Healing America's Oldest Wound

 

The term “systemic racism” has come to prominence these last few years, as the crowning expression of “woke” ideology.  The term, and the concepts it represents are doomed to fail in the quest to right the wrongs of America's past, because they are a complete misdiagnosis of the basic problem.  In addition to being racist in its own right, it has the flaw that since it tries to cover so many things it becomes a meaningless mush; a sweeping indictment of everything everywhere.  As such, it ends up covering nothing. One begins to suspect it is desperate, if not cynical, attempt to make sense of a long and painful unsolved mystery.  Hence, it has devolved into little more than another of humanity's consensual paranoid delusions, totally incapable of healing the pain and frustration it pretends to offer as a cure. 

The pain and frustration seem to come from not just the years of  widespread and legal African American oppression, but more especially from the time since the civil rights movement.  Since that time no official racism has been allowed, and yet the African American community has not only not made great progress, but has in many ways regressed. Certainly, family breakdown, drug use, crime and violence have increased in the black community since the 1960’s.  What’s more, with the immigration of various African ethnic communities, and their subsequent rise in American culture, the comparison with the seemingly perpetual social malaise in the wider African American community has caused increasing frustration. 

It seems to many people as if something has been done, and continues to be done, to African Americans that is keeping them down.  No one can exactly define what is being done, but there is widespread sentiment that something bad was and is being done, and somehow White people are responsible for it.  Thus, the delusional concept of systemic racism to gain acceptance.  The strategy that has emerged from this concept is to try to chase down and exterminate said invisible bogeyman of systemic racism.  The tactic then becomes to confront and abuse random White people until they admit their hitherto unknown racism, and reinforce the credibility of the questionable concept. So the idea, and the tactics continue, with still no progress being made.

That strategy is doomed to failure because it is based on an inaccurate diagnosis of the problem.  Yes, many of the ongoing, multi generational problems in the African American community are the result of what White people did to Black people, but the abuse has almost all ended while the problems persist.  To end the problems and repair the damage (the real meaning of reparations) we must first accurately diagnose the problem.  Once we do that, we will see that naming the remedy is relatively easy.

Stating the diagnosis is the simple, albeit probably painful part much like ripping the dressing off an old wound.  Simply put, the great wound inflicted on African Americans is two-fold.  First, the mode of their importation and enslavement rendered them into what is essentially a new ethnic group.  Second, this new ethnic group, which was inadvertently formed as a side effect of the efficient yet inhumane machinery of mass enslavement, has, since its genesis, been deprived of the blessings and burdens of community self-determination.  These two aspects, which will be detailed shortly, have combined to induce a debilitating and continuing impairment in African American culture.

Let’s unpack the first aspect which is that African Americans were rendered into a new ethnic group at their birth. Consider the unprecedented depth of the cultural dismantling that took place during the great African enslavement in the United States.  Each individual African was stripped of almost all cultural accouterments and the psychological identity that came with them.  First, their clothes were taken and when they landed in the new world they were forced to accept European clothes.  Their language was brutally suppressed, along with any cultural forms or tribal associations. Any communication with family or friends back in Africa was totally impossible.  Since the number of slaves was relatively large compared to the number of Whites, fear of a slave uprising motivated the White slave owners to be intensely diligent in obliterating any expression of Black identity, unity, or self determination.

When, after enduring all this psychological trauma, the individual African American returned to social cohesion, it was in stilted English and as a member of the most abused and demeaned group in the new nation, permanently on the bottom of the social ladder. A new people, conceived in enslaved suffering and formed by the powers of greed and fear, were born anew on God’s earth. They carried forward virtually no shared memories of a previous existence, and there were no ethnic distinctions between the various enslaved African peoples that were recognized or meaningful.

            This experience is unique, certainly in America, and probably, given the size of the enslavement and the depth of the cultural dismantling, in the world.  Even the far greater number of African slaves brought to Latin America didn’t suffer anything like that total cultural dismantling.  They were arguably treated more brutally, often being worked to death, but they were left to speak and associate as they wished. The other ethnic groups that came to America, or that were already here, didn’t suffer any where near this degree of cultural obliteration. 

The Native Americans, although decimated on a large scale, were cheated and lied to but still retained their tribal councils and a degree of national self determination.  Happily, almost all of their cultural institutions are witnessing revival today. By way of comparison with enslaved African Americans, the Irish, the Chinese, and the Mexicans, who were probably the most ill treated of the various immigrant ethnic groups, still kept their clothes, their foods, their languages, and were still able to keep in touch with their families in the old country.  Even in the face of some opposition, they were allowed to associate with each other as they chose.  They congregated in their own neighborhoods and in their own towns.  After two or three generations they would start to move out into the larger culture, confidently moving forward from a position of strength because they had a political and economic power base since they been allowed to exercise a great degree of community self-determination.

