I refuse to do so, because the political terrain as it is currently laid out has left black and other vulnerable communities throughout this country in shambles. By this logic, we are imprisoned in a political cage-to accept matters as they are.
This is the scare tactic that clouds our imaginations: that no matter the circumstances, choosing the lesser of two evils is always better. But these same people who shout gloom and doom fail to advocate for dramatic change to take back the country from these folks. And the country would be left in the hands of libertarians and corporatists, a remarkably high price to pay for all Americans. We would see the undoing of the health care law and the further erosion of the social safety net. The Supreme Court would turn Red for the next thirty years. We would end up giving the presidency over to Republicans and their extremist base. “Some might say what I’m recommending amounts to electoral nihilism. ”īegin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. American history would be contorted in the service of it: where efforts to resist the likes of slavery or to break the back of Jim Crow segregation would be conscripted into the grand story of America’s greatness and its ongoing perfection. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed.
#Eddie glaude free#
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.
They could recognize a man when they saw one. “The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. So when folks claim that American democracy stands apart from white supremacy, they are either lying or they have simply stuck their head in the sand.”ĭemocracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul The value gap limited explicitly the scope and range of democratic life in this country. Hell, the ability to vote for the majority of black people wasn’t guaranteed until 1965. The ideas of freedom and equality, of liberty and citizenship did not apply to us, precisely because we were black. Black folk were never meant to be full-fledged participants in this society. But the fact is that we’ve built the country true. We keep treating America like we have a great blueprint and we’ve just strayed from it. Americans can celebrate the founding fathers even when we hear John Adams declare to King George, “We will not be your negroes” or learn that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t so consistent in his defense of freedom. That separation allows us to maintain a pristine idea of America despite all of the ugly things we have done. “We like to keep separate the evils of our national past from the sacredness of our ideals.
0 kommentar(er)
