Day 87: The "Division" Distraction (Or, "I Am Everyday People")

Why the “Great American Divide” Isn't Our Great American Problem. Whitewashing Is.

Sly and the Family Stone, 1969.

Seems like everywhere I look, people are talking about how divided we Americans have recently become. And I get it. We are. Divided. In all sorts of ways. Take all the new, nifty frameworks – from “black and white” to “red and blue”, to “Christian right and secular left” – ones we’ve created to describe our dividedness. Or, take the books we’re buying; ones on everything from “leading in division” to those outlining optimistic efforts for bridging it. And, again, I get it. I even agree with it. For the most part.

“And what about you, pal?” Bart McGuire, one of three main characters in 1982’s Making Love, asked Zach Elliot, one of the other main characters. “You happy?” “For the most part, yeah,” Zach replied. “Oh, yeah?” Bart retorted, “What about the other part?” I’ve always loved that line. Because, invariably, there’s always another part. In this case, it’s that the division we’re seeing right now is the natural consequence of choices we’re making, that we’ve been making, for as long as we’ve been a nation.

I call this process of taking something corroded and corrupt and giving it a fresh coat of paint so that it appears crisp and clean, “whitewashing”. It’s something we do in all kinds of ways, including when we take the problems driving our divides and gloss them over so that they’re no longer visible. Only the divides themselves are.

Today, what we’re facing is less about our actual dividedness and more about our propensity toward oppression – the harm a segment of us feels entitled to visit upon the rest of us. That’s not new. Yet, we talk about it like it’s breaking news.

The framing leads us to think that Americans are more divided than we’ve ever been, including, say, in the 1750s, when a quarter of the population opposed the Revolution, or, in 1789, when Southern states made the inclusion of slaves in the Electoral College a prerequisite to signing the US Constitution. Or, in the 1910s, when federal troops were marshalled to quell the workers’ rights movement spreading across the country.

We imply that the times are more divided than in 1968, when, in the wake of Martin’s death, 100 American cities were set on fire, or in 1969, when the entire nation was in an uproar, and everyone from anti-Vietnam protestors to women’s rights activists was taking to the streets. Or, in 2004, when 80% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, only to change their minds two years later when no WMDs were found.

And don’t forget when we actually divided ourselves into two countries – The United States of America and the Confederate States of America. So, no, division isn’t new for us. It’s woven into our origin story and at every point since. It’s why transforming it, forging true oneness out of manyness, has always been central to our becoming.

Then, there’s how we keep talking about all this like it’s inexplicable, like there’s no plausible reason for it, and like it has nothing to do with our behavior. But that’s not true. Division didn’t spring from nowhere, nor is it at the root of our problems. It’s how we know where the problems are.

You know that foul smell they add to natural gas so that we can tell when there’s a leak? That’s what division is. And blaming it for our problems is like removing the odor from the gas but not fixing the leak. It won’t be long before there’s an explosion.

We heal our divides by ending injustice.

In This Land Is Your Land, I describe how while there’s evidence of unfairness everywhere we look, unless we’re part of the oppressed group, we’re more inclined (and even incentivized) to continue acting as if it doesn’t exist; persisting in our presumption that our society is a fair one.

That is until something so tragic occurs that it forces us to face reality. When that happens, the unraveling we’ve been ignoring becomes something we can no longer avoid. The problem is as simple as it is ingrained; the same social infrastructure that benefits us harms them. They respond to injury and indignity at our hands by marching peacefully and holding candlelight vigils. But nothing changes.

They fight to get bills turned into laws; ones that guarantee equal rights and equal protection. But again, little changes. They organize and try holding those in authority accountable. In return, they’re targeted, and again, nothing changes. Then, come the killings, like incessant drumbeats, including at the hands of law enforcement. People press for charges to be filed, but they almost never are, and when they are, there are virtually no convictions. And once again, nothing changes.

Until finally, it’s too much. There’s one injustice, one violation, one killing too many. People take to the streets; venting their anguish and pent-up rage. It erupts into Stonewall. Or 1968 Chicago. Or 1971 Albuquerque. They start throwing bottles and breaking windows and setting things on fire. And all of a sudden, the rest of us are finally paying attention and decrying the lawlessness; but only with respect to the rioting, not the litany of injustices that prompted it.

