The lie is a national forgetting that white America uses to justify itself

Evidence

The complex relationship between history and memory preoccupied Jimmy as he witnessed the country’s zealous embrace of Reaganism. So much was being willfully forgotten at a breathtaking pace, and just as much was being relived through the emotions and experiences of black people who remembered Reagan’s tenure as governor of California. … The passage of time between 1975, when Reagan left the governorship, and the 1980 election allowed the majority of the country to forget his negative reaction to the black freedom movement. That forgetfulness made a lie of history, as Reagan became simply the genteel actor who declared “morning in America.” And yet for the majority of black people, he was the face of a choice made by white America to turn its back on the movement of the 1960s—he embodied the lie. In Baldwin’s last interview in 1987, he put it this way: “Ronald Reagan represent[ed] the justification of [white America’s] history, their sense of innocence.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 455

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly defines ‘the lie’ as willful national forgetfulness that becomes history-justifying innocence for white America.
• XREF: This definition of ‘the lie’ as national self-justifying forgetting connects to the reader’s thesis about Baldwin’s after-times concept.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the Reagan ‘morning in America’ rebrand functioned as a country-level memory erasure, and the parallel in later political eras.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compression of a nation’s moral abandonment into a single candidate who ‘embodies the lie’ is a dense, loaded analysis worth sitting with.