This brings up the second aspect of the wound that has been inflicted on African Americans, which is that this new ethnic group, unlike any other group in human history, has never exercised meaningful community self-determination.  There is a consciousness that grows naturally in any group that has any degree of self-determination, and has developed since ancient times in every group in the world.  Even in a country as repressed as ancient China, the local warlord demanded tribute, but he left most problems, such as water, food, medical care, moral restraint, the consequences of immorality, and almost all the other cultural issues, to be worked out by the local villagers.  The same was true in Ireland, where the English rulers took the wheat as rent, and left the Irish to fend for themselves on rotting potatoes.  The same dynamic held true for immigrants from Latin America and the other areas of Europe and Asia. 

            When these villagers from the various areas in the world arrived in America, they had a history and a memory of how to run their own communities.  Even if they weren’t from the exact same villages, members of these ethnic groups shared the same or similar language, systems of taboos, personal responsibilities and expectations.  What’s more, they knew without even thinking about it how to pass these on to their children.

            In fact, the same thing was and is true throughout Africa.  The Africans who were forced on to the slave boats would, if they had been left to their own devices, have been more than capable of forming together in healthy, self governing communities, and would have achieved a strong power base just like every other group has.  A quick look at the modern experience of the Ethiopian, Somali, Nigerian, and other African immigrant communities confirms this truth.

            But African Americans back then weren’t left to their own devices.  They were enslaved and their culture destroyed.  Since they were someone else's property, their well being, in terms of drinkable water, medical care, food, and shelter, was under the responsibility and authority of their White owners.  We can thank God that since racism was so extreme, Blacks were left to study the Bible and live the Gospel of Jesus Christ on their own.  However, even in the area of sexual morality, Blacks were encouraged to be promiscuous, as it enabled slave owners to more easily sell family members for monetary gain, and to engage in selective breeding.

The point is that African Americans weren’t allowed to exercise the powers of self government, of self-determination, and therefore weren’t forced to respond to the challenges of self-government. They were to know their place, do their jobs, and any community problems that arose were to be dealt with by the master in the big house.  Usually, the leader of the local Black community was selected by the owner and was the one who might successfully persuade the master to meet some of the community’s needs.

            Things really didn’t change much after slavery.  There were many in the African American community who recognized the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in freedom, and worked with courage and enthusiasm to meet them.  However, even during Reconstruction, and certainly afterward in the era of Jim Crow, their efforts were thwarted with brutal oppression and terrorism. 

            Well into the 20^th Century, African Americans were kept in near slavery, with no seat at the table where decisions are made.  The worst aspect of this, far worse than the simple lack of self-determination, was the fact that the conditions that develop a healthy consciousness of self-government were still absent.  It must be acknowledged that there were some exceptions to this, like Mound Bayou, Mississippi and some few towns run by African Americans in Oklahoma and elsewhere, but they were too few to change the larger African American culture. 

Even without most of the powers of self government African America continued to rise.  A business class arose, when it wasn’t being bombed out as in Greenburg, Oklahoma.  The Black families were becoming stronger and more stable all the way through the 1950’s.  With the success of the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans demonstrated that they had achieved enough strength and influence to gain political equality with Whites.  Then the third crime perpetrated against African America. after slavery and Jim Crow, was the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson.

            Close on the heels of the equalizing Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (1964-65), Lyndon Johnson enacted a series of socialist programs, called the Great Society.  While seeming to have good intentions these programs continued the crime against the African American community because they once again denied to Blacks the powers and burdens of self determination.  There are some who might say that there is poetic justice in this because self-determination was also largely taken from the White community at the same time, but that should be small solace because the tragic wounding of the Black community continued unabated.

            Consider how many cultural decisions used to be made (by Whites) at the local level, and are now made at the federal level.  Health care, public relief, moral education of the young, control of pornography, and many other issues, ranging from how to provide clean water and sanitation to how to generate local jobs used to be made by local communities.  From 1933 to 1963, a nascent socialism (a topic for another day) took root and fully bloomed in the late 1960’s, removing almost all the powers and burdens of moral self government from all the people, even the white people, just shortly after African Americans gained a real measure of political equality.  Truly, the pie turned rotten just as they finally got a piece of it.

