Why the Poor Stay Poor in America - "The Poetry of Divisive Concepts"

“…our founding concept of universal equality, in a country where one-fifth of the population was enslaved, led to an increase in racial prejudice by creating a cognitive dissonance — one that could be resolved only by the white citizenry’s assumption of Black inferiority and inhumanity. It’s an unsettling idea, that the most revered ideal of the Declaration of Independence might be considered our original divisive concept.” The New York Times, 2021

I’m resisting the typical end-of-the-year round-up — posts I’ve written, topics we’ve discussed in the last year. Instead, I’ll focus on one word, one idea that might propel our way to substantive change in the coming new year. And that word is “divisive”.

At first blush, it appears counter-intuitive — divisiveness is supposedly a negative concept, especially considering today’s politics as one pertinent example. Rather, we should strive to come together to solve problems, work “across the aisle” and stop the inflammatory talk that, well, leads to divisiveness.

I’m all for uniting and working together, but it can’t always accomplish the substantive change that moves us forward as a country — to jump start the change perhaps a different tactic is needed, at least at the beginning, and the ‘consensus and working across the aisle parts’ should come at the end.

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A New York Times article titled, “The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History” speaks bitter truths, not just about our country’s less that rosy history, but about the current roadblocks some people, elected officials and private citizens alike, advocate to shut down truth and the progress that comes with it.

This article, written in late 2021, explores in great detail the background of the 1619 Project and its subsequent implementation and expansion, which I’ve mentioned in a previous post. But it is the ensuing backlash to this project that is fascinating.

The 1619 Project is essentially the introduction into out national, K-12 curriculum of additional, factual information about our country’s slave-holding past and its lasting impact on our society. This part of our history that had been mostly ignored in history books, even those written by eminent scholars, has been introduced into the curriculum through the perspective of slaves and Black Americans in their own voices, including narrative prose, poetry and a focus on the contributions of Black citizens to our history. But according to its opponents, the 1619 Project has become its own sinister, divisive force.

“…opponents believed that “history that dwells on unsavory or even horrific episodes in our past is unpatriotic and likely to alienate young students from their own country.” … [And the proponents of the 1619 Project believe] “exposing students to grim chapters of our past is essential to the creation of informed, responsible citizens.”

For example, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, introduced a bill, embarrassingly called the “Saving American History Act”, to prohibit the use of federal funds to integrate the 1619 Project’s studies into the national K-12 curriculum. He referred to the proposed 1619 Project curriculum as “racially divisive” and said that its inclusion in our country’s K-12 studies would result in “a revisionist account of history” that would deny the “noble principles freedom and equality on which our nation was founded.” Although Senator Cotton’s bill never became law, it purportedly inspired 12 states to enact statutes that currently prohibit the integration of the 1619 curriculum into the public schools.

According to this construction, it is divisive to tell the truth, to upend our self-congratulatory version of American history with additional facts that broaden and deepen our knowledge of our shared past. How do we learn from our history, including our mistakes, if much of it simply isn’t written down and studied by our current and future generations? To really learn critical thinking skills, as our current K-12 curriculum swears our students do, shouldn’t our children be taught the importance of holding two, contradictory ideas at the same time, and then how to reconcile or not reconcile them, like the fact that our country was founded on both slavery and freedom?

Interestingly, the author of this New York Times article, Jake Silverstein, proposes that rather than ban concepts thought to be divisive, we instead require them to be studied, starting with the idea that “all men are created equal”.

We don’t have to strain too much, though, to find that many of our great artists intend to upend our traditional thinking, or at least urge us to think differently from our “fathers”. Even an occasion as mundane as repairing a wall separating two properties deserves to be questioned and maybe today would be called “divisive rhetoric”, because it might be construed to contradict the wisdom of a traditional narrative. Enjoy reading one of my favorite poems, written, ironically, by a long dead, white man, Robert Frost.

Courtesy: The Poetry Foundation

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