Whitewashed Tomb
“America is the greatest country in the world.”
Have you ever heard someone say that? I have. Many times. Sometimes I hear it from friends or family members, sometimes from politicians, sometimes from Moroccans when I lived near Marrakech. The context varies. Yet every time I hear that phrase, I cringe.
As someone who has lived abroad, I am acutely aware of the benefits of having been born in America. It is true that the U.S.A. is a great country. But to say it is the greatest is putting a premium on our value of independence over the many cultures who hold community and family superior. To say it is the greatest eliminates the conversation on our weaknesses, mistakes, wrongdoings, it implies no room for fault or correction. To say it is the greatest is so painfully blind to those in our country for whom life in America has been traumatizing. The U.S.A. is a great country, for some. It is a horrible place for others. For hundreds of years the greatness we so readily claim has come on the backs and blood of enslaved and oppressed people. The wealth and power that many families wield today is a direct result of perpetrating that system. But that part doesn’t make the story we sell to the world. That part is shoved under the bed along with the surmounting number of casualties who have fallen victim to that system.
Billie Holiday forced her audiences to confront the painful reality of lynchings and racism in America through the song Strange Fruit.
For many years, many people have been shining a flashlight under the bed. Poets have written, crooners have sung, activists have shouted, artists have painted, all begging the public to look under the bed. Look at the number of Black men incarcerated. Look at how the war on drugs was really code for racial suppression. Look at the way the police brutalize people of color and use “Black on Black crime” as some kind of twisted justification.
The light is stifled, the bold advocate ignored or killed. Their message is contrary to the leather-bound, gold-trimmed pages of the American story we sell ourselves and the world. Not only have we stifled the voices crying for justice, we have continued to hide the bodies of brutalized Black men and women under the bed, in the closet, beneath the floor boards. Out of sight. Out of mind. Out of the American story. Because America is great.
But there is no more room for corpses under the bed. The evidence of our sins are spilling out for the world to see, calling us on our bluff. Every day another body is pulled out and into the light. Another atrocity to confront. Another sin to atone. Another example of just how horrible life in America can be.
When I was a teenager, I remember once telling my mom I was going to spend the day cleaning my room. After a few hours, she popped in to check my progress and my floor was completely covered in junk. “I thought you were going to clean your room!” she exclaimed. “Why does it look worse?!” I looked up at her from the floor where I was buried in piles of old magazines, boxes of photos, and lost socks and explained, “I’m deep cleaning. I have to pull everything out. It is going to get messier before it can get better.”
This country needs a deep cleaning. The death and suffering that was pushed out of the American story MUST be confronted. Each story is worth hearing. Each victim worth honoring. Each perpetrator worth prosecuting. We must confront what we’ve done and hold the guilty parties accountable, but we must also fight the system that allowed it to happen. No more bodies under the bed. No more bodies period.
And we must rewrite the American story to include the brutality this country was built on. We must tell the story of how America became prosperous through a system built on and fed by oppression. We must record the names of presidents, police, judges, congressmen, governors, mayors who have imprisoned and murdered so many. We must tell of the lynchings that white citizens enacted with their bare hands. We must tell of our wickedness. And we must recognize that the right to live without the fear of being killed for being Black is just the beginning. There is much more work to be done.
In the Bible, Jesus often criticized the religious leaders. Matthew chapter 23 is a particularly scathing rebuke. He calls them out for being wicked yet presenting themselves to the world as holy. As I read this, it brought America’s so called greatness to mind.
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law [have power but]… do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Everything they do is done for people to see… Woe to you, blind guides! …You give a tithe... But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness… Woe to you, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.”
As we continue to work of confronting our wickedness, we cannot consider the optics. Things will be messier before they can be better. But, Lord willing, a better reality is possible. Not just for some, for everyone.