Bearing Witness

My freshman English class is reading 1984 by George Orwell, and one of its major themes has to do with totalitarian regimes needing to scrub the memories of its citizens in order to stay in control. Big Brother's government demands a population of non-thinkers, people who know nothing of past unpleasantness or inconvenient truths about the world around them.

Leonard Pitts Jr., one of my favorite editorial writers, bemoans how in the African-American community there is a pervasive feeling of needing to forget the hell inflicted upon blacks during the Jim Crow South, and he mentions that in his own community there remains a "marked tendency to avoid the grit, gristle, and grime of our own history." He begins his article by admiring how Jews obsess about remembering the details of the Holocaust, deftly institutionalizing it, and educating others so that such a thing cannot happen again to them.

Millions of Americans today suffered terribly under Jim Crow, and untold thousands felt the heat of having neighbors and family members lynched. Pitts' article certainly serves as a wake-up call; we need to fight deliberate and accidental amnesia by being educated, critical thinkers. Could forgetting and failing to educate ourselves usher in a time when Americans again live in fear of being lynched or "vaporized?" Are Jim Crow and Big Brother relatives?

Read Pitts' article for yourself.