Commentary: An Open Letter to the Person who Wrote Anonymously

Editor’s Note: An anonymous letter was mailed to Dani Tietz, the author of Now we know about Juneteenth, let’s be better. This letter was sent prior to June 19, but received in mid-July. The piece is not published, as Ethos Publishing does not publish anonymous Letters to the Editor, but is choosing to respond to the piece to add facts to the common rhetoric that was used to place blame or guilt.

An open letter to the person who wrote anonymously:

I have received your mail. I did quite a bit of traveling throughout the month of June, so I opened it last week. 

I get these types of letters often, especially after I write something someone doesn’t like. The United States Postal Service allows people to send mail anonymously, so who am I to disagree with that? But here I am before you, putting my name on my thoughts in response to yours. 

I am not doing this to embarrass you or the group that you claim to be representing. Instead, I am writing to you because I grew up with the hyperbole that you used to try to shame me for calling on the Mahomet community to do and be better in the future.

You see, a product of the great state of Indiana, I grew up in a very conservative household and neighborhood. I have been a registered Republican since I turned 18 years old. On the night of the 1988 election, I cried and prayed that George Bush would defeat Michael Dukakis because my mother believed that if Dukakis won the United States would become communist or socialist.

Thirty-some years later I can roll my eyes remembering the terror and relief that was spread through my home during that election. 

After the 9-11 attacks when the world pointed its finger at George W. Bush, my husband and I were listening to Rush Limbaugh in his little red Protege. I said I hate how people blame conservatives on everything; I wish they could see who we really are. 

I was told that the Republicans, the Conservatives, were the party that championed the end of slavery, and the Democrats were the party Jim Crow laws, as you pointed out. While it’s not untrue, do you know about how the south became so “red?”

I encourage you to read more about this, but when President Truman, a Democratic Southerner, introduced a pro-civil rights platform at the party’s 1948 convention, a group of Democrats, “Dixiecrats,” walked out. They went on to hold their own convention where they nominated Strom Thurmond to run for president. 

Thurmond lost to Pres. Harry Truman, and the majority of the south continued to vote “blue” because they believed Republicans were still against “States’ Rights.”

Thurmond, who said, “all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation,” became a Republican in 1964. That’s the same time President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. 

According to Bill Moyers, Johnson’s assistant, Johnson said “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.” Between 1960 and 1979, almost 60 Democrats, including President Ronald Reagan (who many conservatives I know believe is the bees knees), became Republicans.

Is Ethos Publishing a “true liberal media outlet”? If you are referring to news written through facts with historical context supporting it, then yes, it is. 

I used to spew similar terms: liberal fluff, snowflakes, free-loaders, libtard…the list goes on and on, right? And we should be poised and ready to defend the freedoms that our forefathers brought to this great nation because those who want to brainwash our children with their radical ideas and turn us all into the government-needing citizens that live in Europe, right?

I was raised on ideals, just like you, I suppose. And to this day, I believe those ideas to the very core of my being. 

• All humans have a right to freedom and prosperity. 
• We have a justice system in place that allows due-process for all its citizens. 
• We are free to worship the God we believe in
  • to voice our opinions in a respectful manner 
  • to be paid a fair and honest wage for our work
  • to separate church and state
  • to elect public officials who will represent the will of the people and do so in a fiscally responsible manner
  • to have access to an accurate and equitable educational system. 

In my mind, this is what made me a Republican, a conservative, a Yankee. And I vowed to not raise children who were liberals. I literally said that when they were toddlers.

When the kids were little, we’d sing a pick-up song that I learned as a child. It goes:

“When we all work together, together, together, 
When we all work together, how happy we’ll be.
‘Cause your work is my work and 
My work is your work
When we all work together how happy we will be.”

I was told by my husband that that was a very socialist song. And so we stopped singing it.

But are these ideas Socialist? Liberal? Conservative? Republican? American?

The older I get the more I see that they are just ideas about humanity, how we organize our collective life together.

