~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Inherent: a natural part of something that cannot be separated from it. –Meriam Webster Dictionary
The Republican presumptive presidential nominee said recently that the U.S. is not an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. That’s true. But he is a little confused because no one is saying that race or racists are stuck to this country by nature; he implies this because he does not want honest history taught in our schools, particularly the honest history of our trafficking of black African humans.
That some people of our country did this for a couple of hundred years, buying and stealing mostly African people, shipping them across an ocean and selling them to white men, is a fact. It is something that needs to be acknowledged, taught and understood the why of the sad injustice, not a minor fact swept under the rug; it need not be white-washed for us to go on living.
Racism is not inherent in our nature; it is something that some colonists and later American citizens took part in and take part in still.
If I don’t know that my country enslaved other humans and why, how do I understand the ill treatment of people of color today? Why would something this horrible ever be a part of our culture? What’s going on today comes straight out of our past. Life progresses on what has happened; it doesn’t just pop up on a Monday morning as a blank slate needing to be filled in with little white lies so I don’t have to appear to be a creep or a descendant of a creep.
Life happens to humans even as humans affect life. We need to accept this if we are ever to get out of the divide that is the result of the trafficking of humans, which led to the Civil War, a brief (1862-1877) Reconstruction and a long period of “Jim Crow” (1870s through 1965, a pejorative term for African Americans as well as laws in America, mostly in the South, to keep people of color from voting, buying property, using the same facilities as whites and a thousand other normal things in life as purposely demeaning as getting off the sidewalk for a white person if you are black).
To study these behaviors and their results does not mean that this nation or its people are inherently anything, as the presumptive mistakenly divines; it means, simply, that in our history as a country, men and women owned other people, bought and sold them, separated fathers from families, raped at will, worked them like beasts, in general treated people of color as less than human.
That last fact is in our Constitution, that each African enslaved was considered – get this — three-fifths of a person so the South could have more representation in Congress. This decision is written into Article 1, Section 2 , Clause 3 of “We the People”:
“Representatives . . . which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (All other persons meant meant the enslaved.)
This abominable law was repealed after the South lost the Civil War; you can read it in the Constitution’s Article 14, Section 2, written in 1868.
During the late Jim Crow era of the 1950s, some Southerners started calling the Civil War “The War of Northern Aggression.” This is a lie, an impossibility because it did not happen, just as three-fifths of a person is an impossibility.
Lying has been going on forever; not just in this country, obviously, but it is this country, our country, our USA that we most love. Ferreting out the lies we tell about our past is a good start in admitting we are not perfect but can be optimistic about improving all lives, that we are all the same in our basic needs as human beings; and it is a good way to refresh our country as we work to improve the extraordinary experiment of governing of, by and for the people — for all of us, not just the monied, the propertied, the powerful, the uninformed and the intentionally misinforming . . . for the positives among us, not the negative fellows who have to lie to get their way.
