It has been more than fifty years since James Baldwin first named the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction for, well, ever. “The failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person,” he wrote. America has failed, he said, because it has come to believe its own myths: The Dream. Equal Justice. The Melting Pot. And America’s greatest crime is its ongoing disinterest in any meaningful introspection. “If we are not capable of this examination,” Baldwin warned, “we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”
Which brings us to Green Book — which is, at its root, yet another story that invites us to whitewash our collective imagination in a soothing balm of Bizarro-harmony, one in which the white guy is now the driver, and the black guy is now in charge.
Stories like this encourage us to assume that the deep roots of our history can be lopped off like a summer haircut. They offer lazy redemption, and hey — isn’t life hard enough? It’s OK, they say to all of us, but especially to White America. All is forgiven. The worst is behind us. This is really who we are
To which Baldwin, then and now, says — screams! — NO. America’s only hope of survival lays in a liberation from the hypocrisy that has allowed generational inequality to persist, to flourish, with nary a speed bump in its way. But because these myths and distortions are embedded so deeply in our collective psyche, they require hard, uncomfortable, sustained, deeply introspective work that we remain, as a nation, completely unwilling to do.
And so, we choose Driving Ms. Daisy over Do the Right Thing.
Emmett Till becomes Tamir Rice.
Fred Hampton becomes Sandra Bland.
And Barack Obama becomes Donald Trump.
To recognize one’s true identity as an American (and a human being), we must first be willing to confront, in its full weight, the history of the Black/White experience, with all its fantasies and attendant myths. Until that happens, nothing will happen. “What is history?” Baldwin asked us to consider. “What has it made of us? And where is a witness to this journey?”
We are all witnesses. Green Book is not our story. It’s time to wake up from the Dream.
At its most literal, A Little Piece of Something is a story about a public Montessori school in Memphis that is changing the way people think — about their community, about public education, and about the best way(s) to foster a healthy identity in young children.
At its core, however, it’s a story of how we come to understand who we are and why we matter. It interweaves three different narrative threads: the inextricable relationship between the health of a community and the health of its schools; the impact of structural racism on our individual and collective sense of identity; and the mission of public Montessori programs, which offer a radically different model of healthy child development than the conventional “reform” approach (i.e., KIPP, Success Academy, etc.) to educating low-income children of color.
I hope you’ll watch and share — and if you do, we hope you’ll join me in considering some larger questions worth wrestling with:
What assumptions have we made in America about children living in poverty that this school is directly challenging?
In what ways has structural racism impacted the ways we see public education, child development, and one another?
And finally, what have we become as a country, and what do we wish to become?
Whatever side of the culture war you’re on — and, unless you’re really not paying attention, you’re on one — this much seems clear: America is having an identity crisis.
We the people occupy different worlds. We read different newspapers, watch different TV shows, and hold up different heroes. We see one another as objects to be avoided or crushed, not reasoned with or understood. We feel increasingly certain of the other side’s madness. We have begun to lose hope, check out, and give up.
So it may surprise you to learn that a new 10-part documentary series about an Illinois high school is the Must-See TV of the moment. And yet three questions at the center of America to Me — which are literally posed at the start of the school year to a group of students still shaking off the languorous hold of the summer — strike at the root of our ongoing identity crisis:
Who are you? Who does the world think you are? And what’s the difference?
For the students of Oak Park River Forest, a diverse public high school of 3,200 students located at the edge of Chicago’s West side, these are the questions that contain multitudes. And for Oak Park’s students of color in particular, they are the questions that reveal the extent to which even a community like theirs, which was shaped by progressive housing and social policies, remains burdened by America’s original sin.
“Much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong,” explains NYU professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in his new book about identity, The Lies That Bind. And when it comes to issues of race, “not only did European racial thinking develop, at least in part, to rationalize the Atlantic slave trade, it played a central role in the development and execution of Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial projects.”
This is the toxic legacy under which we labor today. It’s what makes people see Colin Kaepernick as either a hero or a villain; it’s what sparks the messianic fervor at each new Donald Trump rally; and it’s what leads one of America to Me’s many student stars, a charismatic senior named Charles, to observe ruefully that “this school was made for White kids because this country was made for White kids.”
Yet the series outlines more than one set of truths. Its title comes from a Langston Hughes poem, Let America be America Again, in which Hughes writes that “America never was America to me.” Throughout the same poem, however, Hughes yearns for the other side of the American story, the one where “my land [can] be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.” And in the same episode in which we hear Charles bemoan the racialized design of his school, we also hear a teacher tell a group of incoming freshmen that “when you come to this house, represent who you are.”
Which is it?
Is Oak Park the rare example of a multiracial community in which all people can represent who they are in equal measure? Or is it just another example of how our country’s intractable, deeply ingrained ways of thinking about race (and one another) have yielded two opposite realities for White and Black families, and a schizophrenic message of which parts of oneself are truly welcome, and which parts are too dangerous, misunderstood, and feared?
The beauty of America to Me is that its answer is always “both/and.” The complexity of the problems we face are allowed to hang there for us to wrestle with, unresolved.
In its window into a modern American high school, for example, we see cringeworthy examples of unaware teachers, uninterested students, and uneasy reminders of the ways in which American schools remain unchanged by the tectonic shifts of the wider world. But we also see what makes schools like Oak Park so magical — the sheer variety of what you can explore and experience, the quality and commitment of the master teachers among us, and the ways in which each day can leave a student feeling seen or ignored, heard or silenced. As one teacher puts it, “I don’t think people understand how life and death this job can be.” And as another points out, as if to clarify the source of the stakes, “In this community, when we mention race, all hell breaks loose.”
Of course, they’re not alone. The shadow of America’s racial legacy is at the root of how we see ourselves and one another — all of us, no matter our color, our politics or our age. And in their willingness to courageously confront the third rail of American civic life as the cameras roll, the students, families and teachers of Oak Park have provided the rest of us with a precious and timely gift — an extended window into how far we remain from having the confidence and clarity to honestly confront, and then answer, the only questions that matter:
Who are you? Who does the world think you are? And what’s the difference?
A new episode of America to Me airs each Sunday night this fall on STARZ, or online at starz.com/series/americatome.
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