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Sometimes white folks can be truly precious.
And by precious, I don’t mean cute like a three-year-old dressed in an Easter bonnet, holding a balloon and beaming a toothy grin for their parent’s camera.
I mean precious, as in fragile and innocent.
And not innocent as in “not guilty,” but innocent as in naive.
Innocent in the way James Baldwin meant it when he described us in The Fire Next Time:
“These innocent people are trapped in a history they do not understand, and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
Quite so, even more than a half-century since the time Baldwin first set those words to paper.
White Americans have long wanted deliverance from the history of our country, even as we insist it barely happened, or at least not like that, or at least it was a long time ago, so can’t we just put it behind us and move on?
And thus, the people who made mantras of “Remember the Alamo” or “Remember Pearl Harbor” — both of which suggested the wonders of perpetual recollection — now feign amnesia or at least insist upon the prerogative of forgetting when it comes to the less…
