Your Buried Corpses Have Begun to Speak

As far as the statues go, I think we're more or less safely at the position of "Fuck Confederate generals" and "Fuck Christopher Columbus." The main way in which those are embarrassing now is the fact that we tolerated them for so long in the first place. We'll always have the raggedy band of slow-blinking pack-humans who want to talk about "preserving history" or whatever, but at the moment they don't really seem capable of carrying the day. I can't say necessarily that there are more of us than there are of them, but the climate is such that an openly racist president can't fill a venue in Oklahoma, a place where they really do racism all the way. I've been alive and an American too long to believe we've really turned a corner permanently here (inertia is inertia, whether it's the path of a probe falling forever through space or the specifics of a fucked-up cultural hegemony). So I'm talking less about hope than the urgency to get as much done in the moment.

"Man, you already got Aunt Jemima and Cream of Wheat," your aunt probably said on facebook, "What's next? Mount Rushmore?!"

I mean... yes?

I'm not singling out Mount Rushmore, I mean fucking all of it. How many opportunities does a society have to really reckon with itself, to realign its priorities and its sense of who it is? Maybe post-war Germany, that might have been it. Even changes that seem radical like the fall of communism in Russia, you could make the argument that it's been tsars and boyars all the way through, just with different titles and updated suits.

Iconoclasm is hard enough in Old World societies with a thousand years of piecemeal evolution, with the slow co-opting and normalization of demographic influxes and exoduses and the erasure and redrawing of this border over whatever river. But it's even harder in a New World country where everything here is made up. The foundational mythology is, even at 500-plus years, young and sapling, green, bowing and shallow in non-native soil. The only thing holding it in place is a clinging, gripping belief that it belongs there, all evidence to the contrary. If it relaxes even the tiniest iota, it will show us all its sad roots just as it dies.

As such, there's no outside. The way we have structured this invented environment, it must be right. Further, it must be the best that ever was. And the wars fought and the blood spilt sanctify the mistakes into a sort of gospel, a violent, old-god orthodoxy that will have either your obeisance or your head. Your schools will teach it that way, in the adorable singalong songs and the history books. Your movies will enforce it at every opportunity. Your internet will manifest 4chan and 8chan and whatever else is necessary to give voice to it.

To question it is to invite violence. We've tried it a few times and we got a whole Civil War. And then again, when we got assassinations, Kent State, Charles Manson and basically that was that. Nothing to show for it but fucking disco.

We've arrived at another inflection point, to steal a fashionable phrase. Culturally, it's as if we discovered oxygen is poisonous. The reflex approach is to work the problem: "well, we'll just use scuba masks or something," but all the emergency equipment is made with the oxygen presumption. There's nowhere on the planet to go to outrun it, no substitute to hand that we can swap it out for and hope to live. We crawled out of the primordial seas and gasped in the unsaturated air by the sipping lungful, using it to power our evolution through slithering to crawling to walking to Candy Crush, all the way through inside a context built on the seems-like-it-should-be-unshakeable tautological conclusion that the thing we breathe is breathable. What do you do when everything you've ever understood as true turns out to be the very thing that is killing you?

You do what we did to get from salamanders to lemurs or however the fuck evolution works: you adapt or you die.

The good news is that the thing we're trying to overthrow, white supremacy, was a lie to start with. It's not real and it never was. It's an agreement to common delusion, just like we do with money. It is wholly pretend. It should be a simple act to expose the central lie--that Black men and women are not men and women--and all agree to leave it there, wriggling and dying, along the roadside where it never should have been picked up in the first place. The bad news is that the fictions actually run deeper because they require active buy-in. How hard it will be to get out will depend on how deep we are in it.* If you need a gauge of where that is, you can see it in the face of every statue ever erected to celebrate the life and achievements of an American racist.

---

*You can't really measure the depth of the thing you're born in. It's the universe, as far as you can tell.