October | 2020 | History Sidebar

It’s difficult to heal trauma without truth-telling. You have to uncover and acknowledge what has been done wrong before you can fully move forward. — Rev. Mark Sills, NPR, October 11, 2020.

Starting in 2016 members of the Silver Spring Historical Society (Silver Spring, Maryland) began attending my public programs (lectures, walking tours). They regularly monopolized discussion times with long-winded and disruptive comments about how their organization wasn’t racist.

In early 2018, I was invited to speak in Takoma Park, Maryland. Almost on cue, the Silver Spring Historical Society’s Marcie Stickle and Mary Reardon launched into their speeches during the Q&A. The City of Takoma Park recorded the program and posted it on YouTube. The recording captures the embodiment of white fragility in the Silver Spring Historical Society members. The clip below is from that recording.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. — Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

In my measured opinion, Silver Spring and other places like it will never heal, never move forward without community truth-telling and without abandoning the safe places where folks declare that they are not racists.

Banner, Internet Court of Lies.

Robert Thibadeau wants to jail all of the lies floating around on the Internet. To accomplish this lofty goal, the retired Carnegie Mellon University professor is using an old Moose lodge in a Pittsburgh suburb as a virtual courtroom where he runs the Internet Court of Lies.

Thibadeau’s idiosyncratic approach to Internet truth dismisses decades of scholarship on lies and lying. Instead, he has concocted a dubious definition of “lies” and an even more questionable approach to identifying and mitigating digital dishonesty. I first noticed his “courtroom” while driving through Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, about six miles north of downtown Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River. The banners and other items affixed to the former Moose lodge piqued my curiosity. I bought a copy of Thibadeau’s self-published book, How to Recover Your Lies (Privust LLC, 2019), and then I asked him for an interview.

After a two-hour Zoom conversation, multiple follow-up emails, and communications with a linguist who literally wrote the book on lies and lying, I cobbled together a two-part blog post for the New Directions in Folklore blog. Read about the Internet Court of Lies here:

The Internet Court of Lies: A Digital People’s Court? (Part 1)
and
The Internet Court of Lies – Part 2