Re. Jefferson's Pillow

[David Morris]

http://www.wnyc.org/books/1997

"Generations of my family are buried in this American ground, and this 
country has made its mark on us just as we have made our marks on it. My 
people and I have worked for America, and we have changed it, made it richer 
and better. The question is whether we blacks can join other 
Americans—including more recent immigrants—and become the full emotional and 
civic owners of the place where we were once owned. There is much pain and 
loss in our national history, which contains powerful echoes of the pain and 
loss many of us feel in our daily lives. For blacks there is the pain of 
slavery and the continual loss of dignity that accompanies our treatment as 
nonstandard citizens. For many Southern whites, the outcome of the Civil War 
brought a loss of prestige, power, and privilege, and some of the resulting 
resentment was felt in the North as well. Black people and white people 
became for each other color-coded symbols of the things they had lost or 
never achieved, and of the things they continued to resent and fear.

    Ancient pains are summoned up to cloak contemporary arguments in the 
self-righteousness of victimhood. So we divide up our past and use 
simplistic bits selectively—avoiding real human complexity—in order to fuel 
the argument of the moment or to meet urgent but unrelated needs. But in so 
dividing and simplifying history—for example, maintaining that the 
Confederate flag is merely the symbol of past honor and gallantry or that 
all blacks were innocent and noble victims—we ensure that our future will be 
rent along the same jagged seams that wound us so grievously today."




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