The campaign for reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery and historic discrimination brings up questions including the proper assignment of responsibility. Are the sins of the father to be visited upon the child? Are persons of mixed race guilty in proportion to the degree of their whiteness or entitled to reparations proportional to their blackness? Do the two cancel each other out to the extent of their proportional balance? To what extent are black Americans responsible for their ancestral kings and warlords having largely supplied the slaves to the Atlantic trade? Is the nation as a whole responsible? What amount of money would not be an insult against the enormity of the crime? And how do we prioritize our collective guilt for our many sins—our vast miasma of regret?
While discrimination against blacks has been endemic, many people of good will throughout our history have endeavored to transcend the attitudes and injustices of discrimination. The country at its inception inherited slavery as an established reality from a world where un-free labor in the form of slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude had been from ancient times foundations of civilizations controlled by narrow elites. Persons living in those worlds would have seen slavery as the way of the world, and doubts as to the permanence of that order were not broadly held until changing economics came to favor free labor over coercion and made room for the emerging moral sentiments of the Enlightenment.
At the time of the Revolution attitudes were changing rapidly; by 1804 every Northern State had moved toward eventual emancipation. The fight over slavery was played out in the constitutional convention of 1787 with compromises between Northern and Southern states to insure ratification of the Constitution. The Constitution was ratified but the debate over slavery continued with growing bitterness through the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, only culminating in the blood sacrifice of over 700,000 men at places like Gettysburg, Shiloh and Antietam.
After the Civil War the dominant Republicans moved to decisively secure the rights of recently freed blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and through the administration in the South of Reconstruction, only to see those rights significantly eroded by Southern recidivism and the rise of Jim Crow. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination and sought the clarification and re-establishment of those rights. While today racial prejudice and the lack of equal opportunity remain as indictments of our past and present failures, we have made significant progress both as individuals and as a nation. All are not equally guilty.
The history of racial enslavement and discrimination will not be absolved by a symbolic gesture. The assignment of collective guilt to America, or to white Americans, or the stereotyping of blacks as victims is far worse than not useful. It says that race relations are essentially static, that the attitudes and actions of individuals and their relationships to each other are unimportant, that all politics are identity politics. We do not yet live in a color blind, post racial world, but it is important that we act as if someday we might.
If we would make a restitutive gesture, perhaps it might be in the form of a very large commitment to the mitigation of climate change in the name of humanity at large.
“Bottom rail on top, dis time.” Civil War remark attributed to a former slave, now in uniform, to his former master, now a Union prisoner.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were born to a world in which slavery was a given. It was largely within their own generation that it’s morality was broadly questioned, and even then, against the background of its perceived necessity within the manifold of cultural reality. Yet, in changing times, they could see with some degree of precocity beyond their moment. In saying that all men equal, Jefferson betrayed his class, yet they stuck with him at the polls, perhaps reflecting growing ambiguity.
Racism is a manifestation of how we can’t relate to one another. It’s a black and white symbol of the gulf between us all. Racialistic inquiry is the thought about difference, the meaning of those differences to the degree of their significance, within the balance of significances and of the degree of intransigence in their consideration.
‘Identity’ has the effect of conceptually reducing all to description in terms of simplified generalities suggestive of broad policy initiatives irrespective of the fact that no statistically generated model can accurately describe any individual. Indeed, human diversity is such that the model may be very limited in interpretive utility and, at great expense, an impediment to progress.
Race is real and there are differences. “But whether we like it or not, there is no stopping the genome revolution. The results that it is producing making it impossible to maintain the orthodoxy established over the last half century, as they are revealing hard evidence of substantial differences across populations.”[1]
Assumption of racism as underlying premise of American social structure is itself a premise of that structures reformulation, is consistent with or is an element of the indictment of Western Civilization, the mantra of ‘de-colonization is predicated on the assumption of the superiority of innocence to sophistication, of the primitive to that which is developed.
It follows that the organizational, functional, structural, and moral elements of that society constitute a ‘white’ matrix that requires dismantlement in the name of social justice. White is historically coincidental with European. Europeans are White in terms of their general racial characteristics. And Europe was the continuation of Grecian culture married as it came to be with European technological and organizational fitness. That such is the face and fact of prominent aspects of the modern world should not be surprising. While it is for the established to embrace the promise of the new, it is for those who would ride the train to pay their fare and to respect the rules. While the dominant culture will be imbued with new strands, new racial admixtures, new ideas, it will not quietly, nor should it, continence its own demise.
A Corner of One’s Soul
A corner of one’s soul, still held in bondage,
long after the gate has fallen from its rusted hinges.
The lash bites deep, its memory to the current generation.
The shame of servitude, of dreams eclipsed,
a ceiling hung so low that one could touch it.
How expunge that from one’s sense of self
or of rage ingrained by layers of indignity.
How say, that was then, and
this is now, we’ll start anew?
Yet that is the very thing
that must be done—
Can’t live there anymore.
The bone’s been gnawed,
the bitter marrow sucked.
The ceiling and the walls
now burnt away, the sky so high,
so blue that one would yearn to touch it—
make more children for those lost,
those not forgotten,
but in whose name we carry on.
[1] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[2] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[3]Reich, p. 70
[4] Reich p. 253
Pay wall goes up July, 11th. Readers and conversationalists signing up before that date will be paid-up for life going forward. Existing free subscribers will also be always free to ride, wherever we may go. Tickets $5, once. Two hundred dollars buys you Founders status and an extra dose of gratitude.
Perfect Circle Press is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a subscriber.
Good post and thoughtful. But don’t waste our substance on the climate change hoax. If you believe floods are coming take action to mitigate the impact of the flood, don’t pretend you can stop the rain or hold back the tide.
