Smiley: We need to get straight the story about race and America

After seasons of crowd-pleasing, jaw-dropping, record-setting performances, every great athlete eventually loses agility and slows down a step.

An inconvenient reality.

After years of outstanding performance on stage and screen, an actress, quite naturally, starts to show signs of aging. Not good in male-dominated Hollywood.

An inconvenient reality.

After years of dedication and hard work, showing up faithfully day in and day out, an employee becomes too expensive, and a younger, less experienced, cheaper worker will do.

An inconvenient reality.

After years of being imprisoned, treated as spectacles, gawked at and forced to perform silly routines, sometimes under the threat of violence, animals used for human amusement eventually grow old and no longer make the cut. Many are then discarded or are destroyed.

An inconvenient reality.

After 245 years of being stolen, bought and sold into slavery, ripped apart from families, treated as sub-human and exploited for free labor under the threat of punishment or death, what happens when African Americans outlive their intended purpose?

An inconvenient reality.

It's been a week since the Charlottesville chaos. As I've watched our nation plunge yet again into that most uncomfortable of subjects, race in America, I've listened inside our echo chamber with a new set of ears.

To be sure, I've heard all the typical race-baiting and race-blaming, but I've also had an epiphany this time around, on what many refer to as America's original sin. (I take the point, but for the record, black folk were second in line. See: Native Americans.)

To my mind, Americans tend to fall into one of three categories when it comes to the history of race in America: ignorant (don't know), arrogant (don't care), or racist (I'm better than you).

But perhaps there is another category.

Generations of fellow citizens, who although not avowed racists, have never thought that black folk mattered in any meaningful way, and have yet to figure out what their role in America is, post-slavery.

America is good about assigning people roles to play: You police patrol and fire fight, you cook and clean, you educate and innovate, you plant and pick, you legislate and adjudicate, you battle poverty and pandemic, you get power and privilege.

To this very day, black Americans are still achieving "firsts" not because they couldn't excel, but because they were denied the opportunity to succeed.

I'm not sure America has yet come to terms with what they thought would become of these black folk once slavery ended. Isn't that, in part, why Reconstruction failed?  

In truth, there were plenty of newly freed slaves who didn't know what to do either. Freedom takes some figuring out. But figure it out they did, and the record is abundantly clear: America would not be America without the contributions of black people.

So, when we hear fellow citizens fearful of the future, including the president, romanticizing our past and criminalizing color, offering an alt-history about how we got here in the first place, we must reject it.

At long last, we must come to terms with the fact that black folk have outlived their initial and intended purpose in North America. That slavery was barbaric and profane, secession was an egregious and abominable act, the war is over, the Confederacy lost, and even in the absence of any real atonement, America is better for it.

An inconvenient reality.

Sorry.

Nobody is trying to erase history, we just need to get the story straight.