When I was 12 years old, growing up in the 1950s, I gathered every Saturday with hundreds of kids my age at the downtown theater in my West Texas town where the silver screen fed us lies that passed for gospel truth, lies we also heard in our schools, our churches and every nook and cranny of the world that raised us.
We children watched in horror as vicious savages on horseback terrorized a community of innocent white settlers before killing them and burning their houses to the ground. But our horror turned to ecstatic cheers when suddenly, a regiment of white-skinned, blue-coated cavalry appeared on the horizon, chased the Indians away from the carnage they had inflicted and killed them in what we knew was fair and just retribution.
Richard T. Hughes
And then, when I was 28, I read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a definitive history that chronicled Native American/white relations from 1860 to 1890.
“During that time,” Brown wrote, “the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed, and out of that time came virtually all the great myths of the American West — tales of fur traders, mountain men, steamboat pilots, goldseekers, gamblers, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, harlots, missionaries, schoolmarms and homesteaders, … The Indian was the dark menace of the myths.”
Accordingly, white settlers and the American government systematically killed through their so-called “Indian wars” thousands of indigenous people and removed the rest to reservations on some of the most inhospitable land in the country. Those are the facts Dee Brown’s book presents in great detail.
Flying in the face of those facts, the Trump administration wants to enshrine in every federal agency the myth of white American innocence as the official dogma of the United States, a demand implicit in the president’s Executive Order of March 27, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“The Trump administration wants to enshrine in every federal agency the myth of white American innocence.”
Attempts to “rewrite our nation’s history,” the order complains, have cast our nation “in a negative light.” Accordingly, “our nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive.”
The order therefore requires the secretary of the interior to ensure that no federal properties present “descriptions, depictions or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living … and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
In other words, tell what is good and noble about the American experiment — and there is much we can celebrate in that regard, to be sure — but for God’s sake, don’t even mention the nation’s crimes that might cast the United States “in a negative light” and erode our sense of innocence.
Learning the differences
When I was 7 or 8, I absorbed by osmosis what most whites in America in the 1940s and 1950s believed about themselves — that they were innocent of any racial crime in spite of their subjugation, exploitation and brutalization of Blacks, made legal by the Jim Crow statutes that defined the world of my youth. After all, Blacks were lazy and dirty, we believed, and a drag on white Christian civilization.
Well before I was 10 years old, an uncle in Waco, Texas, spoke quite directly to me, seeking to educate me about the difference between Blacks and whites.
“They eat chickens, bones and all.”
“Want to know about (n-word)?” he asked. “They eat chickens, bones and all.” His words were harbingers of words I would hear some 50 years later from a president of the United States who claimed Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.
Malcolm X (Wikipedia)
And then, when I was 24, I read Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X. While Malcolm’s experience was hardly unique in Black America, my white and innocent world protected me from the fact that people like Malcolm even existed. I still remember how stunned I was when I read about Mr. Ostrowski, Malcolm’s eighth-grade teacher in Mason, Mich. Malcolm’s academic performance put him at the top of his class, but when Malcolm told his teacher he thought he might become a lawyer, Mr. Ostrowski said this:
Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a (n-word). A lawyer — that’s no realistic goal for a (n-word). You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands — making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person — you’d get all kinds of work.
Because Malcolm’s story stands as a stark rebuke to the sense of innocence that always has defined white America, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of hundreds of books — books that tell the truth about America’s racial history — that have been purged from the libraries of America’s service academies, thanks to the slavish allegiance to the notion of white American innocence that pervades the Trump administration.
Yelling epithets
When I was 15 years old, I joined my friends in the back of a pickup truck as we cruised through a predominantly Black neighborhood, yelling racial epithets at every Black person we saw. I felt no more guilt for my behavior than I felt for eating breakfast or going to bed at night.
And then, more than 60 years later, when I was 78 years old, I read a book that illumined my teenage behavior for what it was. That book was Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. There I read these words:
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-lifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.
