Republicans Think America Can’t Handle Truth

By SAM URETSKY

“The House I Live In” is a 10-minute short film written by Albert Maltz, produced by Frank Ross and Mervyn LeRoy, and starring Frank Sinatra. Made to oppose anti-Semitism at the end of World War II, the song was written in 1943 with lyrics by Abel Meeropol and music by Earl Robinson. In the film, Sinatra sees a group of boys chasing a Jewish boy. Sinatra gives a short speech and then sings the song, which begins:

What is America to me?

A name, a map, or a flag I see

A certain word, democracy

What is America to me

The children in the playground

The faces that I see

All races and religions

That’s America to me

The song was later covered by Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson, Josh White, and Sam Cooke. It did not describe the nation as it was, but as it aspired to be. The Robeson and White versions included a stanza that did not appear in the Sinatra film:

The house I live in, my neighbors white and black,

The people who just came here, or from generations back,

The Town Hall and the soap box, the torch of Liberty,

A home for all God’s children, that’s America to me.

The song was written while the United States was still at war with Germany and Japan. The United States still had a segregated armed forces, although the 761st Tank Battalion served under Patton and fought alongside the 100% white 101st airborne and 82nd Airborne. The Tuskegee airmen were known for never having one of their escorted planes shot down by another plane. After the war, however, Black veterans were denied many of the benefits promised by the original GI Bill.

Norman Rockwell was known for his idealistic portrayals of Americana, but even in his Four Freedoms series Black and brown people were hidden in the corners of the frame until, in 1960, he painted a picture called “The Problem We All Live With,” showing Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl, on her way to an all-white public school during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis.

This is basically the intersection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Cancel Culture. Critical race theory is an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine US law as it intersects with issues of race in the US. Dating from the 1970s, it posits that racism is incorporated into American culture for the benefit of Caucasians. Cancel culture, defined in Merriam Webster, is “the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure. CRT calls for teaching American history accurately, with due regard for the contributions and travails of

“..my neighbors white and black,

The people who just came here, or from generations back,”

Objection to CRT is based on former president Donald Trump’s remark, ”If you look at before and after, the things they had in [the bill] were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Making it more difficult to vote benefits the Republican base. The goal then is to ignore or deny both the contributions and the suffering of those who are not Caucasian, of recent immigrants. It refers to Trump asking why America would want immigrants from “all these sh**hole countries” and that the US should have more people coming in from places like Norway.  It is particularly focused on opposition to the 1619 Project, the effort to encourage the accurate teaching of race relations in the United States following 1619. “It was on August 25, 1619, that a ship landed at Point Comfort, present day Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, with the first enslaved Africans brought to English North America. Their landing would be the gateway to 246 years of bondage, 100 years of Jim Crow, segregation, denial of Civil Rights, unfair housing, redlining, lack of equal education, unfair employment practices, police profiling and unfair incarceration policies.” It is simply a call for an accurate teaching of American history.

Critical race theory would call for teaching of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. It would describe the June 1939 decision to refuse political asylum to more than 900 passengers aboard the German ocean liner St. Louis. Most of the passengers were German Jews fleeing Nazi oppression and death camps. It would teach about the incarceration of Japanese ancestry Americans during WWII. As late as 2015, a coalition of 64 Asian-American groups has filed a complaint against Harvard for discriminating against Asian-American students in admissions. The complaint stated that for Asian-American students to gain admission, they have to have SAT scores 140 points higher than white students.

Republicans seem to believe that if their children knew the truth about our history, it would destroy their belief in the country’s perfection. It doesn’t occur to them that if children knew the truth, they might try to do better.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2021

Populist.com