Something similar is at work with our misuse of the term “extremism”, or our labeling of people “extremists”. Instead of identifying people who’ve strayed from the cause of justice, it’s been word-weighted. It now implies that the middle is the right place to be. Like Goldilocks’ porridge – not too hot, not too cold. “This one’s juuuuust right”. Increasingly, this is how we determine whether a news article is biased or not. Not by the power of its insights, but by whether it scores a point for the “left” or the “right”.

There are all kinds of “bias detection” sites out there that assert that being in the middle is the new definition of being unbiased. They have a scale and everything – Far Left – Left-leaning – Fair (“and balanced”) – Right-leaning – Far Right. Get what they did there? In that framework, fairness is no longer about justice. The only good place to be is wherever the median between any two positions happens to fall. Anything else marks you as an “extremist”. The only thing left to determine is how much of one you are.

In an Indie Cinema interview with Graham Streeter about his 2023 film Unfix, Diana Ringo poses the following question: “Unfix sheds light on the harmful effects of conversion therapy. Can you discuss the importance of presenting a balanced perspective on such a contentious issue?” Graham’s response?

I’m not sure I presented balance in Unfix. The film is clearly Anti-Conversion Therapy. During the research, I met too many people who tried to commit suicide, whose children ended their lives, whose families disowned them, who caved to the pressures of religious and spiritual leaders. I learned firsthand how horrible conversion therapy is, how rampant it was 20-30 years ago, how it has changed names and reinvented itself and still thrives today. It has changed its name and applied new guises. For that reason, I never felt I needed to show balance. Just tell the truth.

“So, are you for or against deporting children?” “I’m neutral.” “Are you for or against trans rights?” “I’m neutral.” “Are you for or against police killings?” “I’m neutral.” See how that works? Despite common wisdom, neutrality and a “For All” consciousness aren’t interchangeable or synonymous. They’re opposites. The latter stands for everybody, whereas the former, for nobody.

Back in Tear it Down (Or, This is Your Brain on Word-Weighting), we explored all kinds of examples of this tactic at work, including in the phrase, “playing the race (or “woman” or “gay”) card”. Simply by invoking it, we assert that racism/sexism/homophobia was not present until the person mentioned it, and by mentioning it, they’re falsely claiming bias where, in fact, there is none. In this counter-narrative, the targeted person is now “the boy who cried ‘wolf’”.

This tactic ingeniously implies that the person being violated is actually the problem. It shifts responsibility simply by declaring an unfair context a fair one, then attacking and discrediting anyone who dares speak up. This subtle reframing deftly avoids the problem by crucifying the messenger. The underlying assertion is that the corrosive construct played no part in this toxic context – i.e. – things were profoundly “fair and balanced”, completely unbiased – until that sly, wily minority attempted to skew the process by injecting bias into it.

Today, we’re constantly being told that our dividedness is the culprit, the root cause of all our problems. But it isn’t. Most of the things we currently label as “divides” are the result of our problems, not what’s causing them. They’re the foul odor in the air that lets us know we’ve got a gas leak. They point us to the problem areas. They’re how we know when it’s time to make an added investment in our own humanity.

Back in the early ‘90s, when Southern Baptists were still committed to making racial amends, I developed a weekend workshop that I led in various historically white churches. In describing the work, I chose the term “racial justice” instead of the popular “racial reconciliation”. Because the latter implied that “both sides”, in everything from slavery to segregation, had caused the rift. But that’s clearly not true.

Likewise, in one of the sessions, someone would invariably suggest that everyone is equally impacted by racism. And in almost every case, someone else, another white-presenting person, would speak up. In one such case, the person responding (who I’ll call Janet), said to the person raising the point (let’s call her LeAnn), “Didn’t you have a hard time when Zach came out?” “I did,” LeAnn admitted cautiously, “But I’m over that now; everyone knows that. “I’m not prejudiced,” she added.

“I know that, LeAnn,” Janet said, “But why was it hard at first?” “Because… I didn’t want life to be rougher for him.” “So, even though you love your son, and know he’s just as good as anybody else’s son, you still see how society makes things harder for gay people. Can’t you see how we’ve done the same thing to black people?”

