Living in the COVID-19 World ... and Beyond #14: What is My Responsibility?

I recently listened to an Ezra Klein interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi-Coates (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ta-nehisi-coates-nikole-hannah-jones.html).   The whole discussion was excellent.   And one thing that Nikole Hannah-Jones said caused me to do some thinking and reflection.   Here is the quote from the transcript of the interview:

“No one is responsible for what our ancestors did before us. We’re not responsible for the good things, so you don’t want to own up to slavery then also you can’t claim the Declaration because you also didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence. None of us are responsible for what our ancestors did. But we are responsible for what we do now.”

We are not responsible for what our ancestors did or did not do, per Hannah-Jones.   Interestingly, I have always felt some sense of responsibility for seemingly everything.   Am I not responsible for the genocide of the native peoples of what are now the Americas, for the enslavement of black people, for the Holocaust, and so much more?   No, I’m not responsible for those horrific events.   I was not even alive at those times so I cannot possibly be responsible for their occurrence.

What then is my responsibility?   It is not only that I am responsible for what I do now.  I think I’m also responsible for learning from the past, to understand what caused things to go well and why and where things went off-course.   As Churchill said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”   

I just finished reading Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi.   I appreciated learning about the history of racism as seen through the study of five iconic figures: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.   I could see in Kendi’s telling how each of the five experienced some major evolution in their thinking about racism over the course of their respective lifetimes.   It was important for me to see that these public figures had ideas that they eventually cast aside.   This gives me insight into myself and my behavior.   What I thought and did as a teenager is part of my history.  I cannot change that now.    I am responsible for my own history and my own actions.   I can notice that my thinking has evolved on racism and many other topics.   And I can take responsibility now to do my best thinking and to take action that might be different than what I would have done in the past.  This might involve correcting mistakes that I have made as well as doing and saying things that I would never have even considered before.   It is exciting to consider each moment a new unique moment, not beholden to the past, and to hold myself accountable to do new, fresh thinking.   This is a high standard, not to reflexively do what I have done in the past, and I think it is what Nikole Hannah-Jones means by taking responsibility for what we each do now.