Over the past two weeks, our discussions, the readings, and my research have challenged my understanding of racism in America, and brought me to some disturbing realizations. Like most white Americans of my generation, I was brought up to believe that all people are equal, deserve equal rights and treatment, and that racial discrimination in any form is wrong. The field trip to the Lincoln museum, amidst its Disney-esque spectacles, provided a sobering reminder of the atrocious crimes perpetrated by white Americans that caused the civil rights problem in the first place. Certainly the practice of slavery was morally reprehensible and I have a hard time understanding how anyone could justify it in any time period.
Up until now, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the civil rights movement in the period we are studying, especially as seen through the lens of popular music. I knew about the key events of the civil rights era – the strikes, riots, demonstrations, and assassinations. I’ve seen the footage of white politicians making bigoted remarks, the KKK with the white hoods and burning crosses, and the “no colored people” signs on the Jim Crow establishments in the South. I knew about the Black Panther Party and can understand why they felt they needed to become militant in their fight for human rights.
But the writings of LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) embracing the ideals of the Black Nationalist Movement caught me completely off guard. Although Jones does raise some valid points about the oppression of blacks by white society, his essays are filled with hatred of the white race, and he is basically calling for black Americans to devise a plot use violence to overthrow white society: “The hope is that young blacks will remember all of their lives what they are seeing, what they are witness to just by being alive and black in America, and that eventually they will use this knowledge scientifically, and erupt like Mt. Vesuvius to crush in hot lava these willful maniacs who call themselves white Americans.”
Although I was fairly shocked and disturbed by Baraka’s essays, they did pique my curiosity to learn more about the Black Nationalist Movement, so I embarked on a google journey to find out more about its separatist ideals and how many followers it had. My search led me to the 1959 documentary “The Hate that Hate Produced,” a journalistic investigation into the Nation of Islam, featuring its then-champion Malcolm X. This organization espoused a radical form of black nationalism, claiming that white society is inherently evil, and prophesying that sometime before 1970, black Americans would rise up as a people to overthrow the white reign of power (with significant bloodshed) and the African race would regain its rightful dominance in the world.
Last year I spent a month in and around Germany studying J.S. Bach for another NEH institute. Although it had nothing to do with the institute, I decided to use the experience to also investigate the holocaust. In an effort to examine it from all angles, I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, Zeppelin Field in Nuremburg (site of many Nazi rallies), the German history museum and Holocaust museum, both in Berlin. I came away with a better understanding of what happened during the Holocaust, but am still at a loss to comprehend how or why a society could allow genocide to happen, especially on such a large scale.
When comparing the ideologies of Hitler and the Nazi party with the rhetoric of Baraka and the Black Nationalist Movement, I see some striking similarities. Of course, the obvious difference is that the Nazis actually murdered millions of innocent human beings, whereas the predictions of the Nation of Islam never came true. But it seems their intent was pretty much the same as what Hitler was trying to achieve, for a different race.
This wasn’t where I intended to go with this institute and I don’t think I’ll venture any further down this path. Bigotry in any form is ugly and unacceptable, and we cannot solve the problems of our society using tactics fueled by hate.
-- Karen Helseth
Images are thumbnails from the PBS archive for the documentary "The Hate That Hate Produced."