The thing that’s easy to miss is that LeAnn’s resistance was more about her internal process than about what was really happening. It can be hard for a sensitive person to accept that the world is that unfair and cruel and that they, themselves are, and throughout their entire lives have been, on the plus side of inequity. But we also can’t wish it away. The only path forward is by dismantling the mindsets that made this kind of inequity possible.

We heal our divides by awakening our conscience.

In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention, for the first time, issued a formal apology for how defending slavery played a role in its founding. But even then, they were careful in how they framed it; stopping far short of making any practical amends, like returning wealth and real estate that should have belonged to African American Baptist churches in the first place. Because everyone knows slavery didn’t just “play a role.”

Likewise, in my Baptist History class, they said it was about priorities; Baptists in the South wanted to focus on missions, whereas northerners wanted to tell southerners who could or could not be missionaries. (There was no mention of Southern churches’ intention to send slave owners, slaves and all, overseas, including to Africa.) To make matters worse, this long-delayed apology for their part in this humanitarian crisis was made even as AIDS activists were trying to break through our collective apathy like William Lloyd Garrison had done with slavery.

Though we didn’t know it, this melding of church and state was rife with implications for the nation as a whole. For instance, what happens when a nation founded as a republic begins operating like a theocracy, ruled by God himself, and particularly, to the inalienable rights of those who don’t believe in that God?

What happens to democracy when we undermine the vote, and if we deprive others of the vote, even in the name of God? Is democracy still what we have? And perhaps most pressing, what happens when a religious majority that’s forced its will on society and set the expectation that majorities can do whatever they want is one no longer?

Whitewashing is problematic for a whole host of reasons. First, it obliterates social responsibility. It turns decisions with real-world, life-altering consequences into benign intellectual exercises; separating us as human beings from the actions we allow.

Second, presenting both options as if they’re morally neutral, confounds what the choice really is. It treats oppression and persecution as if they’re false equivalents of equality and justice. In that context, those actions are neither bad ones nor good ones. They just are.

But, perhaps most damaging is how it shifts the focal point of the problem. Sure, we’re living in divided times. But our division isn’t the problem. It’s the inevitable result of one segment of society harming another. Likewise, the problem is not with mislabeled extremism. It’s with middle-of-the-road approaches that are inhumane and immoral.

And the issue isn’t diverse points of view. It’s the segment of society that has decided it’s permissible to sacrifice some of us for their benefit, and those of us who have opted out of doing anything about it. “My name’s Bennett,” I remember hearing my fellow OU students say, “And I ain’t in it.” But we are. In it.

We heal our divides by opposing oppression.

It’s what Martin was conveying in his Letter from Birmingham Jail when he said:

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

There’s simply no safety in neutrality. Take slavery. The problem wasn’t the “divide” between slaves who didn’t want to be owned and masters who wanted to own them. But once we buy into the idea that the divide itself is the problem, it all becomes clear – that’s the thing we need to eliminate. If we could just get rid of that pesky divide, we’d be okay.

That’s what they said in 1963, Birmingham. The problem, according to segregationists, wasn’t segregation. It was “the divide” – the chasm that had opened up right through the middle of the city – the sudden distance between them and Negro Birminghamians who refused to endure subjugation for even one more day.

But their resistance wasn’t the problem. Segregation was the problem. Oppression was the problem. And how do we solve an oppression problem? By eliminating oppression. But, that’s not what we do if the problem is the divide itself. Then, we eliminate whatever’s causing the division so we can get back to being the people we were before the problem reared its head.

This is what we Americans were wrestling with as Governor Wallace used his body to prevent University of Alabama’s integration, as live television beamed images of children swept down the streets of downtown Birmingham by fire hoses, and as officers charged marchers on the Edmond Pettus Bridge.

The sheer violence brought us face-to-face with the pain of our societal kin and with our complicity in it. And in doing so, it deprived us of the ability to continue telling ourselves we’re the good guys. But that’s a tough place to be, so we started whitewashing, painting over the ugliness and rewriting the story to be about our dividedness. Instead of victim and attacker, it’s the Hatfields and McCoys; with both parties equally to blame.

