Dear Future American,
Artist: Joshua Wingerter
I don’t know what you know about 2020. I don’t know what they tell you about us. But I have some things to tell you that I don’t want to be erased by history.
When you ask people who were alive in 2020 about it, you’re going to find that they all say they were the good guys, they all were on the right side of history. I’m here to tell you that they were not. We in 2020 are surrounded by the bad guys. I don’t want them to get away with it. I don’t want them to get to rewrite their histories only so their grandchildren can repeat it. That has already happened to us. Don’t be like this.
It’s a hard truth, but you’ve got to hear it: some of the older people you know were the bad guys. Some of the good guys still did a lot bad guy things.
Ok - that was rough. Take a quick break and watch this:
Back to real life:
You see, when I was in school in the 1990s and early 2000s, we were taught about events but not patterns, particularly patterns of class struggle and racism. And there were rarely American perpetrators of injustice in our history books; always just heroes and foreigners. And just like all the disasters, man-made and natural, in our history books, the COVID-19 pandemic was exacerbated by greed and hatred. I worry it will be remembered as a natural disaster.
Don’t let history erase any of this.
Whatever the death toll ends up being, know that it was as high as it was because our leaders forced people to choose between health and money, when you can’t have one without the other. Like soldiers to the front line, they forced our healthcare workers into hazardous conditions because they refused to help contain the virus, and they paid the ultimate price. They sent the poor and middle class back into the workforce without a choice. They spread disinformation to make people lower their guard and keep working to make money for the wealthy few.
Most of those sacrificed to save the economy - which did not get saved - were black. Like, by a lot. As of writing this, by nine times. The civil unrest that occurred in 2020 was not a separate event on top of the pandemic; the pandemic created the exact conditions for the population to explode in rage, and to demand justice on many fronts - starting with race.
You’ll probably laugh at this, but I learrned in school that racism was over when black people won the vote. I learned that black people had been rioting, and then Martin Luther King Jr. told them to be nice, and then white people gave them what they wanted, and we all lived happily ever after now that history was over. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What I was unaware of until I educated myself was that the Civil Rights heroes of the 1960s we were taught to admire - they all ended up murdered. What I had to learn myself was that the US government stalked and targeted them, that history told us the Black Panthers were radical but failed to tell us that they were radically kind.
So, learn from this, and don’t let history do the same to my current Civil Rights era.
I don’t know what you know about Black Lives Matter, but if they are seen as heroes to your generation, I hope you know that the government and tech companies surveilled and targeted them. I hope you know that tons of their prominent activists ended up dead. I hope you know that white people were unkind to them until this very year, 2020, when the dam seems to have burst.
If they are portrayed as villains in your history, violent fire-starters, please know that the history you learned is wrong. It was writtetn to discredit them. The media is trying to discredit them in my time today. There have been fires, but not organized on behalf of Black Lives Matter. There has been violence, and it has been perpetrated by the police. No matter what they tell you, the government perpetrated the violence. If you look hard at history, they usually do.
I write this with hope that you may have more clarity than we did in my time.
Love,
Melissa
P.S. Here’s some art by a black textile artist I love named Bisa Butler. This is all quilting, because she is such a badass. Black history is not only struggle; it’s creativity and innovation and art. Pay attention to all of it.
