Reconstructing Reconstruction Part 1

Homework

1. Page 9: Do some research to create a list of 5 historical examples in which the United States “signaled the power of racism over patriotism.”
2. Page 11: Based on the fact that 80% of the U.S.’s wealth, in 1860, was a direct result of the unpaid and forced labor of slaves, take some time and write out a case of reparations.
3. Page 18: “Black people have ‘no rights which the white man is bound to respect”, create a list of 5 examples, over the past 365 days, which demonstrate that this is still a fundamental belief in how systems are designed to function.

Transcription

00:10

Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s Book Club episode. We’re reading “White Rage.” We’re reading chapter one—this is episode two—but we’re reading chapter one: “Reconstructing Reconstruction.” And this book is far more complex, the chapters are more dense than the “How to be an Antiracist” because those were fairly shorter chapters, so I could do a chapter per episode, but this I won’t be. Because of the way the chapters are set up, I’m gonna have to do—and I don’t want the fact that I don’t want these episodes to go over 30 minutes—we’re gonna break the chapters down.

So today we’re doing “Reconstructing Reconstruction”: chapter one, pages—we’re gonna work from pages 7 through 18, and then we’re going to stop, and then we’ll pick this up next time we do this show.

Also because of what I learned from doing “How to be an Antiracist,” doing one of these episodes every week is just way too much mental exhaustion for me to have to read this history, to process this history, and then to go back into my role as an educator to come up with meaningful ways to engage you in questions and doing homework. So, we will be doing these every two weeks instead of every week.

01:34

So the first—I’m gonna start on page 7—in the first paragraph.

James Madison called it America’s “original sin.” Chattel slavery. Its horrors, Thomas Jefferson prophesied, would bring down a wrath of biblical proportions. “Indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

And I wrote right at the top, “I think that this is a fascinating way to start this episode, because it highlights that whiteness has always been aware of the inherent evil and harm of white supremacy.” Let me read that again, because I want to just start off the bat: we are not… whiteness is no… we’re not doing the whiteness is hero or victim and never the villain. Whiteness is fully embracing its villainhood and always has been, and that’s the perspective we’re gonna talk about.

So again, I write, “I think that this is a fascinating way to start this episode, because it highlights that whiteness has always been aware of the inherent evil and harm of white supremacy, and made decisions and took actions to facilitate it.”

So let’s—again, let’s—I want to make sure we understand this: whiteness has never been the hero or victim, it has always been the villain, and it’s always been aware of that. So whether you have been able to articulate the things that you have been blinded to, that right there was an intentional ignorance that was designed into the system for you. And if you are now seeing the various ways that white supremacy allows you to, not only take advantage of, but actively harm other people without… little to no consequences, and you are not actively working to dismantle the system, you are complicit and you know what you’re doing.

03:44 

Still on page 7:

In his second inaugural address, in 1865, Abraham Lincoln agonized that the carnage of this war was God’s punishment for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil.” Over time the role to atonement revealed itself: In addition to civil war, there would be the Emancipation Proclamation, three separate constitutional amendments—one that abolished slavery, another that defined citizenship, and the other that protected the right to vote—and finally, the Freedmen’s Bureau, with its mandate to provide land and education. Redemption for the country’s “sin,” therefore, would require not just the end of slavery but also the recognition of full citizenship for African Americans, the right to vote, an economic basis to ensure freedom, and high-quality schools to break the generational chains of enforced ignorance and subjugation.

04:47 

On page 8:

To face these challenges and to make this nation anew required a special brand of political leadership.

And I’m really… okay, we’ll get to it.

Could the slaughter of more than six hundred thousand men, the reduction of cities to smoldering rubble, and casualties totaling nearly 5 percent of the U.S. population provoke America’s come-to-Jesus moment? Could white Americans override “the continuing repugnance, even dread” of living among Black people as equals, as citizens and not property? In the process of rebuilding after the Civil War, would political leaders have the clarity, humanity, and resolve to move the United States away from the racialized policies that had brought the nation to the edge of apocalypse?

