Missing the Mark

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence say it clearly:

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.

Rights, the foundational statement of this nation declares, are unalienable – meaning fundamental and unalterable. And they belong to “all men,” which is a phrase that has expanded in our understanding, from both a social and legal perspective. We know that it originally meant all men collectively, as in the American colonies, and practically speaking (though not exclusively, since this was left up to the states) it meant landowning, white men, not some sort of declaration on general human rights. We know this, in part, because the people who wrote those words owned other human beings.

But times change. Later philosophers, scholars, lawyers, and even President Lincoln interpreted those words very differently, even construing an evolved idea about so-called natural law. Over time, “all men” had to include more than just the previously held demographic. And the history of this nation, since the very beginning, has been a tug of war on what, or rather whom, that entails.

And that work has been necessary because even the lofty ideals of our founding documents profess hierarchy, assuming supremacy based on at least race and sex. Racism is literally baked into the Constitution, which accepts the condition of slavery as just and legally protected. To put it in oversimplified terms, this became such a sticking point (and rightly so) that it led to an actual Civil War and then the passage of a 14^th Amendment to the Constitution intended to rectify past errors and rebalance the scales during the period of Reconstruction.

The assassination of President Lincoln and the subsequent fallout saw that this rebalancing never came to fruition. And, since that moment, the rebalance and backlash has been a tidal force on our society and our political and legal structures.

Last week, SCOTUS significantly narrowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a 6-3 ruling Wednesday, further eroding the impact of the landmark civil rights-era law. This follows a series of efforts to undermine this law across decades, often driven by the assertion made by Chief Justice Roberts in a 2007 ruling on voting rights in which he said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” It has come to be called the “Colorblind Doctrine” and it argues that any legal use of race is discriminatory and that the only way to achieve equality is to treat all individuals without regard to race.

The problem with that is we live in a legal system that has historically and repeatedly used race to discriminate, divide, and deny. The imbalance is so dramatic that the 14^th Amendment had to be written in order to provide freed slaves, people who had lived here for generations, to become citizens of the very nation they toiled to build without compensation, care, or acknowledgement.

Consider that on its own for a moment. An entire demographic, approximately 4 million people, freed by a 13^th Amendment into a world where they had no legal status whatsoever, based 100% on a racial category that, it could be argued, was invented to keep them enslaved.

Discrimination by race was conceived in this country by our legal system, and it has morphed and festered for centuries, typically dismissed as either “natural” or the proper order. The 14^th Amendment had to be enacted to rectify this glaring issue and to begin to make the legal claim, even if the social one was still very much in doubt, that the Declaration’s “all men” included black men. It was a new declaration that a democracy had to make special notice of people who had been historically and systemically alienated from it. And it had to make this crystal clear and chiseled in the rock of law in the wake of SCOTUS’s Dred Scott decision.

The gains made through incredible sacrifice throughout the centuries and, perhaps most impactfully, during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, sought to reshape the social structures that enforced racism. While the constitutional amendment eliminated the formal practice of slavery, it still allowed for it as a punishment for criminal action (more on this later). After the dismantling of the Reconstruction effort came Jim Crow and the rise of systemic racism aimed at making black people permanently and fully criminal, and therefore subject again to slavery. The dam was beginning to break in acknowledging that race was present in the systems we operate and the long road from overt bigotry to the soft bigotry of “colorblindness” had begun with the rise of Jim Crow.

Racism, you see, is a chameleon, a changeling, a trickster. He changes form, wears a suit when needed, a uniform other times, maybe even the same clothes you have on. He adapts and transforms to the barriers in his way, because it lives both in the hearts of people AND in the systems we build. The heart is the harder part, but the forces that want to uphold racism know that the legal and social structures are the places to impact.

Dr. King once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.” He knew that racism ensconced in the law in the place to begin, for that is where it hides, no overtly bigoted intent necessary, just action who impact is soaked in bigotry.

After the hard-won claims of the mid-century civil rights work, the road to change began to point downhill, some even imagined it was gaining momentum. And yet, as we are still discovering in the very moments in which we live, racism is harder to kill than kudzu vine. It is present in the hearts of people who have no business adhering to it and it infects even the best of intentions.

Now, we are told, we live in a so-called colorblind society. It is so much so that in the highest seats of power we find the assertion that discrimination on the basis of race is happening to white people. But racism in this country was always aimed in a particular direction. It has historic and generational roots. Getting rid of it by claiming it equally impacts everyone fundamentally ignores the realities of racism. It would be like buying a house and finding out it has foundation issues but refusing to deal with them because “you didn’t cause that damage” or simply ignoring them and painting over the cracks.

When we treat racism as if it is only found in egregious individual acts or personal bigotry, instead of buried within the systems that has been profoundly unequal for the duration of our nation’s history, we are seeking absolution without confession, or trying to find reconciliation without any conciliation to begin with. Michelle Alexander says it incredibly well in her profound book, The New Jim Crow:

“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.”

Voting is a major example of such embeddedness. And it is tragic – painful and tragic that this decision happens while there are scars on the flesh of many still alive, while some still wince at the bark of a dog, and while there are people – as Eddie Glaude Jr. lamented recently – buried in the ground, sunk in the Mississippi because they tried to vote. That’s it. They tried to vote. And that right – given in the 13^thand 14^th amendments – have been tried and re-tried, supported and attacked, enabled and disabled as if, as Glaude says, “some people think they own freedom.”

The truth is that this decision spits in the face of efforts across the centuries to make that original declaration actually true – all PEOPLE are created equal, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This tug-of-war has crossed party lines, social hierarchies, even religious denominationalism. It has created rifts and social movements, fed party platforms and legislative agendas. And it has, despite the best attempts to deny it, been the designating force behind the sinister practice of gerrymandering, upon which this SCOTUS decision lies.

Now SCOTUS declares that you can gerrymander based on party, but not on race. Only parties have always been racialized, it is how we run elections. And now the party of Lincoln, the GOP that freed the slaves, is arguing to disenfranchise their descendants. How’s that for historical irony?

The cracks are in the foundation and have been since the beginning. This nations’ lofty ideals were set on the sandy soil of white supremacy instead of the solid rock of equality. And until we address the foundations, with diligent and intentional repair, we set our house up for collapse.