But, no matter how we parse it, there’s a world of difference between a war among parties and a war on a party. We often seek to reframe the latter as the former; using language like “conflict” or “political polarization” to imply that both power and agency are equally distributed while avoiding more accurate words like “persecution”, “subjugation”, “exploitation”, “decimation” and “eradication”.

Whitewashing allows us to rationalize – to present our offensive advances as defensive maneuvers and describe our aggressions as responses to attacks on our “way of life”, or in defense of what we see as our birthright. Our manifest destiny.

A key point of Nazi rhetoric was that “Jews hate us and want to destroy us,” and prior to the onset of WWII, Hitler, in reference to “international Jewry”, would declare, “If the Jews succeeded in bringing about another world war, the result would be the extermination of the Jews in Europe.” In their framing, “the Jews” were the dividers. The extremists. The toxic polarizers.

We heal our divides by finding our humanity.

In Birmingham’s case, city officials identified “outside agitators”, and most especially Martin as the reason “their Negroes” were all of a sudden “acting out”. A group of white-identifying ministers wrote an open letter calling for “unity”. Which, naturally, is the opposite of a divide. “However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders,” they said. “We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel [emphasis added] that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”

It leaves me asking, “What, exactly, were those ministers hoping for?” Because, the divide between the oppressors and the oppressed was there long before Martin showed up, or before he was even born. The only thing that was different was that those ministers could no longer act as if the oppression wasn’t happening. Despite what they said, the divide wasn’t what had them worried. The fact that people were no longer going along with their own oppression was. But, that’s not how they were framing it.

We know what to do with divides. We eliminate them. We find the middle ground. We seek compromise. We all get some of what we want. “How about this?” I imagine Birmingham officials saying, “What if we desegregate half the water fountains and half the buses? Is that enough for you people?”

But what does bridging the divide between those who want to oppress you and those who don’t want to be oppressed look like? What does the middle ground between persecutors and those who refuse to be persecuted look like? And we don’t have to ask what compromising on slavery would have looked like. We know. It’s in the Constitution itself. It looks like three-fifths of a person. And that’s all before we get to what we do to the instigators of division, the dividers themselves, people like Martin and Bobby, and all the slain civil rights activists.

By the late ‘60s, an unprecedented wave of humanitarian consciousness was sweeping through America’s faith institutions, propelling people out of the pews and into the streets on behalf of social justice; including the 10,000 people who came to Selma. Almost immediately, an opposite movement, a counterinsurgency arose; one that sought to replace that awakening of consciousness with doctrinal adherence.

The result, with thousands of pastors preaching this new ideology from the pulpit, was the adoption of a new narrative; one that would come to champion ideas those faith groups would previously have rejected as crimes against humanity. Instead of promoting a kinder, more loving world, preserving Christian nationalism became their new goal. They adopted the label “conservative”, which, according to them, means “keeping things as they are”. Even when we shouldn’t.

Though few realized it at the time, this new ideology had already been morally inverted. In this new faith order, segregation wasn't bad, integration (especially miscegenation) was bad, and Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Martin (a Baptist minister) were all burning in hell. That’s what was happening in 1969, the year after Martin and Bobby were assassinated.

I, for one, can’t imagine what it must have been like to have gone from being on the cusp of a “For All” society, to one where the movement’s leaders were dead, and where a candidate backed by the same people who’d perverted the Republican Party was now headed for the White House. I think we have a bit of an idea, based on where things are right now. But what they went through was so much worse. It must have felt like the dream itself was dying.

But, as we saw in everything from We Didn’t Start the Fire to Day 30: Don’t Dream It’s Over, those who came before us would prove otherwise. From the first Rainbow Coalition to the largest anti-Vietnam protest we’d ever seen to Stonewall, from the mainstreaming of the women’s rights movement to Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival to Fred Hampton’s iconic speech, “It’s a Class Struggle, Goddammit!” the constant roar of the people, from the beginning of that year to the end, showed one thing – we’d never be silenced again.

But even back then, a faction was already trying to frame it as being about our “dividedness”. Vietnam wasn’t about all the Americans, most of whom were both poor and who’d been drafted, dying in a foreign war – the equivalent of a mass death sentence. We turned it into a theoretical, whether we believed in the war or not. All of a sudden, our opinion about the war became the divide, not the actuality of it.

