Hurt Feelings

As part of our Black History Month offerings, we wanted to highlight another piece of writing from Rev. Dr. Marvin McMickle. We’re grateful to Dr. McMickle for allowing us to re-publish these reflections and grateful to Rev. Myra for offering these powerful submissons (and her incredible leadership related to equity and anti-racism work).

Today, there is a new form of white privilege emerging that involves banning any books, canceling any courses and classes, and curbing any public dialogue to shield themselves and their children from any opinion or historical fact that might “disturb or hurt their feelings.”

God forbid that any white people in this generation of Americans should be forced to face how this nation stole land from Native Americans, and then stole and enslaved people from Africa to work that stolen land. The argument is that being exposed to those lessons might hurt the feelings of some white people or leave them feeling guilty about the actions of their ancestors.

As the philosopher George Santana observed, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”¹  Hiding from this nation’s blood-soaked history is not a wise course of action. Neither is denial and pretending that such cruelties and injustices never occurred. Facing up to a history of lynch mob justice, police brutality, church bombings, political assassinations, enforced racial segregation in every segment of American public life, and constant attempts to limit and even eliminate the voting rights of African Americans would certainly be some uncomfortable truths to acknowledge. It would shock them to discover how this country was built: on the backs of 246 years of uncompensated slave labor.

However, these stories must be told. As the philosopher Cornel West has said, there needs to be a concerted effort to “shatter deliberate ignorance and willful blindness to the sufferings of others, and to expose the clever forms of evasion and escape we devise in order to hide and conceal injustice.”² It may be uncomfortable for some to pass through this process of being made to move beyond deliberate ignorance or willful blindness, but this is the only way our nation will ever heal fully from the original sin of slavery and racialized violence.

A friend of mine served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War in the early 1950s. He was struck by the words on a tombstone for a soldier who was killed in action and buried in Korea. The tombstone read: “Here lies a black man who died fighting the yellow man to defend what the white man stole from the red man.”

Those words tell a truth about the United States that many of our current white political and cultural leaders do not want to have taught to their children or recorded in the books on the shelves of school and public libraries. That battle is going on here in Ohio as House Bills 322 and 327 are pending in the state legislature. Those bills would prohibit anything being taught in Ohio’s public schools grade K-12 that is considered controversial or divisive.

I guess it is only the feelings of white people that should be protected against the facts of history. Teaching about Robert E. Lee and displaying the Confederate battle flag is “preserving our heritage.” However, talking about the 246 years of legalized slavery in this country that Robert E. Lee fought to preserve and perpetuate is deemed divisive and disturbing.

People who advocate for white supremacy and for denying voting rights to African Americans are the same people who want to ban any references to Critical Race Theory or the 1619 Project. In doing so, they seem disinterested in the feelings of African American men, women, and children. How should African Americans feel when conservative politicians and TV pundits claim that none of the African American women being considered to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court are qualified for that position? It might hurt their feelings if it was pointed out to them that the qualifications and professional experiences of any of those women matches, and in some instances even exceeds the qualifications of those already serving on the Supreme Court. Holding two degrees from Harvard is usually considered the gold standard for consideration to be appointed to the Supreme Court. OK for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas who went to Princeton and Harvard, but not for the African American women who traveled that same path after him!

It leaves me to wonder: do black lives and the feelings of black people really matter in this MAGA moment in American history?

The Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, retired in 2019 as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he had served since 2011. This article was first published on 2/1/22 at The Real Deal Press which can be accessed at https://therealdealpress.com/2.0/index.php/columns/from-the-pulpit-to-public-square-marvin-a-mcmickle-ph-d/1114-please-don-t-hurt-our-feelings and is used with the author’s permission.