Last week I wrote about the importance of history, that is, the importance of teaching our children true histories. My day today has only further radicalized how I feel about that.
I went today to a #FamiliesBelongTogether rally directly outside of the SeaTac Federal Detention Center. During the entirety of the 3 hour rally, men –– who presumably worked at the center –– stood on top of the jail watching the mass of people below. They listened to us chant. They watched us raise our signs in the air. They stood there, some with binoculars, some with their hands on their hips. I, just one of thousands listening to speakers, stared at them from below for a while, wondering who they were, who they lived with, what type of music they liked. I wondered whether or not a part of them wanted to be on the ground with us. I wondered if there was something in them that envied the the moral freedom of the other side.
Four men on top of the detention center watching and listening to the rally. While it appeared they worked for and/or at the center, I am unsure what their roles actually were.
On my way home from the rally, I stood on the link in a car packed with people, listening to a most fitting NPR Code Switch episode, "Immigration Nation." The topic? Why it is the United States has so effectively, for so many generations, been able to exclude and detain immigrants, with no moral internal conflicts.
Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby, and guests discussed the practice of dehumanization as a tool for committing inhumane actions. When human beings become animals in our minds, they become disposable, irrelevant, inferiorized. They become the squirrel who darted across the road just too quickly for us to slam on our breaks in time. America becomes a food chain in these cases, and at the top are people who are able to see others (now immigrants, but in the past, Native Americans, slaves, Japanese, etc.) as animals and devils in their minds.
This may feel like common knowledge; it may seem obvious. You may even recall a time with you were responsible for dehumanizing someone else, or you may not want to admit it. But I don't believe we are honest enough with ourselves about this.
Sure, the Chinese Exclusion Act was made effective in 1882, but its repeal shows the growth of America! Right? Sure, the United States incarcerated Japanese Americans during WWII, but reparations were distributed to families so all trauma endured is now erased! Right?
Histories have patterns, as I mentioned in my last post, so these events will –– and are –– repeating. But also, cultural memory does not dissipate or disappear. When the United States erases the truth of these histories from books, they can't eliminate it from the DNA of communities effected by these inhumane acts.
Meraji goes on to talk with a professor of philosophy at the University of New England, David Livingstone Smith, who believes dehistoricizing what's happening now is at the core of inhumanity.
"Americans tend to have a rather deformed picture of their own history," Livingstone Smith tells her. "And so we're not so acquainted like the Germans are with the atrocities that, you know, white America has committed. If you're aware of those things, then it might give you pause. I teach a course. It's called Race, Racism and Beyond. And without exception, my students have never heard how bad things were."
I was arrested by this; it was so similar to what I was arguing last week, but this time, I couldn't get the detention center men out of my head. I thought of them again, looking down from above at the rally. Did they know how bad things were? Were they fed an inaccurate, uninformed, and propagandized plate of history their whole lives? Even if they were, even if we all were, does it change the fact they were defending something awful?
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