On my social media feeds over the past year, I have seen individuals post about the fact that the individuals who screamed at students outside schools in Little Rock, Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere don’t want history taught because it will illuminate their actions. I understand this argument; however, what I’m more interested in the ways that white supremacy, patriarchy, and other ideoligies get passed down from generation to generation. I’ve written about this countless times on this blog, detailing how I am only five generations removed from an ancestor who fought for the Confederate States of America during the the Civil War.

Over the past decade, I have encountered countless texts that explore the ways that vile ideology moves through time from generation to generation. I’ve looked at this in relation to antisemitism and Nazi ideology in the work of Anna Seghers and others. I’ve looked at in relation to enslavement, examining Edwin Epps’ son in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave. We know that children are impressionable, and they seek to please those who have authority over them. They learn from adults and older siblings. They trust authority figures: teachers, pastors, others. If individuals espouse hate, then the children take it into their own beings.

Lillian Smith, in Killers of the Dream, writes about how her parents told her to love everyone but that she was better than a Black person. Even as a kid, Smith questioned this, but it wasn’t till she got older that she really understood the grip that white supremacy had on the parents that she loved. She even dedicated Killers of the Dream to him, signifying the positive and negative impacts they had on her formation as a person. Even amidst the positive influence, they indoctrinated Smith into the mores of white supremacy, the same indoctrination they endured as they came of age. Smith broke free from the indoctrination, and Killers of the Dream serves as a testament to her journey.

Virulent ideologies don’t go away with the passage of time. Virulent ideologies don’t sissipate when someone dies. They remain, infecting others. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this. In a 1965 interview, Alex Haley mentioned that while many agreed with the goals of the movement they also thought that time and progress would cure everything. He asked King whether or not he thought this was true, to which King responded,

No, I do not. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills. In truth, time itself is only neutral. Increasingly, I feel that time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will.

The “flow of time” will not “cure all ills” because the ills remain. As I’ve written about before, it is something we have to confront. If we think about these ideologies as diseases, then that means that we have to address both teh disease itself and the infected individuals. If we cure an infected individual, as Lillian Smith did herself, the disease doesn’t go away. It remains. If we confine the disease, infected individuals still exist, so they can still transmit the disease, which means we cannot eradicate the disease. So, what do we do?

We have to do what we can do. We have to make connections, as Smith argues, and build bridges across the chasms that these ideologies have created between us. We must educate. But, what if someone doesn’t want education? What if they don’t want to connect? Then, we must pull them forward with us, hoping that time will cure them. We can’t know if this will happen or not, but we have to keep moving forward and encourage the infected to join us on the journey towards the future.

I have been thinking about this a lot over the past few years, and I thought about it again as I read David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s Big Jim and the White Boy, a graphic novel reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventrues of Huckleberry Finn. Big Jim and the White Boy uses Twain’s novel as a jumping off point as it moves back and forth in time, even have Jim and Huck relate their adventures to a group of children in the summer of 1932. As they relate how the fought for the Union Army, freeing a group of Black Union soliders from Confederate soldiers, Huck breaks down as he relates how he killed individuals in the fight.

Jim tells the children “there ain’t no pleasure in “killing and fighting, and Huck agrees, adding, as we get two panels of Huck and Jim back in 1863 during the fight, “War is what happens when the hate in the hears of men grows bigger than the love. . . . War is what happens when the hate has taken over the hearts of some men infects the hearts of other men.” The scene shifts back to 1932, and Anderson shows Jim and Huck sitting next to the wall, Jim looking at Huck, as Huck says, “The hate of one man can turn him into a monster. . .”

The next page contains six panels, each showing Jim and Huck in the same setting. Huck finishes his sentence by saying, “but that same hate can turn others into monsters.” At this, Huck places his hands over his face as he begins to cry. He maintains this pose for three panels as Jim, in each panel, inches closer to him and places his arm around Huck, consoling him. Huck fears he has turned into a monster. He fears he has been infected by the hate of other men; however, Jim reassures him, telling him in the last two panels, “There ain’t no evil in your heart, and you ain’t no monster. You hear what I’m saying?” Huck still doesn’t believe Jim, but Jim continues and tells him, “If it weren’t for what you did, neither of us would be alive today.”

Jim reminds Huck that they fought the disease. They confronted individuals who had become infected by the disease. He reminds him, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” Huck and Jim sacrificed and struggled to help cure the world of virulent ideologies, but even though they fought, those idoelogies remained. The image of women and children screaming at ruby Bridges in 1960 above show that. The rhetoric and images we see today show that. We are only five to six generations removed from 1863, only 161 years.

Progress doesn’t happen in a spit second, in a day, in a week, in a year, in a decade, in a century. It takes time, but it also takes work. We must treat virulent ideologies as diseases, working to find a cure. In 1957, Lillian Smith wrote, “The tragic fact is, neither cancer nor segregation will go away while we close our eyes. Both are dangerous diseases that have to be handled quickly and skillfully because they spread, they metastasize throughout the organism.” We have, over the days, weeks, years, and centuries let virulent ideologies metastasize. They will remain and spread, and with this knowledge, we must find ways to cure these diseases. Smith, King, and others pointed to continuing to move forward, bringing others along with us, and to bridging the gaps that stretch between us. We must do those things, because if we don’t, then the diseases will continue to spread.