Robert Azzi: America, whose story is missing?

By Robert Azzi
“We believe the one who has the power,” Yaa Gyasi writes in “Homegoing.” “He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth?”

For too long far too many people believed in a sanitized history of America, replete with missing, false and suppressed stories. Some rooted in denial, some in embarrassment, some in racism and prejudice.

The persistence of such narratives, uncorrected over centuries and decades, has resulted in the caste system we inhabit today, one that not only elevates whiteness as the national norm but also serves to elevate illusionary narratives about a nation that was born not only in aspiration but also in sin. A nation sustained by the erasure of identity and humanity of its non-white peoples.

These are dangerous days. Never have so many people had so much access at their fingertips to so much information yet been so resistant to any information that might contradict their prejudices. Days where some Americans mendaciously scorn rationality and expertise and applaud vulgarity and bigotry, reject the guidance of scientists and embrace charlatans.

These are dangerous days.

No rational person, I believe, could have foreseen that today America would be so roiled by irrationality rooted in racism and prejudice. An irrationality committed to the preservation of a false American identity so frightening that it presents an existential threat to our existence as a democracy, an irrationality determined to suppress the voices of peoples unlike themselves.

Today, no one could have foreseen that when the Taliban’s Minister of Education, Molvi Noorullah Munir boasted, “You see that the Mullahs and Taliban that are in the power, have no PhD, MA or even a high school degree, but are the greatest of all,” he would be articulating a popular right-wing American trope embraced by millions of people so proud of their ignorance that not only are they willing to sacrifice loved ones on altars of idolatry but they are willing to try and topple our government through insurrection.

Not only has our history for too long been written and rewritten by those in power but even our language has been so appropriated that white people want not only to define racism on their terms but they want to dictate how victims of racism and discrimination should respond.

Appropriate language so that they can be the ones who define what’s diverse, what’s equity, what’s justice. What definitions comfort them and protect their privilege.

Appropriate language and meaning so they can be free to misquote, misappropriate, and demean the voice of the Other.

“Prejudice,” Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim observed, “saves us a painful trouble – the trouble of thinking.”

The truth is that even after abolition, Civil War, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, The March on Washington, Civil Rights legislation and innumerable other acts the fundamental structure of institutions and organizations that enslavers and those who profited from the slave trade created have been not just resistant to change but continue to advance agendas to protect their dominant, and false, perception that America is a primarily a white, Christian nation.

Today, Critical Race Theory (CRT) challenges the historic racial hierarchies embedded in American institutions and questions the legitimacy of power that sustains white America, not by teaching people that they are racist but by exposing how deeply racism is embedded in all our lives.

Rather than understand that “an encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect,” as the late Mary Catherine Bateson, a longtime Hancock, New Hampshire resident wrote, opponents of CRT strive to deny Americans an understanding of the full promise of America, deny the existence of an expansive America.

Whose story is missing?

Americans like to think we live in an “exceptional” nation, as many developed nations do, but the truth is that in recent years we’ve been most exceptional in witnessing attacks on our Public Square, attacks on suffrage, attacks on artists and authors of color struggling to make their singular visions, visions of a great and diverse nation spawned by challenge, love and conflict, known.

While it was once common to deify the Founding Fathers and colonial-settlers who claimed this nation as visionaries who sought to create a nation based on values rather than on ethnicity or religion, the reality is that they often fell short of their own expressed aspirational values.

They, too, were human.

Of the first 12 presidents, eight, along with such luminaries as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, owned and traded in enslaved peoples.

While it’s true that for over 200 years such men were celebrated as heroes doesn’t mean that America’s “birthing story” should not be revisited. “The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism,” Bateson wrote, “is essential to democracy,” and that’s what we’re being called upon to do.

Whose voice suppressed?

For too long America suppressed the voices of The Other, the enslaved, the dispossessed and victims of genocide. Suppressed the horrors of pogroms and lynchings, committed environmental, economic, educational, political and cultural racism against minority communities and peoples of color, all without ever being called to full account.

Accounting for such truths affirms, not diminishes, who we are.

These are dangerous days. To acknowledge such truths, to listen to the missing and suppressed, to face down authoritarian challenges and to confront threats to our democracy is essential to our survival, to our belief that all people are created equal.

Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at [email protected].