America’s Original Sin Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy

I would really like to have a discussion about this article .. a very interesting read.  I do not know that I agree with all of it - yet it is food for thought.  I found a connection between the issues of the 1800's and now - politics seems to be a racially dividing factor that is still being wrestled with today.

I had to post the complete article - as I subscript to Foreign Affairs .. was not certain that others would be able to access the full article.

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T he documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States— the Declaration of Independence   and   the Constitution —present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war. The Declaration of Independence had a specific purpose: to cut the ties between the American colonies and Great Britain and establish a new country that would take its place among the nations of the world. But thanks to the vaulting language of its famous preamble, the document instantly came to mean more than that. Its confident statement that “all men are created equal,” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” put notions of freedom and equality at the heart of the American experiment. Yet it was written by a slave owner,   Thomas Jefferson , and released into 13 colonies that all, to one degree or another, allowed slavery. 

The Constitution, which united the colonies turned states, was no less tainted. It came into existence only after a heated argument over—and fateful compromise on—the institution of slavery. Members of the revolutionary  generation often cast that institution as   a necessary evil that would eventually die of its own accord, and they made  their peace with it to hold together the new nation. The document they fought over and signed in 1787, revered almost   as a sacred text by many Americans,  directly protected slavery. It gave slave   owners the right to capture fugitive slaves who crossed state lines, counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for the purpose of apportioning members of the House of Representatives, and prohibited the abolition of the slave trade before 1808.

As citizens of a young country, Americans  have a close enough connection to   the founding generation that they look to  the founders as objects of praise. There might well have been no United States   without George Washington, behind whom 13 fractious colonies united. Jefferson’s language in the Declaration of Independence has been taken up by every  marginalized group seeking an equal place in American society. It has influenced people searching for freedom in other parts of the world, as well. 

American slavery was tied inexorably to white dominance.

Yet the founders are increasingly objects of condemnation, too. Both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. They, along with James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, the other three slave-owning presidents of the early republic, shaped the first decades of the United States. Any desire to celebrate the country’s beginning quickly runs into the tragic aspects of that moment. Those who wish to revel without reservation in good feelings about their country feel threatened by those who note the tragedies and oppression that lay at the heart of this period. Those descended from people who were cast as inferior beings, whose labor and lives were taken for the enrichment of others, and those with empathy for the enslaved feel insulted by unreflective celebration. Learning how to strike the right balance has proved one of the most difficult problems for American society. 

WHY SLAVERY’S LEGACY ENDURES

The issue, however, goes far beyond the ways Americans think and talk about  their history. The most significant fact about American slavery, one it did not   share with other prominent ancient slave systems, was its basis in race. Slavery in  the United States created a defined, recognizable group of people and placed   them outside society. And unlike the indentured servitude of European immigrants  to North America, slavery was an inherited condition. 

As a result, American slavery was   tied inexorably to white dominance. Even people of African descent who  were freed for one reason or another suffered under the weight of the white supremacy that racially based slavery entrenched in American society. In the few places where free blacks had some   form of state citizenship, their rights  were circumscribed in ways that emphasized their inferior status—to them and to all observers. State laws in both the   so-called Free States and the slave states served as blueprints for a system of  white supremacy. Just as blackness was associated with inferiority and a lack of freedom—in some jurisdictions, black skin created the legal presumption of an enslaved status—whiteness was associated with superiority and freedom. 

The historian   Edmund Morgan explained   what this meant for the development of American attitudes about slavery, freedom, and race—indeed, for American culture overall. Morgan argued that racially based slavery, rather than being a contradiction in a country that prided itself on freedom, made the freedom of white people possible. The system that put black people at the bottom of the social heap tamped down class divisions among whites. Without a large group of people who would always rank below the level of even the poorest, most disaffected white person, white unity could not have persisted. Grappling with the legacy of slavery, therefore, requires grappling with the white supremacy that preceded the founding of the United States and persisted after the end of legalized slavery.

Racially based slavery, rather than being a contradiction in a country that prided itself on freedom, made the freedom of white people possible.

Consider, by contrast, what might have happened had there been Irish  chattel slavery in North America. The Irish suffered pervasive discrimination   and were subjected to crude and cruel stereotypes about their alleged inferiority, but they were never kept as slaves. Had they been enslaved and then freed, there is every reason to believe that they would have had an easier time assimilating into American culture than have African Americans. Their enslavement would be a major historical fact, but it would likely not have created a legacy so firmly tying the past to the present as did African chattel slavery. Indeed, the descendants of white indentured servants blended into society and today suffer no stigma because of their ancestors’ social condition.

American slavery was tied inexorably to white dominance.

Racially based slavery, rather than being a contradiction in a country that prided itself on freedom, made the freedom of white people possible.

