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Politicize Truth

Truth is in crisis. Look at the cover stories in Time titled “How Your Brain Tricks You into Believing Fake News,” and The Atlantic, “How America Lost Its Mind.”¹ Journalists lament the rise of disinformation. They worry the end of democracy is near. Can you blame them?

For four years, the Trump administration lied with reckless abandon. About things major—banning travelers from predominately Muslim countries in 2017, it said, was about national security, not Islamophobia. And things minor—the crowd at Trump’s inauguration, said White House press secretary Sean Spicer, was the largest in history. The lying has continued even since Trump has left office. The right-wing cable-news ecosystem of Fox News provides its devotees with what Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway once called “alternative facts.” “Climate skeptics” say global warming is a hoax. Armchair epidemiologists object to data that COVID-19 is really that lethal. Anti-vaxxers pose as health experts to say that routine vaccinations for seasonal influenza are dangerous.

How to confront this? One common solution we hear is that we need to recommit ourselves to truth. You know the list: Rigor in research. Impartiality. Greater transparency. Follow the facts, even if you don’t like them. If it were only that simple. Yes, truth is indispensable for creating a shared community of trust, but in politics, what matters isn’t simply that you tell the truth but rather how you shape the context, dramatic narratives, and stakes of the facts involved. There are many ways to tell a story. When you tell the truth, highlight the hidden forces of power that determine who gets what and who gets nothing. Foreground that what we believe is a product of struggle. Highlight who gets to speak, whose voices are heard, and what questions are worth asking. Find historical precedents. We’ve been here before. The past haunts the present. Don’t sugarcoat what’s bitter.

This is how freedom fighters battled the greatest disinformation campaign in US history. Not in 2021 but after the US Civil War. By the 1870s, southern states including Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi were hell-bent on rolling back the gains for newly enfranchised Black men during Reconstruction (1865–1877). This after the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery, the Fourteenth provided equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote to men of color.

Southerners may have invented fake news with what they called the “Lost Cause,” which omitted slavery as the catalyst for the Civil War. In best-selling books written by Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, and through monuments to Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, the war was described by southern redeemers as being about states’ rights. This reeducation campaign served white supremacy incredibly well. For if, as they said, southerners only cared about preserving their own culture and were uninterested in dominating Black citizens, then, surely, the 1890s Jim Crow era was harmless. According to this view, the trauma of the poll tax, the grandfather clause, residential segregation, the chain gang, sharecropping, and the epidemic of lynching was no big deal.

No one confronted historical whitewashing as courageously as the most famous Black abolitionist in history, Frederick Douglass. It’s not enough to tell the truth, Douglass believed. If you’re invested in liberation, you need to identify friends and enemies, what you will and won’t stand for and against. Standing in front of the Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day to commemorate the end of the Civil War in 1871, Douglass said, let’s not forget the “difference between the parties,” those who “struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.”²

Memory is a battlefield. Drawing attention to political fault lines makes you know reconciliation isn’t easily achievable, that racial justice won’t be quickly achieved. “It was a war of ideas, a battle of principles,” Douglass says in 1878.³ Concrete ideology, not human folly, was at the heart of the Civil War. There’s no equivalence between the Black and white experience. There are victims and perpetrators. Innocent bystanders are few and far between. Keep in mind the different experiences of the same event. If slavery is a bountiful festival for slaveholders, then it’s a festival of violence for the enslaved. Douglass says it is “traced like that of a wounded man through a crowd by the blood.”⁴ The past is never fully vanquished. History doesn’t move in a linear progressive direction, toward ever greater justice; it zig zags and ebbs and flows, cycling from despair to hope, terror to liberation, and back again. “The South has a past not to be contemplated with pleasure, but with a shudder,” Douglass declares. “She has been selling agony, trading in blood and in the souls of men. If her past has any lesson, it is one of repentance and through reformation.”⁵

You’ll soon hear former Trump administration officials wanting to be rehabilitated in the public sphere, cashing in on lucrative speaking gigs and book contracts. They’ll say they were just following orders when they designed policies to put brown children seeking asylum in cages on the US-Mexico border. Or, they’ll say, they were involved in a vigorous behind-the-scenes pushback you just didn’t see. It’s not that hard to imagine Trump, at some future dinner with his presidential predecessors—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—being toasted as a political disruptor who “shook up” Washington, inspired disaffected voters to get involved, and was smart for getting tough on China.

With the memory of Trump’s administration still fresh in your mind, follow Douglass’s example. Never forget the cheating, lying, corruption, racism, faux populism, sexism, homophobia, warmongering, assault on environmental protections, privatization, tax cuts for the rich, the Muslim ban, and the packing of the courts with far-right judges. But go beyond remembering Trump’s presidency. Next time you see college students toppling Confederate statues in Virginia or North Carolina, know that they are dismantling white supremacy in our cherished public spaces. In doing this, they aren’t promoting a “cancel” culture that signals the end of free speech. They’re forming a counterweight to reactionary politics. How else to counter Trump’s threat to defund public schools that teach the New York Times‘s 1619 Project—an award-winning series of essays investigating slavery in the US—and to veto a defense bill that renamed military bases still carrying the names of vanquished Confederate generals? Never forget that truth is a story. The stories we tell about past disasters ensure they don’t happen again.