The Healing Power of Truth
By Dr. Albert R. Lee
In difficult times it is often challenging to find silver linings in the clouds that surround us. As we entered the summer of 2020, not only were we facing a global pandemic, but we were also confronted with an incident, actually multiple incidents, of police brutality that forced us to grapple with what we had long ignored as a country. In addition, I was providing care for my ailing mother after a major health crisis. Being a politically engaged citizen, a worried son, and a Black man in America felt not only overwhelming but paralyzing. How had we arrived in this place as a country, and how could I live a peaceful and joyous life if I was living in a constant state of fear?
I needed to understand our country’s history in new ways no matter how it may have upended the convenient narratives we are usually offered. Reading Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America led me to read Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lesson for Our Own. As if Kendi’s exhaustive examination of racism’s presence and mutation through centuries of American history wasn’t enough of a gut check, Eddie Glaude’s inciteful and impassioned chronicling of what James Baldwin attempted to teach us through his art was a further sucker punch. I went on to read Angela Davis’ work Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, and I concluded 2020 reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.
It was in encountering Isabel Wilkerson’s second book, Caste, and then turning to her first book on the great migration that my silver lining would emerge. I have to be honest though. Getting to this silver lining was excruciatingly painful. Confronting our country’s history in the midst of deliberate attempts to obscure or rewrite that history made me angry. The many statements of solidarity that were made without concrete steps toward redress made me feel even more isolated than the pandemic made us all feel. It seemed clear that although we felt bad as a country about what had happened, we weren’t prepared to actually address the underlying issues in ways that might require sacrifices from demographics who benefit from our country’s inequities.
So how is this a silver lining? It is a silver lining in the ways truth always is. Holy writ teaches that the truth will make us free. What it does not explain, however, is that grappling with the truth can challenge the lies we tell ourselves in an attempt to cope with reality. When narratives about our history are always glowing, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to really experience the power of truth. We miss out on the lessons our individual and collective choices can teach us about what we really value, and we rob ourselves of the opportunity to actually experience community across demographic differences. If freedom is our country’s pursuit, truth must be our guide.
Double Down Blogger Image/Dr. Albert R. Lee.
Dr. Albert R. Lee is Associate Professor of Voice and Opera at the University of Nevada, Reno. A nationally and internationally regarded classical vocalist, Dr. Lee studies and performs musical settings of Langston Hughes poetry and works as a diversity, equity, and inclusion advocate. When I Sing the Anthem is a TEDx Talk presented by Dr. Lee.
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