I taught my children that we are all part of a community. At home, they do dishes and take care of laundry. They are expected to clean and be a good teammate, to take personal responsibility and care for each other. I am trying to plant seeds and examples of sacrifice and respect in their life so that they know that this world is bigger than their individualism. 

And you know what? All of the “crazy liberal socialists who just want a government-run state” that I know believe and want all of the same things I believe in. And quite frankly, they are the ones who put their actions where their mouth is. 

I don’t expect that you will agree with me on these principles, either by belief or practice, but I hope that you do. I’m at the point in my life where I don’t care if you say you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a Liberal or a Conservative. I don’t care about what you say you believe in, I care about what you do to make the lives of others better. 

All the time that I believed in these ideals for everything that lives, my perspective didn’t always match with what I saw or what I was hearing. For example, in college I had a Black professor in my African American Literature class. She told us that she and her husband had a hard time purchasing a home in West Lafayette because of the color of their skin, even though they were both professors. 

I bucked up against this so very much. West Lafayette wasn’t a racist community. Why would anyone do that? If she had the means to purchase the home overlooking the river, then surely the realtors would not steer her away from that because of the color of her skin. 

Twenty years later, it is beyond evident to me that these practices happen. We have north sides and south sides, rough sides and good sides. And all of these sides are associated with the color of people’s skin. We have entire communities where white people never have to interact with a person of another color, yet they believe they know what life is for that person or those people. 

In a sense, you are right, there are no slaves in America anymore. White people don’t own Black people (let’s not forget that there is work and sex slavery currently, though). Why do we have to talk about what happened in this country, why do we have to face the very backbone of what this country was built upon 1700 years ago? Because humans are still enslaved because of the practices of that system. 

I’m grateful that you brought up Lebron James. I love what Lebron James has done with his career. I still believe that Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time, but we can talk about that a little later. 

But your claim that “every single Black child has the same access to succeed as the next person” is just wrong. Sorry, I don’t know how else to put it. 

The United States Joint Economic Committee released a 2019 report stating the gap between the median wealth held by Black families ($17,000) and White families ($171,000)—a ratio of 10 to one. 

The same study showed that unemployment for Blacks (6.0%) was double that for whites (3.1%). That gap is lessened with a college degree, but according to American Progress, “Black and Hispanic graduates also generally have attended institutions that have less money to spend on offering a quality education. And they are significantly underrepresented in important fields such as engineering and education, mathematics and statistics, and the physical sciences.”

By this report, it’s estimated that “if black and Hispanic bachelor’s degree recipients were as likely to major in engineering as white students, this country would have produced 20,000 more engineers from 2013 through 2015. What’s more, the United States would have 30,000 more teachers of color if students of color were represented equally among education graduates.”

You wrote that “more whites are killed by police than Blacks,” and “Blacks and killed by other Blacks.” 

To your second point, yes. According to 2018 FBI data, 88.9% of 2,925 Black murders were at the hands of other Black people. But according to Washington Post data that contains every fatal shooting by a police officer while working dating back to 2015, “although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.”

We can’t “move forward” without being “reminded of the past” because the past still lives with us today. 

The column titled Now we know about Juneteenth, let’s be better was not a column to “come down” on Mahomet, but rather to point to information that was new to me, to us, so that we can not only celebrate that Juneteenth ended slavery as it were, but to move forward with new, more inclusive hearts.

As a woman who could register to be a Daughter of the Revolution, I am most certain that my ancestors probably played a role in some of the policies and procedures that hurt people. Not in a way where we say something mean or write an anonymous letter, but where their children were literally legally stolen from them, where they were raped, where the President used their teeth to replace his missing. 

My heart gets very heavy when I think about humans doing that to one another. My heart hurt when I watched George Floyd die. My heart hurt when I listened to the detailed report of how Breonna Taylor died. You wrote about how they were “not innocent”, but can you show me when they were proven guilty in a court of law by their peers for the crime you stated they had committed? Where is that verdict? Is that not the way that the justice system in our country works?

Or do we now live (or have we always lived) in a country where people are guilty or killed just based on the assumption of guilt? This not only has happened in the past, it continues to happen today. 

