Leave it to Beaver premiered on October 4, 1957: one month to the day after that photo from Little Rock was taken. America was not innocent, and the evil wasn't only in the heart of Hazel Bryan or other Little Rock whites. It was a national sickness. One most whites ignored...
...or simply couldn't allow themselves to see. Any nation that produces hagiographic representations of itself, at a time when others are being assailed and destroyed, deserves to be exposed as the fraud it is...
And those who bought the lie -- whose childhoods were dependent upon it -- deserve to have their memories assaulted with truth, to be confronted with reality no matter how difficult. It's called growing up. It's called not being able to wallow in infantile naivete anymore...
White Americans have an understanding of this country which is, by and large, infantile. And we are held hostage by our own ignorance. James Baldwin said it best...
'These innocent people are trapped in a history they do not understand, and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.' We want release without recognition, pardon without pain, forgiveness without facing the truth of what this nation has done in OUR name...
And to our relative benefit for centuries. We want the America of the Cleaver family, because we fail to realize it NEVER EXISTED. It was a myth. A lie. Always. Reality was represented by that other picture from Little Rock...
And it wasn't just the overt haters like Hazel Bryan and her fellow racist students. It was the millions of whites who maybe wouldn't have screamed hate like that, but did NOTHING to bring down segregation. That was the vast majority of our parents/grandparents...
And that silence, that acquiescence, was more evil than Hazel Bryan. At least Hazel had the courage of her awful convictions. Far worse to be the white person who accepted segregation quietly and compromised their humanity without even having the guts to own their sickness...