Most people will insist on the removal of a cancerous tumor. No one will agree to the partial removal of a cancerous tumor because what remains of that tumor will continue to grow, infecting healthy cells, causing the patient to suffer until, eventually, the patient dies. What remains, in other words, will still act like cancer. It will destroy healthy cells, eventually, killing the host. A partial removal isn't the same as "all is clear". Ridding ourselves of a little bit or even half of something that is toxic to the survival of democracy isn't a solution to our current political and cultural crisis either.
Unfortunately, knowledge about the US's historical encounter with other human beings is the unwanted, the cancerous. Why would some Americans view this knowledge about its own history as life-threatening? For that answer we have to ask, what is, for these Americans, worth protecting at all cost if not white supremacy. The history of holding caves along the western coast of Africa, of auction blocks, of selling and buying of men, women, and children, of the systemic rape of black girls and women, of the systemic exploitation of their labor, resulting in the foundational establishment of institutions and industries is to be erased, if not forcefully forgotten. Too uncomfortable for Americans filled to the brim with innocence, God, and patriotism!
To subjugate the knowledge of the black lived experienced so as to effect as "disappearance" of the unwanted is to result in the coercion of all Americans, offering everyone, that is, a shared role in the violence of fascism.
Bring out the Confederate flag. Display the crosses. And the noose. No one need wonder where Christianity enters the picture. God is on the side of the insurrections at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Insurrections shouting, "take back our country", coincides with the pogroms, such as the banning of books and the removal of AP courses in African American studies and the outright censorship against anything having to do with slavery. Slavery. It's the dream of American fascist to "disappear" black people, beginning with pogroms that shift the victim of enslavement, conquest, imperialism, and exploitation into the embodiment of the "un-Godly." Evil itself.
It's a pattern of outcomes history has recorded again and again. And it is nothing short of a declaration of war.
And so war it is!
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The war began long before Trumpism. In the "Forward" to The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (2022), the public historian, writer, and former Evangelical Christian Jemar Tisby describes how the results of the Trump victory in 2016 affected him. It was as if he had engaged in battle, and lost. The physical signs of the conflict manifested themselves in a muscle twitch under his left eye. He suffered from this "physiological response in which," he writes, "I essentially winced every time I opened my laptop." Tisby later learns that he experienced "a form of racial trauma".
He had to ask himself, How would it be possible to worship alongside whites at church? "How could I sing, pray, and exchange pleasantries with folks who seemed not to care what their favored politician's plans would mean for me, my family, our community, and our country?"
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