Pitts: Kelly, and many others, can’t handle truth about slavery

The two sides compromised.

In 1961, the Freedom Riders pulled into Mississippi. The federal government made a deal with the state that if Mississippi guaranteed no violence, it could arrest the riders, though they had done nothing illegal.

They compromised.

And so on.

Historically, America always seems to find a way to sell black people out.

Kelly is just the latest in a long line of those who lack the guts to face this straight on. They hide out in textbooks where slaves become “settlers,” flee from “Roots” because it is “depressing.”

And they insist on moral equivalence between people sellers and the people they sold, lynchers and the people they lynched, traitors who fought to destroy America and patriots who fought to preserve it.

“Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” added Kelly in the Fox interview — an interesting take for a military man on an enemy general in a war that killed more Americans than Hitler, Hirohito and Bin Laden combined.

“All of our leaders have flaws,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders in defending Kelly.

As if Lee’s ordering two men and a woman stripped to the waist and whipped (“Lay it on well,” he said) for the crime of seeking freedom was in the same moral universe as Barack Obama’s cigarette jones.

Invested in the myth

I can anticipate how all this will land among certain people. They’ll call it “racist.” They’ll call it “divisive.” They’ll call it everything but untrue.

They are, you see, deeply invested in the myth that struggles with poverty, mass incarceration, joblessness and miseducation arise from something African-Americans chose or did, while the rest of the country, innocent as the dawn, did nothing to cause or benefit from any of it. They will be angry at the reminder that this is ridiculous.

As if this was about them. As if we should give a damn about their anger.

This country stole from black people. It stole their bodies, their children, their names, their land, their lives. Now, some of us seek to steal the very memory of the crime.

Well, let them tell a thousand lies. Let them treat truth like the money card in a game of three-card monte. Let them salve history with the balm of false equivalence.

But let them know that some of us find strength for our own trials in knowing the trials of our mothers and fathers.

So we will not be fooled and we will not be robbed.

We will remember — and demand they do the same.

No compromise.