article: The Puritans Are Not That Precious

I found this article through a link on this page on The Heidelblog.

The Puritans Are Not That Precious

There’s nothing nuanced about kidnapping, the middle passage, hangings, whippings, rapes, children sold off–and that’s the sanitized listing of atrocities. If anything, the story has been so often told or so often willfully ignored that the sharp edges of truth have been sanded off. I tend to think that all the prickly points of Prop’s song were necessary for those of us whose consciences might be a little dull and imaginations unimaginative when it comes to entering human suffering or the blindness that produces it. There’s something that feels right to me about the “in your face”-ness of the song. We’re left no holes to crawl into, no escape routes, no intellectual deflections. We’re left naked before the gaze of the righteously indignant. Uncomfortable and searching. Uncomfortable because it’s searching. It’s in our–face.

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As Prop puts it in the song, “It sure must be nice not to have to consider race.” Many have written about the different frequency with which Blacks and Whites think about “race.” Not thinking about it is a privilege Blacks don’t have or allow themselves, while not thinking about it is a privilege many Whites exercise with immunity and impunity.

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We hear the word “Puritan” and one man thinks “hero” while another thinks “slave owner.” Both interpretations are in some sense true, but only partially true. We know that a partial truth masquerading as the whole truth is a complete untruth. Partial truths asserting themselves upon others is an act of oppression. Our postmodern friends aren’t completely wrong when they tell us that there’s a power struggle whenever one narrative gets foisted upon all people. African Americans and many other minority groups know what it’s like to fight to see yourself included in the overarching narrative.