On Reparations
The campaign for reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery and historic discrimination brings up questions including the proper assignment of responsibility. Are the sins of the father to be visited upon the child? Are persons of mixed race guilty in proportion to the degree of their whiteness or entitled to reparations proportional to their blackness? Do the two cancel each other out to the extent of their proportional balance? To what extent are black Americans responsible for their ancestral kings and warlords having largely supplied the slaves to the Atlantic trade? Is the nation as a whole responsible? What amount of money would not be an insult against the enormity of the crime? And how do we prioritize our collective guilt for our many sins—our vast miasma of regret?
While discrimination against blacks has been endemic, many people of good will throughout our history have endeavored to transcend the attitudes and injustices of discrimination. The country at its inception inherited slavery as an established reality from a world where un-free labor in the form of slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude had been from ancient times foundations of civilizations controlled by narrow elites. Persons living in those worlds would have seen slavery as the way of the world, and doubts as to the permanence of that order were not broadly held until changing economics came to favor free labor over coercion and made room for the emerging moral sentiments of the Enlightenment.
At the time of the Revolution attitudes were changing rapidly; by 1804 every Northern State had moved toward eventual emancipation. The fight over slavery was played out in the constitutional convention of 1787 with compromises between Northern and Southern states to insure ratification of the Constitution. The Constitution was ratified but the debate over slavery continued with growing bitterness through the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, only culminating in the blood sacrifice of over 700,000 men at places like Gettysburg, Shiloh and Antietam.
After the Civil War the dominant Republicans moved to decisively secure the rights of recently freed blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and through the administration in the South of Reconstruction, only to see those rights significantly eroded by Southern recidivism and the rise of Jim Crow. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination and sought the clarification and re-establishment of those rights. While today racial prejudice and the lack of equal opportunity remain as indictments of our past and present failures, we have made significant progress both as individuals and as a nation. All are not equally guilty.
The history of racial enslavement and discrimination will not be absolved by a symbolic gesture. The assignment of collective guilt to America, or to white Americans, or the stereotyping of blacks as victims is far worse than not useful. It says that race relations are essentially static, that the attitudes and actions of individuals and their relationships to each other are unimportant, that all politics are identity politics. We do not yet live in a color blind, post racial world, but it is important that we act as if someday we might.
If we would make a restitutive gesture, perhaps it might be in the form of a very large commitment to the mitigation of climate change in the name of humanity at large.
“Bottom rail on top, dis time.” Civil War remark attributed to a former slave, now in uniform, to his former master, now a Union prisoner.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were born to a world in which slavery was a given. It was largely within their own generation that it’s morality was broadly questioned, and even then, against the background of its perceived necessity within the manifold of cultural reality. Yet, in changing times, they could see with some degree of precocity beyond their moment. In saying that all men equal, Jefferson betrayed his class, yet they stuck with him at the polls, perhaps reflecting growing ambiguity.
Racism is a manifestation of how we can’t relate to one another. It’s a black and white symbol of the gulf between us all. Racialistic inquiry is the thought about difference, the meaning of those differences to the degree of their significance, within the balance of significances and of the degree of intransigence in their consideration.
‘Identity’ has the effect of conceptually reducing all to description in terms of simplified generalities suggestive of broad policy initiatives irrespective of the fact that no statistically generated model can accurately describe any individual. Indeed, human diversity is such that the model may be very limited in interpretive utility and, at great expense, an impediment to progress.
Race is real and there are differences. “But whether we like it or not, there is no stopping the genome revolution. The results that it is producing making it impossible to maintain the orthodoxy established over the last half century, as they are revealing hard evidence of substantial differences across populations.”[1]
Assumption of racism as underlying premise of American social structure is itself a premise of that structures reformulation, is consistent with or is an element of the indictment of Western Civilization, the mantra of ‘de-colonization is predicated on the assumption of the superiority of innocence to sophistication, of the primitive to that which is developed.
It follows that the organizational, functional, structural, and moral elements of that society constitute a ‘white’ matrix that requires dismantlement in the name of social justice. White is historically coincidental with European. Europeans are White in terms of their general racial characteristics. And Europe was the continuation of Grecian culture married as it came to be with European technological and organizational fitness. That such is the face and fact of prominent aspects of the modern world should not be surprising. While it is for the established to embrace the promise of the new, it is for those who would ride the train to pay their fare and to respect the rules. While the dominant culture will be imbued with new strands, new racial admixtures, new ideas, it will not quietly, nor should it, continence its own demise.
A Corner of One’s Soul
A corner of one’s soul, still held in bondage,
long after the gate has fallen from its rusted hinges.
The lash bites deep, its memory to the current generation.
The shame of servitude, of dreams eclipsed,
a ceiling hung so low that one could touch it.
How expunge that from one’s sense of self
or of rage ingrained by layers of indignity.
How say, that was then, and
this is now, we’ll start anew?
Yet that is the very thing
that must be done—
Can’t live there anymore.
The bone’s been gnawed,
the bitter marrow sucked.
The ceiling and the walls
now burnt away, the sky so high,
so blue that one would yearn to touch it—
make more children for those lost,
those not forgotten,
but in whose name we carry on.
[1] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[2] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[3]Reich, p. 70
[4] Reich p. 253
Pay wall goes up July, 11th. Readers and conversationalists signing up before that date will be paid-up for life going forward. Existing free subscribers will also be always free to ride, wherever we may go. Tickets $5, once. Two hundred dollars buys you Founders status and an extra dose of gratitude.
Perfect Circle Press is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a subscriber.
Good post and thoughtful. But don’t waste our substance on the climate change hoax. If you believe floods are coming take action to mitigate the impact of the flood, don’t pretend you can stop the rain or hold back the tide.