WHY DO WE NEVER LEARN?
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” —Albert Einstein
Three times we have faced existential crisis in this country. Each time, when we have come out of it, we had choices – and two times so far we chose the wrong way.
After the Civil War, Reconstruction started on a grand note. Setting up Freedom Schools, voter registration drives, and implementing Special Field Orders, No. 15 issued by General Sherman that reserved a 30-mile wide swath of coastal land and the islands from Charleston, South Carolina down to Jacksonville, Florida for the formerly enslaved to live, work, and govern themselves.
40 Acres and a Lie, an investigative report by Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, and Mother Jones, (motherjones.com/40acres), found at least 1,250 Black families that had been given between 4-40 acres of land under the order. One officer reported 40,000 Blacks. The mules were decommissioned Army mules some got and some didn’t. They got at least 2,400 acres on 34 previous plantations – some they had worked on. The investigators found 41 living descendants today, none of whom knew their forefathers had been given the land.
Whites were not allowed to live on the land, and the Blacks were to be solely self-governed. They quickly elected representatives and set up their own militia. They worked the fields and started selling their crops on the market to the astonishment of the white former plantation owners.
But just a month after the Freedom Bureau was created, President Lincoln was shot. Andrew Johnson was an avowed racist and quickly pardoned the southern traitors and canceled the leases to return the land to the plantation owners. Congress passed a law to enforce the leases but Johnson vetoed it. The Freedman’s Bureau fought the evictions but lost. Johnson sent the military to remove the Blacks and return the land to the enslavers.
Even before the war, Skidaway had a thriving Black colony of about 100 families. Leases were given and then taken away. Now the population is 1% Black. Paradise Stolen: Black families were cheated out of their land on Skidaway Island. Now it’s a wealthy white enclave is a book by Alexia Fernandez Campbell and Pratheck Rebala telling the story. The average house there sells for $900,000.
The Reconstruction act remains the nation’s most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. Unfortunately, it failed.
Soon with Black Codes, sharecropping, and inmate leasing, the formerly enslaved were enslaved once again.
The second existential crisis was in 1968 when universities were closed from coast to coast, cities were burning from north to south, many thought the American experiment was over. The Kerner Commission report https://www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner.pdf (February 1968) analyzed 150 riots between 1965 and 1968 and blamed them not on African-Americans as many had hoped but on “white racism” specifically violent police actions.
Its conclusions haunt me to this day: “…our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal” and called for “programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems” in response. The authors recommended nation-wide changes to policies that could increase aid to African American communities in order to halt further racial violence and polarization, especially in employment, education, welfare and housing.”
Once again, we chose “white racism” like we are doing today.
In 1970, Ramsey Clark wrote a detailed book about Crime in America and made it clear that poverty was the crime and that so long as we maintained poverty, we would have crime. He pointed out that white collar crime kills and injures many more people and steals much more property than street crime ever could do. Unregulated capitalism lets mines collapse on miners, asbestos poison workers, and factories rip off limbs and lives. Unregulated medicine led to food poisonings, lobotomies, and children dying from conditions easily curable like malnutrition, polio, and measles. Sound familiar? Yet these people are not held accountable and their crimes go uncounted.
Many people hailed Clark’s book as a clarion call to abolish the existing prison, jail, and court system as it stood and start over with something humane that actually worked. We didn’t. So “abolish the police” is not a new slogan but 50 years old.
Today is our third existential crisis. When this administration is gone, we have an opportunity not to return to the ways of the past, but to make a new way forward. Will we take it? The always simmering racism remains an open wound infecting the body politic. Gangster capitalism continues unabated looting the countries riches and reducing the population to serfs.
Ever present patriarchy requires violence against women and children to maintain the lie of male superiority. Will we lance the wound? Will we imprison the gangsters? Will we teach boys from birth that they are equal not superior? I’m not betting the farm on it.
But we can make it better. Indivisible has some good daily messages i.e. to work in community every day. To spread the word see one, do one, teach one. The personal connection is most important. But be stubborn and remember that hope is not a thought but a muscle and you must exercise it through action. When we get through this crisis, we must not go back to how it was but forward to how we want it to be.