Mesmerized by Mythmaking

I’ve been sitting with that recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about Charlie Kirk. What struck me wasn’t Kirk himself — that’s a familiar story — but rather the way white liberal avoidance and aversion show up as a quieter, but no less powerful, tool for maintaining caste. There’s a way of nodding politely, declaring “I already know about slavery,” or worse, “It wasn’t that bad,” that works like mortar in the wall. Silence. Denial. Deflection. It all helps keep the structure standing.

The assault on truth isn’t only loud and violent; sometimes it’s soft and evasive. And that makes the road to reconciliation even longer.

I remember writing about this during the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. Back then, I shared how watching Floyd’s murder brought me back to seeing my father publicly beaten and burned as a young man. That wound never leaves you. And it becomes even more raw when you see how many people can look at centuries of brutality and shrug — as if this country hasn’t built an entire caste system designed to keep us “in our place,” then deny it ever happened.

The images that return to me again and again are of Dorothy Counts, walking to integrate a high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1957. A teenage Black girl in a plaid dress and a white ribbon, surrounded by a jeering, spitting mob of white students and adults. Her father told her, “Hold your head high.” And she did. She walked through a sea of hatred with regal grace. Her courage was not symbolic; it was survival.

Those photos aren’t distant history. They are mirrors. Every polite silence, every “I don’t want to talk about that,” every historical revisionism is part of the same lineage. The mobs didn’t disappear — they changed clothes, changed tactics, changed platforms.

Charlie Kirk and his ilk shout their lies into microphones. But white liberals often whisper theirs through a selective historical amnesia, through a refusal to confront the depth of this nation’s betrayals. Different styles, same structure.
And here’s the thing: this structure depends on avoidance. Baldwin said it plainly: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Facing requires discomfort. It requires courage. Dorothy Counts had it. Black folks have had it for centuries. The question is — do those who claim to love democracy have the same will to face the truth?

America was a business before it was a democracy. Its economic engine was slavery; its cultural engine was white supremacy. There is blood in the concrete of its founding. So when people act like racial injustice is some unfortunate side note, or something that happened “back then,” they’re not just misinformed — they’re participating in the maintenance of caste. They’re helping keep the system on life support through silence and plausible deniability.

We’ve seen this play out over and over. From Dorothy Counts to George Floyd. From Emmett Till’s open casket to police body cams. America looks away, then asks us to explain it to them. Again. And again.

But here’s what I know: We will not be gaslit into forgetting. We will not let denial rewrite the story. Like Dorothy, like Fannie Lou, like the Floyd family, we will walk forward with our heads held high — not because this country has earned our love, but because our ancestors did.
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This isn’t about hand-holding or convincing the willfully ignorant. It’s about telling the truth. Building with those ready to do the work. And refusing to let avoidance dictate the pace of justice.