Before the learning, the unlearning.

Thank you for this lesson, Ijeoma Oluo; you shine a light on what should be plain but has been hidden for too long. It’s pungently said and should be required reading in every school, as soon as children can sound out the words. I’ve seen this knowledge in the faces of people of color who have been kind enough to interact with me, to give me a chance at alliance: the candid expression that says, “I am seeing right through that bullshit, Sparky.” It’s a welcome corrective, if you’re tough enough to take it at the time. I’m pretty simple-minded, and I guess I’d have to say that the single most important pre-requisite for a white person who wants to befriend people of color is to just truly acknowledge that everything you think you know about America is a lie, and go from there. Simple, right?

But we’ve been living on lies since we were born: hearing the lies from infancy; reading them in schoolbooks; learning them in Sunday School; eating them in our diets; watching them on television; swimming in the thick culture of lies that pass for values and morality. You show how people of color recognize early that the Great American Lie doesn’t describe their experience at all, and then, with varying degrees of trauma or grace, they learn all of the things you talk about here. And of course, there is that handful of white people of enormous wealth and privilege who also know it’s a lie and perpetrate it for their own purposes. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to see where the money is coming from and where it’s going. That’s why I have advised that white people consider actually conceding some power, to let fresh ideas in for a change. Maybe the bottom 99% could actually make some progress if they saw more clearly and worked together.

But I say all this with a rational tone that belies my grief when I peer into the grim heart of the world’s billions. We fight and struggle, and there are always some who are seeking and celebrating a cruel advantage over others, for no reason other than some inborn animus. I recognize evil, but I don’t understand it. We have such a short time here, to love and breathe the air and marvel at the moon and get a little pleasure here and there, and those people choose to spend that time dominating and stealing and killing, just to pile up swag; just because they can. And were we all born this broken, or just enough of us to break everyone else? I went through seminary; a doctoral program; years of study and service and reflection, and I don’t have a clue.

But from space, all those mean creatures disappear; all of us do; we are nothing more than a thin layer of algae on the face of this blue dot. And I don’t believe in anybody’s God, and I guess it’s a good thing, because the cognitive dissonance is impossible. I do want there to be an eternal soul, however. But the main, ignoble reason I want there to be an eternal soul is so I can transcend this mean, stupid, and truthless life, when it’s time; join the stars, or whatever is next; leave the racists and the bigots and the tyrants behind to wallow here in the filth they have made; tell them all, “The hell with you, if that’s the way you want it,” and then go on out to the galaxy, with those who know the light of truth when they see it.

Until then, I will find the light wherever I can.

Coda: The story is told that a woman once wrote to Brigham Young, President of the LDS church:

“President Young, my husband told me to go to hell. What should I do?”

Brigham Young wrote back and said: “Dear Sister: Don’t go.”