#barbara fields

Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but for what we ourselves choose to do now.

I think what we need to remember, most of all, is that the Civil War is not over until we, today, have done our part in fighting it; as well as understanding what happened when the Civil War generation fought it. William Faulkner said once that, “History is not Was, it’s IS.” And what we need to remember about the Civil War is that the Civil War IS, in the present as well as in the past. The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future, also established a standard that will not mean anything until we have finished the work. You can say “there’s no such thing as slavery anymore” or “we’re all citizens”, but if we’re all citizens then we all have a task to do to make sure that that, too, is not a joke. If some citizens live in houses and others live on the street, the Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought, and regrettably, it can still be lost.

As George Santayana (almost) said, those who do not learn from history will have no idea what they are repeating.

A Labor Department sociologist I knew (a black woman) used to tell about the assignment she once got, to investigate the disproportionate wintertime use of Vaseline by black prison inmates, in comparison with their white peers. (Since no one was prepared to credit her with having an answer from down home sans research, she did the research and then told them: People used to use it for chapped skin.)