 

Truly, the pie turned rotten just as they finally got a piece of it.

 

            Look at the similar cultural effects of these three conditions.  In slavery, there was an alienation from the legal structure.  The master made the rules, and if one could get away with breaking them, very few of the fellow slaves would hold them to account.  As long as what was being done didn’t threaten to bring down the master’s wrath, it was of no concern to the community because the community hadn’t made the rules.  That same thinking held true during Jim Crow.  The “man” made the rules, so if you could get away with skirting them, more power to you.  That thinking was slowly losing ground until the 1960’s, but it has come back with a vengeance since then.

            “The Man” is back, and these days Whites, and everybody else, are in the same boat.  Look at how we all think today.  “We” don’t talk about what “we” are going to do to solve a problem.  “They” have to solve the problem, and “they” are expected to provide us with all our wants. 

            We are to do our jobs and get away with what we can.  Whether it’s cheating the welfare system, cheating on our taxes, or cheating in traffic, it’s only wrong if you get caught because we have no social obligation to each other.  If there is any problem, “they” have to solve it.  Our leaders are those who can get the master…er the man… er, I mean the federal government, to come up with the money to solve our problems for us.  This really is the mindset of almost the entire country and some of our leading thinkers are correct in calling this a plantation mentality.

So, what is the solution? How do we go about healing this almost 400-year-old wound in the African American community?  The great wounding of African America will end and the healing begin when African Americans are free and equal citizens of self-governing communities.  That can only happen when most of the powers of self government are devolved from the federal government and revert back into the hands of state and local governments.

 

The great wounding of African America will end and the healing begin when African Americans are free and equal citizens of self-governing communities.

 

“Hold on there,” one can hear the roar of protest. “Isn’t this just advocating a return to states rights?”  Yes and no, mostly no.  First of all, only people have rights, and according to Jefferson, we delegate certain powers to government to secure those rights.  This is merely saying we should delegate far fewer powers to the federal government and return them to the states and localities. 

“States rights” as advocated by those who called for them, were always about the states being able to deny rights that had already been established, and it was therefore a total lie.  Both the states and the federal government dropped the ball and didn’t honestly enforce the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments for nearly 100 years.  This situation has been used in the last 60 years since the Civil Right Acts to completely discredit local self-government, but that is a misreading of history because the federal government was complicit and contributed to Jim Crow just as much as the states.  Here, at this point of seeing the equivocation of the federal courts and how they cynically did not use an originalist, strict construction of the Constitution, especially when ruling on the post Civil War amendments, is where one might find the invisible bogeyman ghost of systemic racism.  However, it won’t be found by attacking the innocent or even well meaning words of some random White folks in the 2020’s.

            So if the cure is to establish true self-determination for the African American community, the struggle promises to be difficult because some powerful forces want to deny self-determination to all Americans, and to all humans for that matter.  There might be some ready allies in the (conservative) White community who are concerned about the same issues if the two groups can find their way to each other.  Perhaps a revival of the efforts at reconciliation can be ignited within the (mostly conservative) Christian community. Such an effort promises to bear beautiful fruit.  Further, by all means, the voices in the African American community calling for moral revival, self initiative, economic self sufficiency, and all the other civic and personal virtues should be welcomed and amplified because of such ideals are all healthy communities built.   

Nonetheless, the burden of self determination must be sought and borne if the great wound is to be healed.  Some might complain that absorbing all the changes this path entails is not fair.  Why must the victims endure even more pain?  Such objections are valid, because this is not fair, just as it’s not fair that the victim of a brutal assault must generate the self discipline and endure the pain of rehabilitation in order to recover from the assault.  Sure, the assault victim and the victims of racism and slavery could just blame the perpetrators (White people in this case) for their problems, and remain wounded.  Or they could demand, and maybe even receive some financial reparations, a court settlement from the criminals, feel good for a while, but if they continue to dodge the pain of rehabilitation they will remain wounded. 

Or they could, like a victim choosing painful rehabilitation, find their own healing. (Here the analogy slightly breaks down, because the African American community would be gaining something they were deprived of since their genesis, not regaining something they previously had.)  In the courageous spirit of their forebears, they can seek the finish line of community self-determination, meet the difficult challenges of moral self-government when it is gained, and thereby begin to heal the centuries old wound.  Such a strategy, while it will be challenging, is the only way to heal and is guaranteed to bear much sweeter and much more abundant fruit than the angry quest to root out the mythical bogeyman of “systemic racism” ever can.