November 5, 2018
What we are facing tomorrow is nothing less than a reckoning that has been more than two centuries in coming. This country was founded on two diametrically opposed ideas — that all men were created equal and that Black people were not citizens entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In order to make the white citizens of this new nation comfortable with the contradiction, this nation invented the pernicious myth of white supremacy. This country told its children the fairy tale that Black people weren’t really “people” in the way that white people were. They said that we lacked the intellect, the impulse control, the ability to form familial attachments, that white people had. By inventing this vicious mythology, they rationalized denying us any education, selling our children away from us and exercising absolute control over us by the most violent means at their disposal. By doing so, Southern slaveholders (and those Northern merchants that profited from them) could sleep at night, secure in the delusion that those they brutalized weren’t fully human.
Although we fought the nation’s bloodiest war to loosen the yoke of bondage, the contradiction inherent in our nation’s founding was never reconciled. After it became clear during Reconstruction that Black people were deadly serious about educating themselves and getting elected to public office, the South roared back with a vengeance, enacting Jim Crow laws that excluded Black people from enjoying any rights of citizenship, which they enforced with lethal precision. Despite the efforts of crusading journalists like Ida B. Wells, who tried to force this country to address the ubiquity of lynching as a gruesome enforcement tool of white supremacy, most Americans looked the other way, privileging their comfort over Black lives.
It took another another hundred years and the combined brilliance of activists from A. Philip Randolph to Martin Luther King to Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker and lawyers like Charles Hamilton Houston to Thurgood Marshall to Constance Baker Motley to Jack Greenberg, to secure, a mere fifty years ago, laws ensuring that Black people had the right to vote, the right to an education and equal opportunities for housing and employment. The backlash was immediate. Republicans have spent the last fifty years undermining those laws and cultivating resentment among white people by treating rights and opportunity like a zero sum game. They encouraged the belief that for Black people to gain anything, white people had to lose something, casually erasing all that had been stolen from us for centuries.
Undergirding it all was an abiding belief in Black inferiority that emboldened people to challenge the presence of Black people in the most quotidian spaces (like Starbucks and public parks). It fueled resistance to integrated schools, both among “progressives” in gentrifying cities and among conservatives in the South. It justified challenges to affirmative action and limited defense of the policy to the benefits accruing to the majority, rather than recompense owed to a long despised and disenfranchised minority.
Through it all, as a nation we have been decorous and timid in our language, eager not to offend the sensibilities of the majority. We call things “racially charged,” as if we’re discussing electrical currents rather than irrational hatred based on skin color. Black people walk on eggshells, for fear of being told that we’re “playing the race card,” as if our lives are some cosmic game of Bid Whist and the race card is the “Joker” that trumps all. We have been unwilling to call the white men who gun down Jewish people, Black churchgoers and women yoga students, terrorists, because that would require us to name the ideology that fuels their terror. This is where our cowardice and our avoidance has gotten us — to the eve of an election where the choice is between fascism fueled by hatred or a fragile democracy. Like I said, tomorrow is a reckoning.
#VOTE
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