Selma: Past and Future
By nadinabbott on March 7, 2015 •
March 7,. 2015 (San Diego) The past is prologue. Many important figures, including the President of the United Stares, are at Selma, which is sacred ground for the civil rights movement.
We could celebrate, but instead we will delve into that past, which it still is a foreign country, it is the heart if the matter. For we, as a nation, still have to come to full terms with evil that inhabits the dark recesses of the past and the present.
The origin of what ails us is early in the colonial period. Slavery, what we would today accept as slavery, affected both African American slaves and poor whites. Both entered the system of indentured servitude where they were treated as property and abused by a land owning class. It was neither joyful nor voluntary, Still, in the first generations both could escape this and become free men by serving the term of their contract. Slavery, as it was to evolve, was alien to the British. Within three generations though African slaves became property for life. This singular event is the source of what ails us.
This singular change needed a philosophy of life that would justify men and women becoming property. This is why the institution was justified in biblical terms, as well as a mythos. While the reality was soul crushing and involved cultural genocide, the ideology told of gentle masters taking care of mere children, who would never become adults or fully human. This is why black men were merely three fourth human as far as the census, and law, was concerned. This is why blacks could never testify against whites. This expanded to native peoples and in some cases Hispanics, as the US expanded to the West. Manifest Destiny was but one manifestation of this.
The Civil War was partially fought over slavery. The North exercised total war to preserve the Union and emancipation was an economic tool of war. When Frederick Douglas, an escaped slave, proposed to President Abraham Lincoln the use of black troops this was an attack on this basic ideology that made slaves children.
To be blunt, children do not take up arms and smartly march, fight and die. This is what men do. This is why white officers led African American troops, and why the army remained segregated for another 80 years or so. While they were men, the ideology could not trust them to lead each other, perish the thought white men. They were still not considered to be full men, capable of the same responsibilities and leadership as their white counterparts.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was ultimately an open challenge to this system. Boys, and African American men were often reminded of this, couldn’t vote. They cannot be police officers; they cannot be adults fully in control of their lives. Men demanding the same rights as other Americans, chiefly white Americans, was a challenge to the ideology that perpetuated a second class status for black men and women. This is a system that in some ways still remains, in insidious ways that are hard to understand outside of communities of color.
While the victory was important, the system cannot tolerate this equality. It still sees blacks (and other people of color) as children, who are naturally violent and in need of control. Why we are facing not just the purposeful dismantling of civil rights legislation, but also other attacks on men, in order to break their spirits.. The school to prison pipeline has become central. Men in custodial control cannot vote. Therefore we are back to square one in some respects.
Men of color face harsher sentences than white counterparts. They also are expected to end in prison more often. It is easy to blame black men, and whites do it often. Well, they are raising thugs…what do you expect? After all, children are not expected to raise children to be useful adults.
In the taxonomy of evil we tend to classify the holocaust as evil. There is no doubt in anybody’s minds that ISIS currently is engaged in genocide and cultural destruction. It is much harder to look within and realize that what Hannah Arendt once called the Banality of Evil is part if daily American life.
No, this is not a physical destruction of a people, including cultural objects. This is far more insidious, though when compared to the Holocaust it has been going on for just as long. Anti-Semitism set the seeds for that paroxysm of violence where not just six million, one third of all Jews in Europe died, but also another seven million. The infantilizing culture that sets a group of men to fail, and deemed to end up in custody, as children should, is not that far from this kind of violence. The ideology of superiority that led to the gas chambers in Europe can lead to genocide in the United States as well. We could argue it has, during the Indian Wars.
Regardless, we have seen flashes of violence to keep the expected order. Whether it was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, or extra judicial executions, not just by lynching, or last year at Fergusson, Missouri where we watched as police officers violated the rights of demonstrators in a systematic manner. These moments, when dogs are set upon children on national television, usually tug at the conscience. Yes, we all like to celebrate the victories, and they should be celebrated, but also defended. But, until we deal with a system that by design keeps people in a child like state, these advances will be slowly erased.
It is not up to minorities to write down the grievances, only to have whites nod in sympathy. We have had enough of that. It is time for those who are in the majority to sit down and listen. It is also up to all of us to acknowledge our biases and our fears.
It is high time to see the roots of the system we live under. No, it is not a single police department, or a District Attorney, or a judge. The country itself needs to come to terms with 400 plus years of slavery, as well as white supremacy.
As Frederick Douglas once wrote, power concedes nothing, so this will require more than just words.
So 50 years on, after the March on Selma, we are finding ourselves taking steps back. It is time to acknowledge not just how far we have come, but truly, how far we still have to go.
http://reportingsandiego.com/2015/03/07/selma-past-and-future/
Posted in full with permission.
Emphasis mine.
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