Azzi: America has a lot of work to do

America has a lot of work to do.

We're having a hard time facing our history, resisting nativist impulses, challenging a mythological origin story that privileges some Americans over others, privileges white Americans over enslaved and Indigenous peoples.

Airwaves and mass and social media are filled with competing narratives - some true, some demonstrably false - about who we are, where we came from, where we are going.

Some of it is personal.

Recently someone wrote me that they aren't racist because Jews are white; another told me they aren't being racist by hating Islam because that's a religion, not a race. Someone else argued that the Democrats organized the January 6th Insurrection. Last month a shop owner told me they weren't closing for the Nineteenth because that was a "colored" holiday - they would close on the Fourth because that was "for everyone."

America has a lot of work to do.

I wonder whether, for example, in response to the Supreme Court's decision that supported prayer on a school football field - based on Justice Gorsuch's outrageous misrepresentation of the facts - whether the decision have been the same if that prayer had been accompanied by a prayer rug oriented toward the Ka'aba in Mecca, Saudi, Arabia?

I know that answer.

I wonder whether America still believes, as did  Thomas Jefferson, that “Neither Pagan nor Muslim nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion;” or as Richard Henry Lee believed, that “True freedom embraces the Muslim and the Hindu as well as the Christian religion.”

I wonder whether, in response to recent SCOTUS decisions on prayer, school funding, abortion, and guns, for example, whether we can still claim to be a nation that believes that all people are created equal?

I know that answer, too.

I'm having a hard time with all that because I believe that a majority of today's Supreme Court Justices - lacking only the powdered wigs of the 56 white men and slave holders whom they worship - are playing an active and willing role in a recolonization of America planned by white-supremacist Christian nationalist forces.

Recolonization designed to delegitimize the poor, the vulnerable, the weak, the hungry and the oppressed - delegitimize anyone that does not look or worship as they do.

Recolonialization that threatens to marginalize and disenfranchise me - and people like me.

That's the danger that America confronts, the danger of lies and false tropes stirred into a witches' brew of Christian nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and racism rarely seen since the Civil War, since Jim Crow, since George Wallace - since the rise of 21st century seditionists and insurrectionists.

Lies and tropes offered as antidotes to Critical Race Theory, antidotes to inclusion, diversity, equity, antidotes to facts and knowledge; all willingly consumed in the hope of keeping the feared Other from the promise of America.

All proving, without contradiction, George Orwell's dictum that “[t]he most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

All proving, to my mind, that the Roberts-led iteration of a once-hallowed SCOTUS has unequivocally validated the central thesis of the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times 1619 Project - that not only has white America yet to confront its origin story of having been conceived in sin but is actively resisting all efforts to set the record straight.

All proving that, if circumstances permit, the most personal and private of human concerns can be exploited for political power and profit if the right pawns are in place wiling to exploit resentments and grievances - and distort history - in order to achieve desired political ends.

Achieve a triumphant recolonization to colonize the bodies of 50% of American citizens.

In 1973, for example, when Roe v. Wade was handed down, the ruling was praised by W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas who said, “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Indeed, Southern Baptists, who not only called for the legalization of abortion in 1971 but reaffirmed that call in 1974 and 1976 were not alone in support of Roe. James Dobson, who has applauded SCOTUS's 2022 decision, actually said in 1973 that the Bible was silent on abortion and that it was OK for evangelicals to believe that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being.”

Heather Cox Richardson notes that Historians from the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association have criticized the six Supreme Court justices in the majority in Dobbs for “adopt[ing] a flawed interpretation of abortion criminalization that has been pressed by anti-abortion advocates for more than thirty years." Further, the historians noted ... "These misrepresentations are now enshrined in a text that becomes authoritative for legal reference and citation in the future," an undermining of the "imperative that historical evidence and argument be presented according to high standards of historical scholarship ...."

Flawed scholarship embraced by the current majority in the Supreme Court, denying long-established rights and precedents to far too-many Americans.

High above the white marble courtroom where our Supreme Court justices deliberate are installed two carved marble friezes displaying figural representations of 18 “great lawgivers of history." They include Hammurabi, Moses, Confucius, Marshall, and Blackstone and even,  standing between Charlemagne and Justinian, the Prophet Muhammad.

This is the America our founders envisioned. This is what our scholarship must embrace.

America has a lot of work to do.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: America has a lot of work to do