HIP, HIP HYPOCRISY!!

Happy Fourth of July!  As American holidays go, this one has got to be the most hypocritical, if not schizophrenic, national self-congratulatory celebration we’ve got.  But before I explain why I hold that view, let me acknowledge that this post draws heavily on Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning essay at NYT Magazine Hannah-Jones published last August 14, 2019, on the 400^th anniversary of the date slavery was introduced to the American colonies.  Her essay is entitled, America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made it One.  If you missed it, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and there isn’t a better day to read it than today, the Fourth of July. 

This day, the date the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Second Continental Congress, is called Independence Day, but independence should not be conflated with freedom.  The independence called for in our founding document did not spring from the desire to establish individual freedoms, but from the need to unyoke an economic system based on unpaid, forced labor threatened by an abolitionist movement in Great Britain.  

Actually, the Declaration of Independence preserved the freedom to enslave.  It was written 157 years after the colonists at Jamestown purchased between 20 and 30 Africans kidnapped by British pirates from Portuguese slave traders.  During those 150-odd years, the colonies had developed a thriving economy based on the cultivation of cotton by slave labor.  The unarticulated rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, put into unequivocal action in the War for Independence, was to protect the colonies’ most valuable commodity:  At the height of slavery, cotton accounted for half of all American exports, and cotton grown in the South supplied two-thirds of global demand.  Cotton, quite simply, was the national economic engine, powered by slaves.  Its preservation was existential.

The bastard child created by the miscegenation of independence with slavery has haunted our country from its very beginnings, as Hannah-Jones writes: 

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” … As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half-brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned….Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

Except Hemings, together with one-fifth of the population in the 13 colonies who were enslaved, wasn’t regarded as one of the “men” who were created equal.  He was chattel property, an inherited and permanent racial condition that allowed him to be bought, sold, traded, used as collateral for a debt, gifted, and killed for any reason or for no reason at all.  In terms of the Declaration of Independence, slaves had no Right to Life, Liberty or the pursuit of Happiness.  Let Hannah-Jones count the ways:

Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.

After independence from Great Britain was won, the cognitive dissonance created by continuing slavery in a nation which claimed to be founded on individual freedom required a harmonizing myth.  This took the form of a racist ideology, supported by “science” and literature, which held that black people were subhuman.  Liberty was therefore for people who were considered white; enslavement was the natural condition of people who had any amount of black blood.  

The racist ideology soon became law.  In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that black people, whether enslaved or free, were an inferior slave race which made them ineligible for the democratic privileges of citizenry.  The Court ruled that the Negro race was a separate class of persons who had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.  The normalizing myth that black people were a slave race, rather than enslaved, reduced cognitive dissonance but left us with systemic racism which endures to this day.  Hannah-Jones:

If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

The uncomfortable coexistence of slavery and equality reached a peak during the Civil War.  Although Abraham Lincoln considered emancipating the slaves to add soldiers to the Union’s cause and opposed slavery on humanitarian grounds, he also opposed equality.  As Hannah-Jones relates, Lincoln believed free black people were a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people.  During the second year of the Civil War, he offered black leaders a deal:  fight for the Union as freedmen, but at the end of the war, take the appropriations Lincoln secured from Congress to expatriate to another country.  Not surprisingly, or perhaps very surprisingly, the black leaders declined the offer.

At the end of the Civil War, the South was destroyed and destitute, resembling Berlin after World War II.  Seeing the photos of Atlanta (above), Charleston, Savannah, and other devastated confederate cities, I wondered how the South got the means to rebuild its economy.  Where did the money come from?  The answer is to be found in Ava DuVernay's brilliant documentary, The Thirteenth.  Cotton economy slave labor was replaced with post-war convict leasing thanks to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1865 (emphasis added):

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Newly freed slaves made up as much as 40% of the population of some former slave states.  As such, they presented an existential threat to the white power structure.  So, under the exception in the 13th Amendment, they were convicted of minor crimes, such as vagrancy or littering, and were set to work in prisons rebuilding the South—for free.   This free lunch on the backs of blacks continues to this day, where it takes the form of mass incarceration under the War on Drugs.  Its enabler is the prison-industrial complex. 

On the positive side, Reconstruction (1865-1877) also saw a golden age of democracy in the South, with blacks being elected to local, state, and federal offices. State constitutions were rewritten to embody egalitarian principles; equitable tax legislation was adopted; laws prohibiting discrimination in housing, public accommodations, and transport were enacted; and public education was established.   

But these gains were short-lived and created a backlash of voter suppression, electoral fraud, and the overthrow of bi-racial governments, as was the case with the Wilmington insurrection in 1898 (See Wiki Wilmington).  Per Hannah-Jones:

Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery.

Black equality was dealt another serious blow by the Supreme Court case, Plessy vs. Ferguson, in 1896, which held that “separate but equal” accommodations were constitutional, ushering in segregation on a national scale.  It’s worth quoting Hannah-Jones at length to appreciate the humiliation segregation visited on black Americans, despite the equal protections of the 14^th Amendment (1868):

With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old they were. In the North, white politicians implemented policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites-only public pools and held white and “colored” days at the country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black people service, placing “Whites Only” signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in barring black people from marrying white people, while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white children.

And yet, black Americans still volunteered to fight in World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and subsequent misadventures in the Middle East and Afghanistan.  Where does this patriotism, this love of country in the face of discrimination and race hatred come from?  Are black people subhuman or are they actually superhuman?  I have no answer to that, and I will not put anyone on a pedestal, for that is also dehumanizing.  But I will agree with Hannah-Jones when she says:

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it…. The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did.... For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

The fact is, if you listen to what black people are saying, you realize they want to be part of America, not apart from America.  They had the chance to leave and they rejected it.  After all we’ve put black Americans through--the degradation, the humiliation, the lynchings, the stop-and-frisks, the choke holds, the mass incarcerations, the denial of a decent education, housing, and other public goods, they still want to be “We the people.”  

I’m humbled by their grace and grateful they still believe in the social contract we white Americans continue to breach every day.  Activist Kimberley Jones put it well after the murder of George Floyd:  We're lucky black people are looking for equality and not revenge.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kolWnoEGydU

Keep it real!  Wear your damn mask!

Marilyn