we have not arrived

Inspired by Ann Patchett in These Precious Days:

Because in this present moment we always feel that we have fully arrived. We believe we are fair and sensitive, helpful, kind, no longer predatory or racist. But the future will call us out just the same.

and Kiese Laymon in Heavy:

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other.

The other day, I was standing in the Harvard Law School library (Langdell Hall, 4th floor) staring at the dingy water fountain and—maybe because it looked so old and dilapidated and sad—I could not help but wonder if, given the history and age of this institution, this fountain, or any of its surrounding ones, had ever been Whites Only. The thought shocked me—not because I was unfamiliar with the concept of America’s suffocating historical ills, but because it had been so long since the last time I personally contended with Harvard, and my life, in such a context.

A few days later, I was minding my own business, listening to Caste by Isabel Wilkerson in the SEC basement when Wilkerson name-dropped “Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard University” as a leading figure in the early 20th-century eugenics movement, which sought to label African Americans as biologically inferior to whites under some masterfully whimsical unscientific farce. My beloved house, Eliot House, which I have called home for two years, is named after that stupid, stupid man. The whole building—beautiful courtyard, stunning river views and all—is a living, breathing monument to a man who wasted his precious time on earth being wrong and hateful.

It stunned me because, and I am ashamed to admit, I don’t usually think about how these things are woven into the American social and historical fabric—and, as a result, my personal life—until I am hit squarely in the face with the facts in a $1 billion Harvard engineering building basement. History is so much closer than I’ve allowed myself to fully comprehend and the realization was paralyzing. The proximity is something that seems, in my 21st-century Asian American body, almost unthinkable—a problem of bigots long past—in the ivory tower that is my elite higher education institution.

It is way too easy for me and others like me to forget what kind of past we are constantly struggling against.

At Yad Vashem this March, the woman guiding us around the halls of horrors said a stunningly obvious thing that I have nonetheless committed to memory: “Democracy is terribly, terribly fragile—if we don’t look after it we’ll lose it.” I feel as though it’s not a large stretch to apply the same rationale to racial justice and human rights.  

Her words remind me of a passage from Chelsea Manning’s memoir README.txt:

This was my first inkling that the moral arc of the universe doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice. That instead, there is a constant and active struggle. And regardless of my changing understanding of how history happens, for the first time I truly understood that the fundamental promises of this society—liberty and justice for all—are just words, unless they are supported by meaningful values and concrete actions.

and Clemantine Wamariya in The Girl Who Smiled Beads:

That’s all a person can do, really: Let others live their lives on their terms, and interrogate how you live your own. Insist on knowing the backstory to your gifts and your pain. Ask yourself how you came to have all the things you carry: your privilege, your philosophy, your nightmares, your faith, your sense of order and peace in the world.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic or maybe I’m being unduly influenced by my recent reading (mainly, Caste) or maybe it’s both, but it feels like a revelation to truly accept that the context of vitriolic hatred upon which this country was built informs almost every American institution I have ever benefitted from. And I just think I haven’t been thinking enough about that. 

We have not arrived—not even close. This is me asking myself, and you, to pay better attention to and look after the progress we take for granted.