Gore Vidal was correct when he damningly observed that the American people do not have a memory of the last week. “We are the United States of Amnesia," the famed novelist concluded. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Given America’s state of hyperpolitics, the black hole that is the attention economy spurned on the 24/7 news media, and a public that is not able to concentrate longer than a goldfish, Vidal now looks much too generous.

This absence of memory is especially true for White America and its understanding, or lack thereof, of the realities of the color line and its impact on America’s past and present. The real and complex history of the United States, and how it was and continues to be shaped by racism and white supremacy is systemically whitewashed and distorted in the nation's schools and culture. This is a form of psychological and emotional abuse for Black and brown people whose history and life experiences are erased in service of protecting white privilege and the many lies that sustain it.

Such acts of racial erasure eventually damage the minds, morals and ethics of white people — and in particular white children. As such it is a threat to American democracy. It is an attempt to deny the American people the lessons of the Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Movement, two of the most successful pro-democracy movements in U.S. history.

White America simultaneously practices a type of selective remembering that is grounded in an eternal present where the complex history of the country and the color line are flattened and distorted. In this narrative, there are great men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who showed up, read a speech, were assassinated, and then robbed of their radicalism as they were inducted into the high pantheon of American heroes — and then somehow “the race problem” was solved. The election of President Barack Obama is cited as further so-called proof that racism and white supremacy were mostly vanquished in the country. In the Age of Trump, the long arc of history has been twisted and distorted to such an extreme that it is now white people who are supposedly the “real” victims of “racism” in America and not Black and brown people. There is no substantive evidence to support such fantasies of white victimology.

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Ultimately, because the American people (specifically many white people and those mercenary Black and brown people who are invested in accessing the privileges of whiteness) live a selective relationship to history — where the past is almost like a motherless child or orphan — they possess a limited ability to confront the many great challenges we are facing as a country. Thus, the American people and their political elites are unable to effectively respond to Trumpism and the neofascist-white authoritarian movement because they still believe in the fiction of American exceptionalism and that fascism is something “over there” rather than homegrown.

In one of the most recent and dangerous examples of how America’s organized forgetting along the color line has negatively impacted our public discourse and politics, Donald Trump, his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and the other mouthpieces and agents of the MAGA neofascist movement, are now claiming that Black Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio are eating white people’s dogs and cats and presumably other pets as well.

The mainstream news media and political class — and many among the general public — are responding with shock and disgust that Trump and his agents would traffic in such obvious white supremacist and racist conspiracy theories that are dehumanizing and inciting violence against innocent people. However, alongside that disgust and outrage is a general failure to understand how these attacks against the Haitian community – which are auxiliary to the larger campaign of racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris — are part of a much older history of white supremacy and racist conspiracy theories and violence in America.

First and most importantly: there is no evidence to support this racist fear-mongering about Haitians in Springfield (or the United States more broadly). To that point, JD Vance has all but admitted that his claims that Haitian refugees are eating (white) people’s pets are not true. But the facts and the truth have little meaning or........

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