The Direction of Intention

“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” ~ James Baldwin

It was the end of a blistering hot day and my brains were baking. We walked the path in the afternoon sun to see one more arch. Turning into the shade we squeezed through a narrow passage way and stepped into a sandy sanctuary. It was easily 20 degrees cooler. It was ancient. People had been coming to this place to escape the heat for centuries.

I thought of the sanctuary when I watched the clips from the faux-interview. I wish I was surprised but I was not. During his interview with Kamala Harris, the absurd lengths Bret Baier went to protect his fox-audience from basic information should have been astounding. It was not. To twist a phrase from Forrest Gump, “Propaganda is as propaganda does.” Sad. And consistent.

And dangerous. Fox News is not like a box of chocolates because you always know what you are going to get. Hatred. Fearmongering. Victim TV. Brain-baking. Division, division, division.

I realized that all of my eye-rolling, my utter disbelief that fox-viewers will swallow without question such large chunks of tripe, can be boiled down into one single question: “What are they afraid of?”

The answer is as old as our nation. Perhaps they are afraid of losing their made-up history. Perhaps they are afraid of losing their place in the caste?

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first appearance in print of the adjective white in reference to “a white man, a person of a race distinguished by a light complexion” was in 1671. Colonial charters and other official documents written in the 1600s and early 1700s rarely refer to European colonists as white.

As the status of people of African descent in the British colonies was challenged and attacked, and as white indentured servants were given new rights and status, the word white continued to be more widely used in public documents and private papers to describe the European colonists. People of European descent were considered white, and those of African descent were labeled black. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley explains:

“‘Many of the European-descended poor whites began to identify themselves, if not directly with the rich whites, certainly with being white. And here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark-skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery.‘”(facinghistory.org – inventing black and white)

Inventing white and black, dividing black and white. Colonists, always greatly outnumbered by the people they colonized – therefore deeply afraid of the people they colonized – relied on one highly useful trick: divide the people so they will fight amongst themselves.”

Fox News, as yesterday demonstrated by Bret Baier, works to carry on the colonial tradition.

“After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s lawmakers began to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving Virginians of African descent and giving poor white indentured servants and farmers some new rights and status, they hoped to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they would unite again in rebellion.“

What they are afraid of is insidious: the fox is afraid that we will unite. They are afraid that we will fulfill the great promise of these United States of America. They are afraid that we will stop demonizing each other according to made-up lines of division and treat each other with the respect and divine promise of our nation: that all people are created equal. That all people deserve to be treated fairly, taxed equally, afforded an equal playing field…

The fox fears that we will come together, cooperate, and finally see through the manufactured division, the if-you-gain-I-lose fantasy. They fear we will see-through and transcend the colonial-control-game, that we will step out of the brain-baking heat of division, and enter the ancient place, the sanctuary known as rule by the people and for the people. For all people.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE SANCTUARY

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Filed under: Identity, Metaphor, Perspective |