Letters from Peter: Black Grief, White Grievance
The Catastrophic Costs of Justice Betrayed • by Peter Laarman
I write “betrayed” rather than “denied,” because deny doesn’t begin to communicate the bitterness African Americans feel in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of Black voting rights. This comes on top of all the other grievous blows raining down in the quest to Make America White Again. Here I refer to the Racist Right’s relentless attacks on diversity and affirmative action, the elimination or drastic shrinking of every program or agency that might possibly support Black community thriving or be helpful to Black aspiration, and of course the multiplier effects of these Trump-engineered moves on a wide range of private entities: large and small corporations, universities, arts organizations, museums, etc., almost all of which are now dismantling diversity programs at lightning speed.
Some of the wounds these blows leave behind are profoundly psychological and spiritual and are thus incalculably costly in that sense alone. But make no mistake, the assault on Black America is also doing enormous material damage, destroying good-paying jobs across multiple fields, undermining always-fragile gains in Black household wealth, and now even discouraging gifted Black students from bothering to apply to college.
In the midst of all this, when Black people turn to so-called white liberals for solidarity, they are likely to get little more than a shrug: “Yeah, it’s bad isn’t it? Just one more thing these terrible people are doing. Such a darned shame.” But it’s not just one more thing for the Black community; it’s part and parcel of a long and excruciating history of white betrayal and white failure to actually see what Black life is like in the country.
In just two months the United States will celebrate 250 years of freedom and “equal justice under law,” but nothing here has ever been free or equal for Black people. The year 1619 saw the arrival of enslaved Africans on these shores. That’s 407 years ago. That’s before Plymouth Rock, before the Dutch showed up on Manhattan Island, and long before there was an entity called the United States. Except for the Indigenous peoples, Black people can legitimately claim to be more American than any other group living here.
Let’s look at those four centuries. For the first 250 years there was a monstrous regime of chattel slavery, with all Black people viewed as presumptively enslaved and constantly having to watch their backs whether they had achieved legal freedom or not. To justify this atrocity and extract all that free labor, white people — leading scientists and ministers and other public figures — invented a spurious “race science” to justify the subjugation of an entire people. They derogated Black people as both child-like and also dangerously devious and sinister. While white men were routinely raping Black women, they had the cheek to demonize Black men as incurably rapacious and Black women as incurably promiscuous. Even leading white Abolitionists and admired Northern thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson held these views: yes, they wanted to see slavery abolished, but they absolutely did not want free Black people living among them on an equal basis.
Then came a cataclysmic Civil War, which the North initially pretended wasn’t about slavery until they needed the help of Black people in order to prevail. There followed a reckoning, a true national pivot point called Radical Reconstruction, when it looked like this country might actually achieve a multiracial democracy. But because Reconstruction did not come full effect until 1869 and was abandoned for all practical purposes in 1876, there were just seven years of actual freedom, and even these years were lived under the nightmare shadow of Klan terrorism. Nine decades of the vicious American apartheid system known as Jim Crow grew up in Reconstruction’s wake. No more voting, no more civil protections, rigid segregation in every aspect of life, thousands of gruesome lynchings, and not just in the South. Once again, the white people invented theories of Black inferiority to justify this appalling betrayal. Elite white historians belonging to what is called the Dunning School propounded the idea that Black people had been better off during slavery. Blackface minstrelsy, and popular films like “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind” reinforced anti-Black stereotypes while romanticizing the Plantation South. This is not ancient history. Jim Crow was in full effect during some of our lifetimes.
Black people did not give up--they have never given up--and between the First World War and the mid-1960s a whole new disciplined and determined freedom movement arose, achieving by 1966 what is often described as a Second Reconstruction built upon what everyone thought were secure pillars like the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board decision, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Black people and a handful of white allies sacrificed and fought and died to achieve these precious gains.
This Second Reconstruction is what has just been essentially wiped away by a Supreme Court decision that Chief Justice John Roberts has been attempting to engineer ever since he was a fresh-faced clerk for Justice William Rehnquist decades ago. The Court’s majority opinion in the Callais case denies that there are lingering effects of racism that might require special protection for Black voting rights.
Yes, that is what this decision says: There’s nothing to see here. We live in a colorblind society now.
Really? How about you do the math, Mr. Chief Justice. During the 407 years of Black life in what is now the United States of America, 340 of those years have been lived either under chattel slavery or the rigid apartheid system known as Jim Crow (a system much admired by Adolf Hitler, by the way). Compared to these 340 years of direct violent subjugation, there have been just 67 years of something approximating freedom (adding the seven years of Radical Reconstruction to the sixty years of the Second Reconstruction). Today Trump and his minions do not even bother to hide or moderate their anti-Black venom. And this Court doesn’t think there are lingering effects of white racism worth mentioning?
Something that most white people have never understood is that keeping Black folks down doesn’t just hurt Black folks. Racism may have built white wealth at the top, but at this point racism’s cancerous effects are taking this country down at an accelerating rate. It’s not at all difficult to make the case that racism explains why we have a low-wage labor market, unchecked corporate power, pathetic public services, some of the world’s worst public health outcomes, an increasingly dysfunctional government, and a diseased spiritual life.
Thanks in no small part to Black Christianity, Black people have been trying to love this country into a new and vital existence for a long, long time. These efforts have been consistently spurned by the white people, with catastrophic costs. Black people today have every right to be enraged by what racism has done to destroy their dreams, endanger their lives, and make a mockery of American democracy.
But so do the rest of us, if we would only wake up.
~ Peter
Notes and credits: Photo-illustration by Christina E
