When Whoopi Goldberg’s character Oda Mae Brown approached Demi Moore’s Molly in the movie Ghost, she issued an ominous warning, “Molly, you in danger girl.” America is a little less than two weeks away from celebrating Black History Month, and a large contingent of white Americans would be happy to have it disappear. If you think that only applies to a small segment of the country—roughly 12 percent, America, you in danger girl.
National Hispanic and Latin American Heritage Month, Native America Heritage Month, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and so on, could be next. Let the whitewashing continue. Who would believe that the questions of its origin would be in dispute 163 years after the beginning of the Civil War? Or that following the war between enslaving states and free states, Jim Crow laws, and the denial of the right to vote, banking, education, and housing discrimination, Emmett Till and George Floyd, a politician running for the highest office in the world, could not bring herself [Nikki Haley] to say the obvious—that racism is a major part of American history or that the Civil War was fought over enslaving human beings.
When Critical Race Theory was purposefully mischaracterized and used by the likes of Christopher Rufo to advance white nationalist views, GOP politicians—whose every statement was a noun, a verb, and CRT eventually abandoned the strategy. In the long term, it opened the door to banning challenging, thought-provoking literature. The theory was that white children would be so disturbed by the truth that their psyche could not recover. I agree that excessively prurient material should not be available in schools. However, award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Anne Frank, and George M. Johnson are caught up in the hysteria. What their books have in common is a perspective, not just from white Christian men. Stories from the mind’s eyes of a black woman, a Jewish teenager, or a gay man are perceived as threats to the dream of a utopian white theocracy.
One of history’s most popular sets of movies is the Godfather trilogy (well, maybe not part three). It is full of violence, philandering, domestic abuse, and racialized themes. A paperback copy of Mario Puzo’s book started my journey into reading when I was 14 years old. As a black youth, I was enthralled with the story. I was introduced to a world I had no idea existed; I read the whole book in a weekend. I stayed up at night in the bathroom reading as long as I could before being ordered to bed. From there, I read Robert Beck’s (Iceberg Slim) Pimp: The Story of My Life, and I have been an avid reader ever since.
Neither book prompted me to assassinate anyone on a Causeway or don a feathered hat to drive my flashy Cadillac filled with scantily clad women. It whet my appetite for knowledge; what else is in books, I thought? All I remember learning about black history, to that point in school, was George Washington Carver and the peanut. Dr. King was still a pariah in some quarters but was in books. Malcolm X was a radical militant, but he was in books. So, while the Conservative movement rails against DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as bad things, books remain a haven for TAI (Thought, Advancement, and Intellectualism). The march to fascism always begins by banning independent thought, and the purveyors of thought—writers—are the first to go. Republicans say they are dedicated to saving money for our grandchildren but are unwilling to protect their minds.
Note: Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay for Ghost, says his influence came from one of the world’s greatest writers, William Shakespeare.
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