The administration can't disown shocking images of abuse at the border

[View in browser]( [Mother Jones Daily Newsletter]( September 22, 2021 On Tuesday, one of my Mother Jones colleagues tweeted out a link to a story that was 16 months old. It made me do a double take—why did he share that?—until I saw what inspired it. Then I retweeted it, too. The [story in question]( was one that another colleague, Nathalie Baptiste, had published in May 2020, after a video circulated of a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery being chased and gunned down by a truck full of white vigilantes while jogging in his neighborhood. Baptiste, exhausted by requests for her and other journalists of color to cover such atrocities, wondered, "Is there anything new to be said?" More frustrating, she wrote, was that "well-meaning people of all races littered my social media feeds with a rallying cry that is a variation on a theme as familiar as it is fundamentally empty. It boiled down to the old trope: 'This is not who we are!'” "In fact, this is who we are," Baptiste added. "And yet, by treating every single senseless death, every single racial profiling incident, every attack on Black people, every example of the disproportionate vulnerability of people of color to economic and now coronavirus devastation as some aberration, America is given a kind of absolution." The sharing of Baptiste's piece was occasioned by a CBS Mornings appearance in which White House press secretary Jen Psaki, confronted with images of Border Patrol agents on horseback riding down a group of Haitian migrants, declared, "This is not who we are. That’s not who the Biden-Harris administration is." I can't speak for the administration, but it's damn well who America is. We are a nation where many states today are [enacting laws]( designed to make it harder for certain groups of people to vote, and, worse, laws that [empower state officials]( to challenge election results they dislike. We are a nation that deploys Predator drones to Muslim nations, sometimes [murdering innocent]( men, women, and children based on laughable intelligence—and [lying about it]( until we are caught red-handed. We may aspire to do right as a nation, but we cannot ever seem to agree on what that means. In the meantime, people—usually white people—tell themselves stories to avoid confronting our dreadful, racist past: Oh, but slavery ended so long ago. Listen, my grandparents came to America way later; my family wasn't part of all that. Hey, nobody ever gave me a handout. We white Americans get uncomfortable when confronted by the idea that, regardless of whether we harbor racist intent, we have all benefitted from racism, socially and financially. In [a review]( of Clint Smith's recent book about how America is dealing with its slavery legacy, I wrote about how a well-educated white acquaintance had expressed annoyance to me that Black Americans couldn't just get over it. After the review ran, several readers tracked down my personal email to make their case for why slavery reparations were not in order. (I'd never explicitly said that they were.) Their arguments, though lengthy, had logical flaws, and lacked a full accounting of our past—which isn't yet fully past. I didn't have the time or the energy to engage, in part because I'm pessimistic that [presenting]( a [more]( [comprehensive]( [view]( of race in America—the sort of history some state legislatures are busy banning from school curriculums—would change these people's minds. As James {NAME} wrote, "Someone once said to me that people in general cannot bear very much reality." And yet the rest are forced to live with the consequences. —Michael Mechanic Advertisement [ACLU]( [Top Story] [Top Story]( [In California’s Water Wars, Nuts Are Edging Out People]( Agriculture's voracious appetite is sucking residential wells dry. BY TOM PHILPOTT [Trending] [Texas Republicans just passed a slew of extreme laws. Now they’ll gerrymander to stay in power.]( BY ARI BERMAN [The New York investigation of Trump's business appears to expand]( BY RUSS CHOMA AND DAN FRIEDMAN [Kyrsten Sinema is threatening to derail Democrats’ agenda. Again.]( BY TIM MURPHY [America is spending a fortune to help rich people retire in luxury]( BY MICHAEL MECHANIC Advertisement [ACLU]( [The Mother Jones Podcast] [Special Feature]( [The Metamorphosis of Kyrsten Sinema]( From radical activist to Senate obstructionist, the rise of a political fairy tale—and nightmare BY TIM MURPHY [Fiercely Independent] Support from readers allows Mother Jones to do journalism that doesn't just follow the pack. [Donate]( Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by [forwarding]( it to a friend or sharing it on [Facebook]( and [Twitter](. [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. 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