That is because the ability to append   enslaved status to a set of generally identifiable physical characteristics—skin  color, hair, facial features—made it easy to tell who was eligible for slavery and to maintain a system of social control over the enslaved. It also made it easy   to continue organized oppression after the  13th Amendment ended legal slavery in 1865. There was no incentive for whites   to change their attitudes about race even when slavery no longer existed. Whiteness still amounted to a value, unmoored from  economic or social status. Blackness still   had to be devalued to ensure white superiority. This calculus operated in Northern states as well as Southern ones. 

CONFEDERATE IDEOLOGY

The framers of the Confederate States  of   America understood this well. Race played a specific and pivotal role in their  conception of the society they wished to create. If members of the revolutionary   generation presented themselves as  opponents of a doomed system and, in   Jefferson’s case, cast baleful views of race  as mere “suspicions,” their Confederate grandchildren voiced their full-throated   support for slavery as a perpetual institution , based on their openly expressed belief in black inferiority. The founding documents of the Confederacy, under   which the purported citizens of that entity lived, just as Americans live under the Declaration of Independence and the  Constitution, announced that African   slavery would form the “cornerstone” of  the country they would create after winning the Civil War. In 1861, a few weeks before the war began, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy,   put things plainly :

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast had anticipated this as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation   of the laws of nature; that it was wrong  in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.

Our new government is   founded  upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone   rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. 

Despite the clarity of Stephens’ words, millions of Americans today are unaware of—or perhaps unwilling to   learn about—the aims of those who  rallied to the Confederate cause. That   ignorance has led many to fall prey to the romantic notion of “the rebels,” ignoring  that these rebels had a cause. Modern Americans may fret about the hypocrisy   and weakness of the founding generation , but there was no such hesitancy among   the leading Confederates on matters of  slavery and race. That they were not successful on the battlefield does not mean that their philosophy should be ignored in favor of abstract notions of   “duty,” “honor,” and “nobility”; Americans  should not engage in the debate that the former Confederates chose after the war ended and slavery, finally, acquired a bad name. 

It has taken until well into the twenty - first century for many Americans to begin  to reject the idea of erecting statues of   men who fought to construct an explicitly  white supremacist society. For too long,   the United States has postponed a reckoning  with the corrosive ideas about race that have destroyed the lives and wasted the talents of millions of people who could have contributed to their country.   To confront the legacy of slavery without  openly challenging the racial attitudes that created and shaped the institution is to leave the most important variable out of the equation. And yet discussions of race, particularly of one’s own racial attitudes, are among the hardest conversations Americans are called on to have. 

For too long, the United States has postponed a reckoning with corrosive ideas about race.

This issue of the Confederacy’s legacy was made tragically prominent in 2015, when the white supremacist   Dylann Roof   shot 12 black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine of them. History had given the worshipers in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church every reason to be suspicious of the young man who appeared at their doorstep that day, yet they invited him in to their prayer meeting. Although they had, Roof said, been “nice” to him, they had to die because they (as representatives of the black race) were, in his words, raping “our women” and “taking over our country.” Their openness and faith were set against the images, later revealed, of Roof posing with what has come to be known as the Confederate flag and other white supremacist iconography. The core meaning of the Confederacy was made heartbreakingly vivid. From that moment on, inaction on the question of the display of the Confederate flag was, for many, no longer an option. Bree Newsome, the activist who, ten days after the shooting, scaled the flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House and removed the Confederate flag that flew there, represented the new spirit: displaying symbols of white supremacy in public spaces was no longer tolerable.

And those symbols went far beyond flags. Monuments to people who, in one way or another, promoted the idea of white supremacy are scattered across the   country. Statues of Confederate officials  and generals dot parks and public buildings. Yet proposals to take them down have drawn sharp opposi tion. Few who resist the removal of the statues openly praise the aims of  the Confederacy, whatever their private thoughts on the matter. Instead, they   raise the specter of a slippery slope:  today, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee; tomorrow, George Washington   and Thomas Jefferson. Yet dealing with such slopes is part of everyday life. The problem with the Confederacy  is not just that its leaders owned slaves.   The problem is that they tried to destroy the Union and did so in adherence to an  explicit doctrine of slavery and white   supremacy. By contrast, the founding  generation, for all its faults, left behind   them principles and documents that have  allowed American society to expand in directions opposite to the values of the   South’s slave society and the Confederacy.

It is not surprising that colleges and universities, ideally the site of inquiry and intellectual contest, have grappled   most prominently with this new national discussion. Many of the most prestigious American universities have benefited from the institution of slavery or have buildings named after people who promoted white supremacy. Brown, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have, by starting conversations on campus, carrying out programs of historical self-study, and setting up commissions, contributed to greater public understanding of the past and of how the country might move ahead. Their work serves as a template for the ways in which other institutions should engage with these issues in a serious fashion.