Collective Amnesia: American Apartheid: African Americans’ 400 Years in North America, 1619–2019 by Eugene DeFriest Bétit (2019)
This recent book by Eugene Betit traces the separation of Americans by race back to the Civil War. As slavery disintegrated, new forms of white domination were developed to both subordinate African Americans and separate black from white. This American Apartheid, which set African Americans at a marked disadvantage, has been systematically denied and lately forgotten.
Betit devotes as much analysis to the process of purposeful forgetting as he does to the discrimination it was designed to obliterate. An interpreter of the Civil War at a battlefield site, he addresses the distortions of the history of the Confederacy as a way of whitewashing the past. The forgetting of the role of African American troops in the Union army was capped in the 1970s by the creation of the “Myth of the Black Confederates.”
This book is a good introduction to the degrading treatment that all African Americans suffered during the first hundred years after slavery ended. It also asks whether we are heading back to the same debilitating patterns of the past with the rise of modern white nationalism and of politicians willing to harvest votes from the fertile fields of hate. The forgetting of the past sets up the exploitation of white aggrievement. Betit writes:
After World War II, the German nation repented past transgressions and made it illegal to possess a Nazi flag. After Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, a Truth and Justice Commission was established to hear statements from victims of civil rights violations… Both countries’ actions are in sharp contrast to the United States, where more than one hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, thousands still fly Rebel flags first used in 1949 as a symbol of white supremacy, declaring that the South will “rise again,” utterly denying that those four horrendous years of civil war concerned slavery, an institution based solely on white supremacy and coercive force.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