Initially, it appeared so. […] The Thirteenth Amendment was, in important ways, revolutionary. Immediately, it moved responsibility for enforcement and protection of civil rights from the states to the federal government and sent a strong, powerful signal that citizens were first and foremost U.S. citizens. The Thirteenth Amendment was also a corrective and an antidote for a Constitution whose slave-owning drafters, like Thomas Jefferson, were overwhelmingly concerned with states’ rights. Finally, the amendment sought to give real meaning to “we hold these truths to be self-evident” by banning not just government-sponsored but also private agreements that exposed Blacks to extralegal violence and widespread discrimination in housing, education, and employment. […] the Thirteenth Amendment was designed to do significantly more than “confer the bare privilege of not being chained.”

06:49 

And I want to stop there for a moment, ‘cause that’s huge. ‘Cause I hear that, when we are having conversations online and whatnot—they usually happen online because most people aren’t brave enough to say this shit in people’s faces—but there are still people who have the belief that we should be—Blacks in these United States—should be pretty damn happy that we’re no longer slaves, that we’re no longer chained, and that that is all we should expect. And we should be happy with that and shut the hell up. It’s an interesting perspective and paradigm to deal with, so I will continue.

That momentum toward real freedom and democracy, however, soon enough hit a wall—one that would be more than any statesman was equipped to overcome. Indeed, for all the saintedness of his legacy as the Great Emancipator, Lincoln himself had neither the clarity, the humanity, nor the resolve necessary to fix what was fundamentally broken. Nor did his successor. And as Reconstruction wore on, the U.S. Supreme Court also stepped in to halt the progress that so many had hoped and worked for.

Lincoln had shown his hand early in the war. Heavily influenced by two of his intellectual heroes, […] Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans.

08:18 

And I wrote in the margin, “This is news to me. This is what happens when the oppressor gets to shape the narrative.” There’s nowhere in my history of—and I’m a history buff—there’s nowhere in my K-12 learning of the history, college-level history, that I was ever told that Lincoln had his own resettlement plans.

In August 1862, he lectured five Black leaders whom he had summoned to the White House that it was their duty, given what their people had done to the United States, to accept the exodus to South America, telling them, “But for your race among us there could not be war.”

So again, always the hero or the victim, never the villain. So now you’re blaming Blacks, enslaved—formerly enslaved people—for the results of the war.

As to the how and why “your race” came to be “among us,” Lincoln conveniently ignored. His framing of the issue not only absolved plantation owners and their political allies of responsibility for launching this war, but it also signaled the power of racism over patriotism. Lincoln’s anger in 1862 was directed at Blacks who fully supported the Union and did not want to leave the United States of America.

09:51

So we’re at your first homework assignment:

Do some research and create a list of five historical examples in which the United States signaled the power of racism over patriotism.

Again, on page 9:

Do some research and create a list of five historical examples in which the United States signaled the power of racism over patriotism.

10:16 

We’re gonna continue on page 10:

From this perspective flowed Lincoln’s lack of clarity about the purpose and cause of the war. […Alexander H. Stephens remarked,] “What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?” […Mississippi’s Articles of Secession stated unequivocally,] “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery … Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.” In fact, two thirds of the wealthiest Americans at the time “lived in the slaveholding South.” Eighty-one percent of South Carolina’s wealth was directly tied to owning human beings. 

I want to repeat this:

Eighty-one percent of South Carolina’s wealth was directly tied to owning human beings. […] When the Confederacy declared that the “first duty of the Southern states” was “self-preservation,” what it meant was the preservation of slavery.

To cast a war as something else, as Lincoln did, to shroud that hard, cold reality under the cloak of “preserving the Union” would not and could not address the root causes of the war and the toll that centuries of slavery had wrought. And that failure of clarity led to failure of humanity. Frederick Douglass later charged that in “the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eagerness to have the Union restored, there was more care for the sublime superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon which it alone could be upheld”—the full rights of the formerly enslaved people.

12:12

So I wrote in the margins, “There are so many elements about this that sound like Trump’s handling of the coronavirus.”