My heart also ached when I heard about the tragic death of Chris Oberheim and injury to Jeff Creel. I do believe that those men should be honored for their service and sacrifice. What happened to them was not fair and certainly not right or justifiable.

I believe that we can work towards our ideals of a better system, a better life for all so that we don’t have to mourn the lives that are cut short unnecessarily. 

Where do we go from here? If you need me to be “Marxist left” so that you can hold anger in your heart, I will be that for you. But know that there are perceptions and there are facts. My views on this world and who we should be working towards becoming have not changed in this lifetime. I read things that are cited and fact-checked. I adopt a perspective beyond what my parents, my community or my party tells me to. And most of all, I spend a lot of time listening to people, no matter who they are or where they come from.

Recently, I read an essay In History and guilt: Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust? by Susan Neiman, a moral philosopher and essayist. She highlights the German plight of guilt that many Germans wrestle with as they look at what their ancestors did to those the Nazi government deemed as “inherently inferior.”

As they continue to work through responsibility, they have developed a mindset to help move forward: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung.” 

I don’t know how to say this word, either, but it is a way for a collective group of people to face and interact with their past as a way to not repeat its horrific practices. 

She cites a second-generation German slogan: “Collective guilt, no! Collective responsibility, yes!”

Alison Mullin writes: “Germans have to deal with a difficult history more recent than most, they were forced to quickly shift from a world in which the Hitler myth of grandeur resonated in each individual’s hearts, to one that forced them to confront not only the evil of Hitler but also the collective responsibility of the nation for the atrocities committed during World War II. While the initial years after the war were filled with a popular dissociation with politics and history, today’s Germany has effectively and thoughtfully engaged in the education about and remembrance of the Holocaust. In terms of education, museums use geographic elements and an abundance of evidence to show beyond doubt the extent to which the events that took place are relevant. On the other hand, remembrance and memorialization seem to use more symbolic and subliminal tactics to convey the horror of Nazism through emotion rather than brute facts.”

According to Neiman’s essay, Germany has not only told the stories of how Jewish people were treated and terminated during the Holocaust, but also doesn’t reduce their story to that one time in history. They are intentional about showing how people of Jewish heritage help contribute to society. 

Jewish people did, in fact, receive restitution. According to Politico, “Germany has paid more than $60 billion since 1952 for the horrors of the Holocaust and continues to this day to provide for those living survivors in special need, but not their descendants.”

And to your claim, the Japanese who were removed from the West Coast during World War II also received compensation when the U.S. government deemed the move “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

Politico also points out that “more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II were each paid $20,000 under a law signed in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan, but nothing was paid to the heirs of those who died before the 1988 law went into effect.”

Being so far removed from what you are referring to as slavery, it would be difficult to offer reparations in that same manner. But communities like Asheville, NC have committed to new investments in black homeownership and business opportunity. 

“What we have committed to do in this resolution is invest in and create systems and programs and structures that will allow those community members to have the same opportunities for economic mobility, to build generational wealth that white people have,” Asheville Councilwoman Julie Mayfield told ABC News. 

The city recently sold land to make the first investment into their commitment. 

Evanston, Ill. is using a 3% tax on the sale of recreational marijuana to help fund restitution in their community. The Chicago suburb’s City Council has allocated $400,000 to eligible black households. Each qualifying household will receive $25,000 for home repairs or down payments on property, according to NBC News. 

That’s exciting, right? A community that puts their actions where their mouth is. 

Like I said at the beginning of this letter to you, I’ve done a lot of traveling in June. I visited 17 states in 30 days. What a vast and diverse country we get to live in! One of the things I was reminded of while I saw diverse landscapes and talked to all types of different people is that the experience that we have in Mahomet is just one experience in this world. 

When we remember and when we look at history outside of the present and experiences outside of our own, we become better human beings. So, no, I have no shame in that. 

If you’d like to write to me again, you can. It’d be best to send the correspondence to Ethos Publishing, c/o Dani Tietz, PO Box 823, Mahomet, IL, 61853. I’ll be happy to read and respond to you again.