at the very heart of law in the United States. It remains so despite the latest fashion of the legal fiction of “color blindness.” How people are treated in court, how they are charged, and how they are sentenced are direct reflections of what race and ethnicity they are and how such traits are regarded by white America.
Several years ago, a prominent American law professor asked his students to imagine they would wake up the next day as Black folks. The white students reasoned that such a “disability” required monetary damages of a million dollars a year for life.
Why damages, unless color does matter? Unless whiteness is a valued property which, when lost, demands a premium payment? And Black is devalued?
Americans are blind to everything but color.
A HISTORY OF BETRAYAL
October 29, 1998
United States history is a study in denial, for much of what is taught as history in the schools of the nations bears little relationship to the lives lived by millions of men, women, and children on the land we now call America.
Most schools teach that which is safe, and mostly false; so much so that shock and disbelief are usually the result of telling a history that reveals that many of the men called “Founding Fathers” were enslavers, visceral racists, and, in a word, creeps.
Dedicated to the erection of a “white man’s republic” (as supported in the 1857 Supreme Court opinion by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford), many of the nation’s leaders, congressmen, and presidents were virulent racists who made every effort to deny any semblance of justice to Black freedmen in the hellish aftermath of the Civil War. How many Americans know that more than 37,000 Black men died while serving in the Union Army? The people who fought to preserve the union, who fought against secessionists and enslavers, returned to a South where virtually every promise made to them was shattered and broken, often by the very government they had fought to defend. While the war was raging, General Sherman assigned thousands of acres to freedmen, on the land that was vacated by white enslavers or confiscated. These lands, on which more than 40,000 freedmen and their families tussled with the earth to create a life, were summarily snatched away from them by the U.S. government. In October 1865, General Howard traveled to “Sherman land” to revoke titles to lands confiscated during the war, in order to return them to their previous white owners.
General Howard’s instructions to the so-called freedmen? “Put aside your bitter feelings,” and “become reconciled” to your old enslavers. The people who had suffered indignity and bondage for centuries, who worked to enrich the national economy, told the U.S General: “No, never,” and “can’t do it.”
Howard Merrimon, formerly enslaved in Mississippi, described the condition of emancipated Black folk during the period of the Great Betrayal, 1865–1866:
No land, no house, not so much as place to lay our head. . . . Despised by the world, hated by the country that gives us birth, denied of all our writs as a people, we were friends on the march. . . . brothers on the battlefield, but in the peaceful pursuits of life it seems that we are strangers.9
Abolitionist Wendell Phillips aptly noted that without the vote, Blacks would be doomed to a “century of serfdom.”10 He wasn’t far wrong.
Blacks fought and died for the Union, and after the war they were forsaken, treated as if they were the enemy of the very nation that they had fought and bled for. Here, in the aftermath of carnage, white supremacy was the law, and Blackness was a crime. That was the reality that leads to today, the history that created the days and nights of this very hour.
When the United States was formed, it was constituted by an act of compromise that left half of the nation slave, and the other half of the nation “free.” A hundred years later, and even after the raging horrors of war had ripped the nation apart, a new compromise was reached between the North and South. In the words of one supporter of President Andrew Johnson, that compromise was based on this central tenet: “Keeping the Nigger down.”11
For a century after “Emancipation,” Black folks, in the main, were denied every substantive right of the U.S. citizen: voting, holding office, jury service, freedom of travel, freedom of assembly, freedom to collective bargaining, etc.
Far from free or equal, Blacks found themselves condemned to a new life where the state took the place of the slave master, and did everything in its power to control Black labor in the interests of the landowner’s class.
For most of American history, so-called “law” was merely white whim. Black life, considered cheap in slavery, became “free” and worthless in “freedom.” As historian Eric Foner notes:
Sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other local officials proved extremely reluctant to prosecute whites accused of crimes against blacks. To do so, said a Georgia sheriff, would be “unpopular” and dangerous while an Arkansas counterpart told a [Freedman’s] Bureau Agent that to take action against a planter who had defrauded freedmen “would defeat him in the coming fall election.”12
That was the reality that leads to today. The roots of a repression that still block sunlight, and makes Black life so hellish still.
LEGALIZED POLICE VIOLENCE
March 28, 1999
“When a gang member is beaten by persons unknown in a mixed neighborhood, and the black gangs begin terrorizing whites, it is called racism, a bunch of cops can ride through black neighborhoods all day beatin’ ass, and call it law, when a bunch of blacks beat one of these cops’ ass it’s called mob violence.”
—John Africa
A young woman, engulfed in a diabetic coma while sitting in her car, is repeatedly shot by a corps of cops, who say they are threatened by her. Tyesha Miller, of Riverside, California becomes a statistic.
A young man sitting in his car in North Philly is surrounded by a phalanx of armed cops whose guns are pointed at him from all points. He is ordered to raise his hands. When he does so, he is shot to death by one of the cops, who insists he thought he saw a gun. The 18-year-old is unarmed. Dontae Dawson becomes a statistic.
An emigrant from the West African nation of Guinea comes to America, taking an apartment in New York’s Bronx Borough. When four NYPD cops approach his door, reportedly because of a suspected rape (he was not a suspect), he is shot at 41 times. Nineteen shots hit him. Amadou Diallo was unarmed, and will never return to West Africa.
In case after case after case, in city after city, from coast to coast, such events arise with alarming regularity, worsened by the realization that, in most cases, cops who have committed these acts, which if committed by others would constitute high crimes, will face no serious prosecution, if any prosecution at all.
They are, the corporate media assures us, “just doing their jobs,” “under an awful lot of pressure,” or “in fear,” and therefore justified in what they do. In the language of the media, the very media that make their millions off of the punishment industry calling for the vilest sentences known to man, turn, in the twinkling of an eye, into paragons of mercy, who lament that the “fine young men” who “served their community” are in “trouble,” or have “suffered enough.”
The suffering of the slain, because they are young, and Black, are all but
