Thoughts From Randall Robinson, Black lawyer/activist

Randall Robinson:  "All of us look.  Few of us see [understand].  How much is deliberate obscurity?"

"As a young man, I worked on Capitol Hill for three years; I walked through the Rotunda countless times.  But I did not see it."  He did not know it was built by slave labor; he was not aware of the absence of black figures among the impressive art.

As a young person, he was not aware of the flaws of American history.  "Truths, half-truths.  Unsupportable myths.  Outrageous lies.  Polished together into history."  After living 91 years, I think there may be more myth and lie than truth in white written histories of America.

The Capitol Dome/Rotunda art is majestic/awesome, but it also hid "the buildings and America's [horrific] secrets."

"This was the House of Liberty, and it had been built by slaves."

"Slavery lay across American history like a monstrous cleaving sword, but the Capitol of the United States steadfastly refused to divulge its complicity, or even slavery's very occurrence. . . .  gold-spun half-truths.  It blinded us all to our past and with the same stroke, to any common future.  Deliberate obscurity."

Our historical past haunts our sociological present, but few of us are deeply aware of this deep and important connection.  So we see and misinterpret our current social problems.  A sanitized past enables us to escape our responsibility for the oppression of the present.  Privilege without responsibility.

In a poor black community, a person driving through might look at a group of black men hanging out on the corner.  Some may have worked the night shift.  Some may have been damaged by decades of oppression.  Concluding that they are shiftless and lazy may not be factual.

You may have benefitted from the systems of oppression that have crushed them.  "Monstrous systems [of oppression] do turn people into monsters."  Lost in the fog of history are "causes unseen."

A final thought/confession by Ivan Filby, president of Greenville University:

"Brenda records the hardships and challenges the Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean population faced at that time [1980s].  What troubled me is that I lived in Birmingham [England] at that time.  I had many Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean friends, but I was completely unaware of the challenges they may have faced.  In hindsight, all the clues were there; I just did not have the eyes to see."