America’s “Fatal Flaw”
Geoffrey Philp
El autor es escritor.
If we are committed to the idea of freedom as expressed in the great North American experiment that «all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,» we will need to rewrite the American social contract or slide back into the dream of our collective innocence.
Throughout his career as a writer and human rights activist James Baldwin in his many novels and essays, often returned to the theme of America’s “fatal flaw,» which he articulated brilliantly in one of his more memorable speeches in 1963:
The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.
This “trouble” had enormous moral implications in the framing of the American story. For although the Bible sanctioned slavery, the moral cost of subjugating other humans nagged at America’s conscience, and produced a kind of cognitive dissonance into the culture. White Americans colonists saw themselves as the New Jerusalem, so they could not be implicated in anything evil. To partake in evil would rob them of their favored status and they would fall out of God’s grace. Therefore, in order to maintain the community’s self-image, any act they committed—no matter how morally reprehensible —would be justified because they were God’s “Chosen People,” who could literally “do no wrong.” Thus the myth of American innocence was born and this innocence had to be maintained and protected no matter the cost.
Yet, there was still the matter of living among those who were not so highly favored, so the colonists created a set of sub-laws known as the «Slave Codes.» Enacted, «out of a justifiable paranoia on the part of the white settlers that a violent rebellion could occur in one’s own neighborhood,» these laws were designed to control the minds and bodies of New World Africans. The immediate effect of the “Slave Codes” was to codify white supremacy into law. The laws made it illegal to teach enslaved Africans to read and write, which in future iterations would become “Anti-Literacy Laws,” They also restricted freedom of assembly and ownership of property by non-whites. In other words, the practice of policing Black bodies began under the «Slave Codes,» which gave any white person the right to question any African American at any time and in any place.
The inequities of the «Slave Code» and legal apparatus that supported the dehumanization of New World Africans would remain uncontested until the United States Constitution Convention in 1787. The Founding Fathers, who had dodged the issue of slavery in the Declaration of Independence by deleting Jefferson’s passage about «chattel,» had to determine how slaves would be counted for representing the states in Congress. In what is now known as the «Three-Fifths Compromise,» the legislators agreed to count three out of every five enslaved Africans as people. This compromise ensured the continuation of slavery and the source of stable income for slave owners in the South.
Despite the legality of the «Three-Fifths Compromise» and other laws restricting the freedom of African Americans, the moral implications of the «fatal flaw» never went away. To continue suppressing the human rights of New World Africans, physicians such as Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright devised theories about the mental abilities of African Americans. Cartwright’s hypothesis of «drapetomania,» defined the desire for freedom as a «disease» among African Americans who tried to escape from slavery:
»The cause, in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as to any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.»
In classifying African Americans’ desires for freedom as a pathological disorder, Cartwright became a forerunner of an industry dedicated to furthering the hypothesis that African Americans were mentally inferior to whites, and the only cure for this so-called disease was «proper medical advice» and continued subjugation.
However, with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, «all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State..shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,» the former slave masters faced a new challenge. Confronted with the loss of property, Southern states seceded from the Union because of the «increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery,» and the Civil War ensued.
After their losses in the Civil War, Southern states, which relied on Black labor for their wealth, passed new laws to solve what Williams Ansel in 1891 called the “Negro Problem.» For despite the best efforts of the former slave masters to exert control over Black minds and bodies, New World Africans continued to fight for their human rights.
Noting demographic changes in the population, the «One Drop Rule» was devised in many Southern states. These laws, which defined anyone with at least one black ancestor as a “Negro,” further restricted African Americans’ property rights and barred admission into public schools, which continued legally until Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954.
But the journey to that momentous turning point was fraught with race riots, some of which intensified between 1916 and 1919. The growing tension between whites and African-Americans exploded in the East St. Louis Riots in 1917 and resumed in the summer of 1919, for which James Weldon Johnson, composer of “The Negro National Anthem,” coined the phrase «The Red Summer.» Yet the most infamous incident of racial terrorism on American soil, the «Black Wall Street Massacre» was still on the horizon. White entrepreneurs, who saw the enormous wealth in Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where money circulated at least 100 times before it left the community, destroyed this prosperous neighborhood. Thirty-five city blocks were razed, 300 people died, and over 800 were injured in order to force African-Americans to accept the economic hegemony of white America.
Yet African-Americans never gave up hope and kept struggling for their freedom even as they fought against the effects of the «fatal flaw» or as Eddie Glaude in Begin Again calls it, «The Lie.» According to Glaude, «the lie’s most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to fit the story whenever America’s innocence is threatened by reality.” In real terms, this has meant the omission of many events from the history and civics books used in our educational system, or in some cases, a deliberate refusal to confront America’s original sins of slavery and genocide. The myth of American innocence pervades every aspect of our lives. As Glaude asserts, «The lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose…These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air.»
So how do we breathe in a moment like this—another turning point– when the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner have demonstrated to the world that many African Americans “can’t breathe.”
We are facing a moment in which the «lie» has been exposed, and it calls for us to reevaluate North American history and the story of the Americas, which had its own “slave codes.” For example, the French colonies after 1685 adopted the Code Noir, and the Spanish had some laws regarding slavery in Las Siete Partidas, and the «New Laws» advocated by Bartolomé de las Casas, one of the greatest advocates for the human rights of Native Americans and enslaved Africans.
We will also need to reevaluate those we honor as a reflection of our collective values and how we want to tell about our story. If we are committed to the idea of freedom as expressed in the great North American experiment that «all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,» we will need to rewrite the American social contract or slide back into the dream of our collective innocence.
I hope we choose wisely.
