“You know better.” How many times did we hear this as children and how many times have we said this to our own?
It is a call to shape up and get our act together. It is a call upon our memory, a demand made of our conscience.
It is a comparative claim. The behavior we witness does not match the teachings expressed. This is not the way you were raised or the expectation in our home.
This is not what you saw growing up or what you were taught. “You know better than this.”
We also associate this knowing with age. Our parents and elders said, “You are old enough to know better.”
We expect it of the eldest, the firstborn. Because “you are too old for this.”
There is a cut-off age for foolishness. There is an age of accountability and it usually begins when there is another child on the way.
Her belly is getting bigger and your time is running out. Put your toys and this childishness away.
“You know better.” We are convinced their actions are not a reflection of their intellect. It is a call to responsibility.
It is a reminder that there is a difference between right and wrong, no confusion as to the set standard. The statement is a hint at our home training, of the lessons we learned at our mother’s knee and on our father’s lap. The bar has been set and you can meet this expectation because you know the right thing to do.
“Do the best you can until you know better; then when you know better, do better,” Maya Angelou said. Yet, for all that America knows, the country is not doing any better.
“We are currently witnessing the collapse of our democracy,” Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” recently said to the LA Times. A student of dictatorships, he and a fellow educator wrote a letter appealing to Harvard to defend itself against Trump’s attacks on academic freedom.
Eight hundred of their colleagues agree and have signed it. But there are still millions of Americans who suffer fools and government goons gladly. I’ve never had the patience for either.
Besides, this has never been about democracy. Pointing out the obvious contradictions of American chattel slavery, the systemic oppression of African Americans and a class structure that favors the elite, Frederick Douglass said in the 19th century: “Democracy here has always meant power for the few, silence for the many.” It’s still true.
And the one who is doing all the talking is not well-informed, well-rounded or well-educated. Still, he keeps talking, more unwanted evidence of a meager vocabulary and that white- body supremacy is a fallacy. He is not “articulate.”
Instead, his speech is a mix of gibberish and stream of consciousness. His hand gestures are evidence he is stringing this all together in real time and stringing along Americans, who would rather accept a wannabe dictator than the reality that the world has always been diverse. It is all insufferable small talk, focused on picking people apart rather than discussing ideas that enlarge our self-concept and it’s costly.
His words slur while threatening to garnish the wages of Americans who can’t pay back their student loans while also offering $5,000 to any woman willing and able to bear a child. So, punish the educated and keep women barefoot and pregnant. Because you are afraid of a declining birthrate, but not an uneducated workforce.
The government is discouraging education and proposing to pay women to stay home with their children. That’s the plan. Patriarchy and white-body supremacy have no new ideas.
This is what New York Times bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo was talking about in her book “Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.” It hints at the running joke of desiring “the confidence of a mediocre white man,” except it’s not so funny when he makes it to the White House.
“When I talk about mediocrity, I talk about how we somehow agreed that wealthy white men are the best group to bring the rest of us prosperity, when their wealth was stolen from our labor,” Oluo wrote in 2020. She asked readers, “How can white men be our born leaders and at the same time so fragile that they cannot handle social progress?”
Oluo pointed out, “While we would like to believe otherwise, it is usually not the cream that rises to the top; our society rewards behaviors that are actually disadvantageous to everyone. Studies have shown that the traits long considered signs of strong leadership (like overconfidence and aggression) are in reality disastrous in both business and politics.”
African American women tried to warn us about this convicted felon. But, clearly, an overwhelming majority of folks thought they knew better.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
