America as House and Voyage
Listening to Isabel Wilkerson
Last month, I attended Isabel Wilkerson’s keynote address at the Embrace Ideas Festival in Boston. Wilkerson delivered a masterpiece, weaving her scholarship together with the present-day vulnerabilities of our democracy and her own personal experiences. The many rounds of applause were resounding proof of the unique power of the humanities to inspire hope while articulating the reasons for despair.
A historian whose work has reshaped our understanding of America, Wilkerson conjured two images that felt incredibly useful at this moment.
America as a house
How many of you live in an old house? she asked. As we were in Massachusetts, many hands raised, along with some knowing laughter. When you move into that house, you found things that were wrong. There might be mold in the ceiling or water in the basement. You might smell something bad or put your hand through rotted drywall.
What do you do? Do you throw a prolonged tantrum, blaming the original occupant? After all, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t let the foundation fall into disrepair. You would never flush that down a toilet. Do you ignore the problem?
No. You can’t do that. That stench is yours to eliminate, those stairs are yours to climb. So you get to work. You own the house now.
Our nation, Wilkerson said, is that house. There are structural problems. There are places where it is dangerous to walk. We can’t make repairs it if we don’t understand what happened, what’s been built incorrectly or allowed to decay.
But we must fix it. It is our country. We are responsible for it. We live here.
Americans as voyagers
Wilkerson recieved a Pulitzer for her coverage of the midwestern floods in 1994, then gained national prominence in 2010 with The Warmth of Other Suns, her history of the Great Migration. As her address drew to a close, she reminded us that, no matter your background, every America has an ancestor who took a journey in order for us to be here. See them pushed onto slave ships, or pulling a trunk onto a dock. They loaded into a van to cross a border or waited at a gate to board a plane. Some were pushed off tribal lands and forced to relocate. The car heading north or the train chugging west.
In so many of these family histories, said Wilkerson, that departure included a last look at a relative or loved one who would stay behind. Both ancestors understood that there was a good chance they would never see each other again. But the journey began.
Across all the differences that distinguish us, she said, we share this experience as Americans. Those moments survive in our genes. We can draw on it for strength, we can connect and compare our stories, we can mourn and we can reflect. We can choose to understand today’s migrants and refugees as the newest voyagers. We can recall the bravery upon which so many of our blessings are built.
And now what?
I gravitate towards these images in a time full of despair and bitterness. The words “courage” and “responsibility” are not selling this year. They are seldom heard amidst the furious onslaught of information and opinion. One could argue that too many people can’t afford to be brave or think about the nation’s past—they are struggling to make ends meet, looking over their shoulder in fear, riding buses in the wee hours.
We know, too, that our history and present include those who claim “courage” as they prey on those taking journeys away from real suffering. The concept of “responsibility” has long been used to position the white male as the true inheritor of America.
Yet that’s precisely what draws me to Wilkerson’s images of home and voyage. They are accessible to each of us. If we only knew the history of our nation, Wilkerson said, we could get on with the businesses of repairing it.
To know our history is to confront the contours and details of the nation’s past. To make repair is to leverage this knowledge with courage and a commitment to justice.
There is much more to wrestle with here. But as another week begins in this frightening season, I’m grateful to Wilkerson for reminding us that there are other paths for America.