Thanks to whitewashing, we weren’t talking about police raids of queer spaces for no reason at all, and the blatant violation of their rights. We were discussing polling, and what Americans thought about gays. That was the case with the 1967 survey commissioned by CBS, which concluded that “Americans consider homosexuality more harmful to society than adultery, abortion or prostitution.” We were talking about whether gays were harmful to society, not about whether society was harmful to them.

And it meant that the conversation was no longer about the economic destitution that was the impetus behind the unprecedented Rainbow Coalition, which brought together groups ranging from the Black Panther Party to the Young Patriots, whose symbol was a Confederate flag.

When we were done, it was about Americans’ opinions about these groups, and the percentage of us who agreed with FBI Director J Edgar Hoover’s accusations that: “Leaders and representatives of the Black Panther Party travel extensively all over the United States preaching their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents [emphasis added], but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.”

“When the South has trouble with its Negroes,” James Baldwin said in Nobody Knows My Name, “When the Negroes refuse to remain in their “place” – it blames ‘outside agitators’ and ‘Northern interference.’ When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.” Malcolm X said it another way: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your foot on my neck.”

And that’s the thing. Sure, we can take certain actions and strip them of their moral weight. But, presenting a humane thing and an inhumane thing as equal choices doesn’t make them equal. They’re not moral equivalents. It’s not a choice between butter pecan and mint chocolate chip. It’s not a theoretical debate, an academic exercise. It’s the effect of our actions or inaction on lives, and on the world.

We heal our divides by becoming the Beloved Community.

There really is a moral responsibility question here. And there really are sides. Just not the same “both sides” we’ve been told about. So, the question is, if we’re not standing with humanity, who are we standing with? Or, when the little girl marching in Birmingham’s Children’s Crusade answered the reporter’s question by saying that what she wanted was freedom, were we on her side? If not, whose side were we on?

No matter how much we tell ourselves that whitewashing oppression, instead of abolishing it, amounts to the same thing, it doesn’t. That declaring ourselves the land of the free is as good as actually being it. It isn’t. Or, that tacking “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” onto our Pledge will substitute for the hard work of transforming ourselves into one. It won’t.

“What is happening in this country,” James Baldwin said, in Baldwin’s Nigger, “Is that brother has murdered brother, knowing it was his brother. White men have lynched Negroes, knowing them to be their sons. White women have had Negroes burned, knowing them to be their lovers. It is not a racial problem. It’s a problem of whether or not you’re willing to look at your life and be responsible for it and then begin to change it.”

It’s what Martin was speaking to when he said, “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But... the Good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”

It’s not fixating on ending our divides that makes us a better nation. It’s ending oppression and exclusion, becoming the nation that the best among us always believed we could be. It’s not how far our positions are from others. It’s how far they are from justice. It’s not the political hat we wear. It’s whether the society we’re helping build works for just some of us or all of us. And it’s not about whitewashing our failings. It’s about each of us taking a stand right now – when it’s needed most.

About uprooting oppression and standing for justice, about undoing harm and demanding more from our elected officials. About embracing one another and making life better for everyone. About showing up, doing that thing that needs doing, the one small act that could be our saving grace. Because in that place, what unites us is not sameness. It’s solidarity. It’s that each of us stands for all of us.

Today is April 16, day 87 under this administration. We have just 579 days until the 2026 elections, 1,310 days until the 2028 elections, and 1,378 days until Martin’s 100^th birthday. So, when do we fight? Today, tomorrow, and every day between now and then. Where do we fight? Anywhere and everywhere we see injustice occurring or oppression increasing. And, how do we fight? In every way we can.

In closing, I have two videos of the same song for you today – Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone. Both the band, an ethnically diverse mixture of men and women, and the sound they created, a fusion of everything from rock to soul, gospel to jazz, were revolutionary. Everyday People was released at the end of the tumultuous year that was 1968 and became an anthem for the explosion of activism that would occur throughout 1969.

This first video is the lyrics version as originally performed by legendary Sly and his crew.

The second is a 2016 performance of the same song by an amazing group of singers, musicians, actors, dancers, artists and celebrities spanning from Jack Johnson to Alfre Woodard, from Paula Abdul to Yo-Yo Ma – all with schoolchildren from all over the country. I guarantee it will do something good for your soul.