Even though by then I had long since come to terms with the tragic reality of racism in American life, I still found myself protesting. “Racism? Yes! That’s obvious. White supremacy? Yes, that’s obvious, too. But ‘caste?’ Where’s the evidence?”
The evidence, Wilkerson explains, is largely silent, largely unnoticed, largely assumed as a self-evident truth that we need not bother to prove.
“Caste,” she writes, “is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue.” Or again, caste is like the studs and joists that support a house — unseen, but powerfully present. Caste, she concludes, “is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.”
“As I read her words, I began to remember.”
As I read her words, I began to remember. I remembered my uncle’s words about Blacks and how they “eat chickens, bones and all.” I remembered the subconscious conviction, bred in me from the time I was small, that Blacks are lazy and dirty and a drag on the perfect world whites could build were it not for “all those people.” And I remembered cruising through a neighborhood where my friends and I shouted horrible epithets at men and women and children whose skin was darker than my own.
But most of all I remembered I felt no guilt at all — no guilt for my racist convictions, no guilt for my racist words, no guilt for my racist behavior. For I had absorbed, as we all had absorbed when I was young, the myth of white American innocence.
While that myth is a staple of American self-understanding with roots that predate the nation, it is a profoundly pernicious myth that distorts the character of those who embrace it. Even worse, it ascribes to the nation an innocence that flies in the fact of reality.
Yet, the myth of white American innocence is precisely what the Trump administration seeks to impose on every federal institution charged with preserving, presenting and interpreting American history. Those institutions include the Manzanar National Historic Site which served during World War II as a sort of concentration camp housing Japanese people who, by virtue of their race, were suspected of disloyalty to the American nation. Those institutions also include the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which presents the horrors of slave ships and slavery in the United States. The MAAHC also testifies to the beatings, the castrations and the lynchings inflicted on many African American people long after slavery had come to an end, and it presents in distressing fulness the evils of Jim Crow segregation and the soul-withering results of the racism that persists to this day.
Yet, on May 20, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum issued “Order No. 3431” that requires his department to review “all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties on lands within its jurisdiction to identify whether any such properties contain images, descriptions, depictions, messages, narratives or other information (content) that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” and “take action to replace the removed content with content that focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
Reflecting on the myth
Most whites seldom reflect on the myth of innocence since the myth of white American innocence shields both themselves and the nation from having to grapple with the rotten fruit that myth creates at home and abroad.
Many Blacks, on the other hand, have recognized that myth for the lie it is and have critiqued it unsparingly. James Baldwin offers a case in point.
James Baldwin
In his 1963 classic, The Fire Next Time, written during the years of the American Freedom Movement and the war in Vietnam, Baldwin wrote that “these innocent people are trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” But they could not afford to grapple with the truths of their past for fear of losing “their identity” as a noble and innocent nation. As a result, they “are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it,” for their sense of “innocence … constitutes the crime.”
Eddie Glaude, in his 2020 book on Baldwin, Begin Again, assessed the myth of innocence with brutal clarity.
That myth, he argued, was not only essential, but indispensable, in order to sustain what Glaude simply called “the lie” — the notion that white lives matter more than the lives of others.
“Taken as a whole,” Glaude wrote, “the lie is the mechanism that allows, and has always allowed, America to avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of Black people and how it deforms the soul of the country. The lie cuts deep into the American psyche. It secures our national innocence in the face of the ugliness and evil we have done.” For “according to (the lie) … America is fundamentally good and innocent, its bad deeds dismissed as mistakes corrected on the way to ‘a more perfect union.’”
Ta-Nehisi Coates took up this theme as well. “There exists all around us,” he wrote to his son, “an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names.”
Coates referred to American whites who embrace this myth as “the Dreamers,” people who willingly indulge themselves in the illusion of American innocence. In order to sustain that dream, however, they have to forget. Indeed,
They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. … To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body.
But none of these warnings and none of these insights matter to the current administration, committed as it is to enshrine as official dogma the myth of white American innocence and to rewrite American history by omitting any allusion to the nation’s crimes.
Richard Hughes is the author of Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories that Give Us Meaning; and co-author of Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans to January 6, 2021.
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