Fortunately, I don't know anyone who thinks that the killing of George Floyd was a good and justified act. Unfortunately, I know several people who think that the looting of businesses in Soho was a good and justified act. They justify their opinion by claiming that the United States has systemic racism. (They don't quite manage to explain how destroying people's livelihoods will end systemic racism.)
I want to explain why I think those people are wrong, and argue that racism is actually counter to the American system, which is unusual in the history of the world in trying to promote racial justice. But I also want to examine the very real forces that are weakening that system and which could bring much less protection for the 'inalienable rights' that Jefferson talked about in the Declaration of Independence, not only for black people but for all Americans.
What would become one of the most remarkable nations in the world, offering what millions of people from all over the world a hope for a better life, had two sorts of founding. The first was an uprising that can perhaps be called a sort of power-to-the-people movement. The hooliganism of the Boston Tea Party, which we tend to forget was an attempt to avoid paying a tax that was imposed specifically because the colonies had promised to pay the expense of the Crown's army during the French and Indian war, got an idealistic cover letter of sorts from the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, whom we tend most often these days not to mention without adding that he was a slave-owner. Well, of course he was a slave owner. It was the eighteenth century, and folks weren't woke yet. But he was waking up, and his Declaration of Independence outlined the ideas that led to the much more egalitarian society we have today. That uprising of the people would probably not have succeeded, and the English army would like have just burned Jefferson's plantation and his writings, except for the brilliant leadership of George Washington.
After the revolution, however, there were still the dishes to wash. It would be Washington, in support of a better form of government to replace the colonies' first Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, who used a phrase which has remained one of the most important ways of understanding what the United States would become. He would be the first president in the government that was established by our present Constitution, and he wrote in 1790 that 'The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.' One might do well to re-read the Preamble to the Constitution from time to time. The establishment of what we have come to know as The United States of America was a recognition that the power of government ultimately rested in the people, an idea quite in keeping with the ideas of Jefferson, but, with a bit of help from folks like James Madison, it also recognized that people tend to get crazy sometimes and throw stuff that doesn't belong to them into the sea while they are dressed up like someone else. In other words, a system needed to be established to protect us people from ourselves.
It's a system. It's not a utopia.
But it was a system that expected free men could and would work together to achieve the goals of the Preamble. These days it is again and again the existence of slavery that is held against the founders. Interestingly enough, Jefferson in his first draft of the Preamble had condemned slavery. (Yeah, I know. He was a slaveholder. He was kinda like those folks who condemn big corporations on Facebook using their iPhone. Sometimes we find ourselves in sticky situations.). But slavery and slave trade were expected to be outlawed, so much so that slave trade was forbidden to be outlawed until 1808, when it was.
Nor was it racist. The famous 'other persons' who were counted as three-fifths of a person for representation in the House of Representatives could be white or black or others--yes, there were white slaves, but they proved to be less profitable than black slaves because they tended to contract malaria more easily. Free black men were counted just the same as free white men, and only three states, Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, restricted suffrage to whites. Race and color would only appear in the Constitution with the Fifteenth Amendment. For a more in-depth view of the issue, one might click here.
I felt it necessary to write about slavery in the Constitution and in the early days of the Great American Experiment because once again people are in the streets, claiming to be the heirs of the Boston Tea Party or the heirs of slaves, demanding change that would often be extra-constitutional, outside the system (Ironically enough, a rapidly growing number of black Americans are recent immigrants from Africa. The American system may not be perfect but it's the one people want to join.) It would not be so dangerous if it were only the power-to-the-people sorts who are revolting against the system. Indeed it would be useful for a wise leaders to listen to the power-to-the-people sorts as a sort of feed-back on how the system's doing. I'm sure Lao-Tzu must have said something about that.
Unfortunately, the United States seem to have not just lost but abandoned and discarded wise leadership. The dudes who did the Constitution--I was afraid if I used the term 'framers' I would be accused of using Greek--recognized how easily tyranny arises, and they recognized that democracies are subject to the worst sorts of tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority. (I mean, if there's one guy who's a tyrant, you can just put him away in an iron mask or something, but that's harder to do if the tyrant is 50.5% of the population.) So, after dividing power up into three branches to balance each other, they added limits--the Bill of Rights--to restrain that power.
That was then. This is now. As Frederick Douglass said in in 1860, 'A chart is one thing, the course of a vessel another. The Constitution may be right, the government wrong.' The United States now seems to have a government which is pre-occupied with shrugging responsibilities. In order to avoid being blamed for mistakes, Congress gives more and more power to the presidency. And then the president says, again and again, 'I accept no blame.'. Harry Truman's motto 'the buck stops here' has come to have a much more lucrative meaning. And each party fights to control the Supreme Court, not as a defender of the constitution but as enforcer of the party line.
One one side we have the folks like Nancy Pelosi, who doesn't just listen to the complaints of the people throwing tea into Boston harbor but rushes to put on her Pocahontas dress (pardon a mixed metaphor, please) and join them. On the other we have the folks like Donald Trump, the new law-and-order version of George III, anxious to send in the troops.
I am not a big fan of Abraham Lincoln. I think he could have been much slower to use troops. But it sees patently clear that he was correct about one thing: 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' Unfortunately, if the Great American Experiment has only been a card game, it has had very high stakes.
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