“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
When I was at the Naval Academy, I remember walking into my first freshman (“plebe”) English class and being shocked to see a grizzled, muscle-necked Navy SEAL in dress white uniform sitting in the middle of the room. The chair-desks were arranged in a circle around him, where I took a seat next to classmates who looked equally as terrified.
The SEAL sat silent for what seemed like five or ten minutes, just looking at each of us, intensely. Finally, he spoke:
“I am Lieutenant Smith*. I am your English instructor. And there is nothing I take more seriously than your complete and total focus on the history of the language you speak every day.”
I could tell this was going to be an interesting class.
The next words out of his mouth were a quote. Not from Shakespeare or Chaucer or Twain, but this one — and it surprised me:
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
James Baldwin.
Smith’s message that day was that each of us carries the past with us. That past is often traumatic. But it is our duty to listen, learn, understand, and live our lives according to those lessons. He ended the class with another quote from Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
In the years since, that message has stayed with me, and I have tried my best to live up to it: to listen, learn, and understand. And now, as a candidate for Congress, it’s my duty to act on those lessons.
Juneteenth preceded my Naval Academy English class. It preceded the writings of Baldwin and so many others. Juneteenth is important because it recognizes that slavery did not end in one decisive stroke with the Emancipation Proclamation. Two and a half year laters, it took a Union general riding into Galveston, Texas, to finally bring the message of freedom to the last remaining vestiges of a shameful institution.
Juneteenth celebrates black freedom in America. But we know that this moment was only the beginning — not the end. The struggle for real freedom remains incomplete.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Jim Crow. “Separate but equal.” Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Our children read about these things in history books, but their memory lives on for members of our communities. They cannot be easily forgotten. And they impact the way in which citizens access their government and work in our economy.
Here in Central New York, the struggle is also incomplete. History traps people here, too.
65 years after Brown v Board of Education, CNY still has some of the most segregated schools in the entire country.
54 years after Edmund Pettis Bridge, we still grapple with excessive force and mistrust between government and communities of color.
And today, 154 years after the first Juneteenth, when our Union promised “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the racial wealth gap is still staggering, black unemployment is still twice as high, and black mothers are three times more likely to die in childbirth. In Syracuse, concentrated racial poverty is some of the worst in the nation.
We have to lay these things plain upon the table. Neglect is no cure for inequality. We can only solve it by taking direct action.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Juneteenth is a celebration and a reminder — that power remains frustratingly, insidiously, pervasively unequal in this country. And that inequality traps people — in poverty, violence, and their own history.
I believe that we can free people from that history and live up to our founding ideals as a nation. To do this, we should start by recognizing a maxim I learned in the Navy: a rising tide lifts all boats. The surest way to prosperity in this country is not through tax cuts for the wealthy, but equality and security for everybody.
Economic equality and security starts with closing the racial wealth gap, providing dedicated support for entrepreneurs of color, and promoting community-based solutions for health care that focus on and lift up communities of color. It also means ending the concentration of power that leaves so few with so much, and the rest of us with so little — and impacts communities of color hardest of all.
The measure of any candidate or any representative of the people is not how many parades they march in, but how they will work to finally, fully balance the power between citizens and government and make good on the promise of our country to all its citizens.
People are trapped in history. We can work together to set them free.
Roger Misso is a candidate for Congress in New York’s 24th Congressional District (NY-24). He is a husband, father, and veteran — a former naval flight officer and victim advocate for military sexual assault victims. He is a proud Central New Yorker.
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*Not his real last name
