in this op ed for today’s Washington Post.
By now we can expect that kind of criticism from the likes of Charles M. Blow, in yesterday’s Times, or Eugene Robinson, also in today’s Post. After all, both are African-American and identified as liberals.
But Gerson is white, and considered at least a moderate conservative, given the role he played (speechwriter) in the administration of George W. Bush.
Thus I think it important to bring more attention to what Gerson writes, even as I am critical of some of his framing.
He begins with this paragraph:
It is often difficult to determine if President Trump’s offenses against national unity and presidential dignity are motivated by ignorance or malice. His current crusade against sideline activism at professional football games features both.
and follows with these words at the start of the next:
Protests by players during the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” are misdirected, but their motivations are understandable. African Americans have a naturally complex relationship with a country in which 1 out of 7 seven human beings was once owned as property and robbed of his or her labor. A country with a founding promise that bypassed them.
Whether or not you think the first words in that second block quote are too much of a balancing act, please focus instead on what follow. The final sentence of that block quote is reminiscent of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28, 1963 when he talked about an unfulfilled promissory note due to African-Americans.
As for the motivations being understandable, Gerson immediately turns to the words of the speech about the 4th of July by Frederick Douglass, a speech to which he will also return later in the column.
It is, however, the words of Gerson himself on which I wish to focus. For example, consider these words:
And the end of slavery was hardly the end of oppression. We are a country where the reimposition of white supremacy following the Civil War involved not just segregation but also widespread violence. A country in which mass incarceration and heavy-handed police tactics now create a sense that some neighborhoods are occupied by a foreign force. A country in which wealth and opportunity remain, in significant part, segregated by race.
Gerson shows both the historical knowledge and cultural awareness that lie behind these protests, things far too often absent from the broader discussions that have flowed since Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the anthem.
Or as Gerson himself writes bluntly, in a brief, stand alone paragraph which forces us to focus on these words:
If white Americans can’t feel even a hint of this alienation and outrage, it is a fundamental failure of empathy and historical memory.
Gerson goes on to remind us of history of which Trump seems either ignorant or to which he is oblivious, ranging from Emancipation through Black Union troops through sit-ins to the Edmund Pettis Bridge. He accuses Trump of malice, of deliberately feeding racial animus to his base, citing some of Trumps more recent history before describing it as “a pattern and habit of division by race, ethnicity and religion.”
Then comes this paragraph:
Stop and consider. This is a sobering historical moment. America has a racial demagogue as president. We play hail to this chief. We stand when he enters the room. We continue to honor an office he so often dishonors. It is appropriate but increasingly difficult.
Indeed.
Again, you may choose to quibble with some of Gerson’s attempts to be “balanced.” Consider for example these sentences:
In this case, demagoguery is likely to be effective, in part because protesters have chosen their method poorly. The American flag is not the racist symbol of a racist country. It is the symbol of a country with ideals far superior to its practice.
To argue that the protestors “have chosen their method poorly” is to be like those critics of “direc action” in civil rights activity to whom King had to address his now famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
from which I will only quote this much:
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
How are those still feeling the sting of discrimination and oppression, who are too often being killed extra-judicially with impunity supposed to bring the attention of the nation to the injustice they suffer without doing something sufficiently out of the ordinary to cause us to stop, to break out of patterns of behavior that function as indifference to the pain they continue to experience?
Gerson is more on point when he writes:
The extraordinary achievement of America’s founders was to elevate a set of ideals that judged (in many cases) their own hypocritical conduct. With the Declaration of Independence, they put a self-destruct mechanism in the edifice of slavery. They designed a system that eventually transcended their own failures of courage. At least in part. With more to go.
And if he can recognize that conduct was hypocritical, that too often we do NOT in teaching the Founding of this country recognize that in our instruction, how does he expect things to change if we are not forced to confront the still continuing original sin of racism that continues to harm this nation, that is used by demagogues — like Donald Trump — to continue to divide us?
Gerson returns to Douglass to set up his conclusion, words that like all those from that famous speech are well worth pondering, and which probably should also be required as part of instruction in our history. He then concludes with these words:
The president’s agenda of division is fully exposed. Faith in the Declaration, and in the genius of American institutions, remains the proper response. Under the flag that symbolizes them both.
I would argue that taking a knee in silence, as Colin Kaepernick did, is to express faith in both the Declaration and the Preamble to the Constitution, to the idea of fulfilling the promise of our founding documents, to beginning to redeem King’s “promissory note” that is still outstanding.
Gerson’s words move in the right direction, but I hope he can some to see that they are insufficient because of his felt need to criticize the particular action.