Millions of enslaved people and their ancestors had built the enormous wealth of the United States; indeed, in 1860, 80 percent of the nation’s gross national product was tied to slavery.

So this is your question number two, from page 11:

Based on the fact that 80% of the U.S.’s wealth in 1860 was a direct result of the unpaid and forced labor of slaves, take some time and write out a case for reparations.

12:56 

So we’re gonna continue on to page 11.

We claim freedom, as our natural right, and ask that in harmony and co-operation with the nation at large, you should cut up by the roots the system of slavery, which is not only a wrong to us, but the source of all the evil which at present afflicts the State. For slavery, corrupt itself, corrupted nearly all, also, around it, so that it has influenced nearly all the slave States to rebel against the Federal Government, in order to set up a government of pirates under which slavery might be perpetuated.

And so I put a note here, “This is still true today because the government never acknowledged or dealt with fairly…”—let me do that one again. I wrote a note, “This is still true today because the government never acknowledged or dealt fairly with the issue of slavery.” So we’re still dealing with the fact that the United States never fairly dealt with, made amends for slavery.

That military service had to carry with it, they believed, citizenship rights and the dignity that comes from no longer being defined as property or legally inferior.

To be truly reborn this way, the United States would have had to overcome not just a Southern but also a national disdain for African Americans.

14:26

And this is, I just really, I’m happy that this is in here because people like to act as if racism only lived in the South. No, it lived in the North as well. It was out in the open and explicit in the South. It was very implicit and hidden in the North. And that is to this day, and we’ll continue on page 12. 

This violence was simply the most overt, virulent expression of a stream of anti-Black sentiment that conscribed the lives of both the free and the enslaved. Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discriminations against Blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote. In addition, only Massachusetts did not exclude African Americans from juries; and many states, from California to Ohio, prohibited Blacks from testifying in courts against someone who was white. 

And I wrote a note in the margin, “Racism is not just a Southern affliction.”

A key element was ensuring that the rebels would not and could not assume power in the newly reconstructed United States of America. Yet, as the Confederacy’s defeat loomed near, Lincoln had already signaled he would go easy on the rebel leaders. His plan for rebuilding the nation required only that the secessionist states adopt the Thirteenth Amendment and have 10 percent of eligible voters (white propertied males) swear loyalty to the United States. That was it.

16:14 

And then I actually just highlighted the next paragraph. I do not intend to read that to you. It’s pretty graphic, and I don’t feel like, you know, traumatizing myself reading that again. So we’re gonna go to the bottom—the last paragraph on page 13. 

To stop this descent into the cauldrons of racial hate, African Americans had to have access to the ballot box. The reasoning was simple. As long as Blacks were disenfranchised, white politicians could continue to ignore or, even worse, trample on African Americans and suffer absolutely no electoral consequences for doing so. The moment that Blacks had the vote, however, elected officials risked being ousted for spewing anti-Black rhetoric and promoting racially discriminatory policies. But, in 1865, that was not to be. Suffrage was a glaring, fatal omission in the president’s vision for reconstruction. 

All right, we’re on page 14.

“I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races.” 

17:35 

And so this speaks to who gets to tell the narrative when it comes to history, because I—again—have never heard these words of Lincoln ever before. The only thing we ever talk about is that Lincoln came from Illinois; he was the 16th president; he was the president during the Civil War; he emancipated the slaves; and he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at the theater. Nothing about his inab—his lack of desire to do anything to have equality—social and political equality of Black and white races. All right.

The new president,

So we’re talking about after Lincoln was killed and Andrew Johnson took over. And we’re at the bottom of 14.

The new president, just like Lincoln, had convinced himself instead that the Civil War was only about preserving the Union. No more. No less. And therefore, he set about stitching the rebel South back into the fabric of the nation.

18:51 

Page 15.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. 

Page 16.

Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, […]

19:35 

So, I skipped over that because that is a person who was put in place by William Tecumseh Sherman and all we know about him in the South is he came through Atlanta, and came through Atlanta on his way to Savannah. And so he put in charge General Oliver O. Howard to enact the Freedman’s Bureau’s policies. 

Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freed people off the land and reinstall the plantation owners. While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act, which would give, not lease, 160 acres in the West to citizens who were “without money”—meaning poor whites. The intended beneficiaries were clear because from 1843 through 1862, when the law was fully passed, most African Americans were not citizens and therefore, regardless of how impoverished, were ineligible.

21:05

So this is where—again—when people want to say, “Oh, we’ve dealt with slavery; why are we talking about reparations?” No, we haven’t. What we actually did was have a plan in place to give 40 acres and a mule to Black folx. But we also had a historical perspective of giving 160 acres, to—without leasing—people without money, giving away 160 acres to white folx in the West. So this country has a long history of disenfranchising and harming Black folx in service to a white supremacy.

Continuing on one page 16: 

In 1864, two years after the Homestead Act passed, he advocated taking the plantation owners’ land as well and redistributing it to “free, industrious, and honest farmers,” which again was Johnson’s way of helping poor whites, whose opportunities, he felt, had been denied and whose chances had been thwarted by the enslaved and masters alike. 

So he’s advocating for people who were like him. Okay,

But even his core constituency, first impoverished under the old plantocracy and then treated as cannon fodder, became readily expendable when it seemed that the only way to keep Blacks as labor without rights was to reinstate the leadership of the old Confederacy.

Johnson’s rash of pardons had the desired effect.

22:39 

And then I wrote in the margins, “Does this look familiar?” Do we not have a current president who is pardoning people who should not be pardoned for his own ideological or beliefs—well, basically, to protect himself.

So we’re moving on to page 17: 

White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-Black violence that had reached “staggering proportions.”

So, as you can see, I skipped over some parts. Again, I just can’t do it.

And so I wrote in the margins, “White folx stocking up on guns during this current pandemic reminds me that whiteness has always been allowed to cause harm without consequence.” And so, again, nothing that we’re experiencing right now is new.

23:27 

Continuing on:

One former Cabinet member in the Confederacy “later admitted that … the white South was so devastated and demoralized it would have accepted almost any of the North’s terms. But … once Johnson ‘held up before us the hope of a white man’s government,’ it led ‘[us] to set aside Negro suffrage’ and to resist Northern’s plans to improve the conditions of the freedmen.” Thus emboldened, Virginia’s rebel-tainted leaders planned to “accomplish … with votes what they have failed to accomplish with bayonets.”

And so I wrote in the margin, “White supremacy and harm has always extended beyond political, social, and moral boundaries.” So this speaks to when I say that, I don’t care; to me it’s not about blue states, red states, left, right, it’s all rooted in white supremacy and is designed to harm.

24:32 

So we’re still on page 18:

Like a hydra, white supremacist regimes sprang out of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the other states of a newly resurgent South. As they drafted their new constitutions, the delegates were defiant, dismissive of any supposed federal authority, and ready to reassert and reimpose white supremacy as if the abolition of slavery and the Civil War had never happened. […] “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race; and in accordance with the constant adjudication of the United States Supreme Court”—specifically, the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1856, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had stated explicitly that Black people have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

And I wrote in the margins, “This belief is so ingrained that many of you refuse to face this part of yourself in the mirror.”

25:37

I’m going to read this lil’ section again because I want you to understand that in 1856, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said Black people have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” And I wrote in the margin, “This is a belief that’s so ingrained in many white folx that you refuse to face this part of yourself in the mirror.” And if you cannot face this part of yourself in the mirror, you cannot be doing the work of antiracism.

The Louisiana delegates concluded “that people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.”

26:17 

So this brings us to your final homework question on Page 18. “Black people have no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

Create a list of five examples over the past 365 days which demonstrate that this is still a fundamental belief in how systems are designed to function.

Again on page 18, “Black people have no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” So,

Create a list of five examples over the past 365 days which demonstrate that this is still a fundamental belief in how systems are designed to function.

So we’ll stop here, and we’ll pick up part two of this chapter when we come back in the next episode. Episode three of White Rage will be picking up part two of this first chapter “Reconstructing Reconstruction.” Thank you and have a wonderful day.

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