America is today in the throes of one of its epochal – truly historic – democratic earthquakes. The racist and savage murder of citizen George Floyd has unleashed a national tumult seen only once every 40 years, if not longer.
I know many people around the world are confounded by what they see on CNN, or other hegemonic networks. Some regret that America may be on the brink of collapse. Others celebrate what they see as the end of the American Empire. Both are totally wrong. What I see – and I am living it in America today – is ironically a constitutional moment of hope, of renaissance. We are witnessing the renewal and cleansing of America – the purging of America’s Original Sin.
Let me explain. First, most people don’t understand that democracy is only an experiment whose final outcome is unknown. There’s a strong narrative that projects America as the hope of the world, what Ronald Reagan called a “shining city” on a hill. This is the jingoistic, Eurocentric story of American exceptionalism. It’s true American society is a marvel of human ingenuity. Its diversity is both complex and impressive.
It’s a land built by enslaved Africans. Its native peoples were all but exterminated by Europeans. It’s fundamentally a country of immigrants, even if white Americans think they own it. It’s a motley stew, not a melting pot – kind, cruel, rich, rough, poor, domineering, racist, segregated. It’s not nirvana.
Secondly, even if America is the most complex and successful democratic experiment, it’s still a very wobbly experiment. That’s because democracy sits on the stilts and fictions of liberalism, which are based on beliefs – not inflexible truths – that we choose. Those fictions are equality, autonomy and freedom.
They are very seductive and inviting fictions. The opposing fictions are racial supremacy, misogyny, fascism and rule by birthright. Although America and most of the world have chosen to live by the fictions of liberalism, and not those of fascism, the demons of the latter are very present, and more often than we like to admit, dominant. That’s what drove officer Derek Chauvin and his fellow policemen to savagely kill Mr Floyd.
Third, America was birthed in sin – the Original Sin of slavery in which black Africans were enslaved by whites, including America’s founders George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other lionised icons of American “democracy”. This original sin almost destroyed the young American republic in the Civil War, and cost President Abraham Lincoln his life.
The Southern states wanted to keep black people enslaved in chains. America’s most brutal war ensued. President Lincoln said “if I could save the Union without freeing any single slave, I would do it”. That says it all – even the man who abolished the enslavement of African-Americans didn’t believe in their humanity. He did it only to save the republic. America’s original sin wasn’t repudiated, or exorcised.
Fourth, let’s understand America’s Original Sin. In America, the enslavement of black Africans began in 1619 and was only abolished in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. That’s over 200 years of enslavement. That’s why the argument for reparations can’t be gainsaid, or brushed away. But even after 1865, as Rev Al Sharpton puts it, America hasn’t taken its foot off the necks of African-Americans. The brief respite offered by the Reconstruction Era from 1863-1877 ended with the re-imposition of Apartheid through Jim Crow laws. Blacks were again denied most basic rights until the Civil Rights Era of 1954-1968. Landmark civil rights laws were passed to formally – not substantively – outlaw racial discrimination.
Fifth, it’s not lost on anyone that African-Americans have been the engine of the American democratic experiment. The Civil War was fought over the enslavement of blacks. The civil rights movement started to end racial segregation, exclusion and discrimination. Other movements for freedom – women’s rights, anti-war movements, the gay rights movement and the Me-Too movement have adopted the tactics of the struggles of African-Americans. That’s been the blueprint.
The frontiers of American democracy have been stretched largely by African-Americans. The civil rights enjoyed by Americans today wouldn’t be possible without the valiant struggles and enormous sacrifices of black people in America. Mr Floyd has re-ignited that struggle again to tear down structural and normative racism.
What Mr Floyd encountered is deeply embedded in the American psyche. Chauvin felt he was entitled to kill a black man with total impunity. I directly know about this cruel system as a black person who has lived in America for nearly 40 years and raised three African-American sons here.
The cruelty of racism – savagely sickening, as in Mr Floyd’s case, or casually gratuitous, as in the slights of a white store cashier – murders the spirit of a black person by a thousand small cuts. I can’t wait for November 3. I will vote early – as I know the protesters will – to remove the fascist in the White House, and continue purging America’s original sin.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School and Chair of KHRC. @makaumutua.
