface mine, to accent the mission of higher education to foster free thought and critical thinking) and you get a bleak picture and clear summary of why we are still so stuck in the racism quagmire. 

 

Which leaves us with two choices:

1) Get to work.

2) Move to Germany.