Sometimes, our history can hurt

MIAMI HERALD ^ | May 17, 2010 | LEONARD PITTS

[glide625]

History is not a Hallmark card. Sometimes, history breaks your heart.

I know this because I have often recounted history in this space, tales of black men and women bought and sold, cheated and mistreated, maimed and lynched. And whenever I do this, I can be assured of e-mails and calls of chastisement.

I still remember one of the first, an earnest lady who pleaded with me to leave this history behind. Telling such tales, she said, could not help but make black people resent white ones..............I find the same value in recounting those stories that my former boss Bert used to find in remembering Holocaust brutalities and my friend John finds in recalling Irish suffering at British hands. Understanding the past provides context to understand the present and predict the future. Moreover, history is identity. These stories tell me who I am.

But there's a difference, isn't there? Bert's history indicts Germans in Europe; John's indicts Britons in the United Kingdom. Mine indicts white people, here..........Like the lady who called me, the governor seems to prefer that hard stories not be told, that doing so detracts from American unity. As one online observer put it, “We need to focus on America instead of promoting everyone else.” The problem with that reasoning is obvious: America is everyone else, a nation composed of other nations, a culture made of other cultures, a history built of other histories. And yes, sometimes, those histories will be hard to hear.

[joseph20]

And ignoring also the fact that slavery has been happening since the beginning, that white people also sold white people into slavery, and that America has done more to make up for its slavery past than any other country in the history of the world...

But no...keep telling me about how it is all the fault of America and white men.