Truth & Justice, Or the American Way...Which?

An overlooked reason why the United States is so rife with white supremacy/racism/just plain injustice—replete with genocide, terror, murder, wrongful imprisonment and systematic impoverishment and marginalization is for the purpose of commandeering resources away from People of Color, concentrating power into the hands of whites, as sanctioned by its Constitution.  It is meant to be that way; that's how the country was built.  We the people, who do the titanic striving toward a more perfect union do so in vain, or worse, at our own peril if we refuse to face this truth.

The posterity to whom the blessings of liberty have been secured (iron-clad no doubt, wrested from the clutches of the original owners…)  should feel righteously entitled to trample someone else’s human rights and snatch the fruits of their labor.  The Constitution permitted that as a thing.  At the very top of the very first page, the Three-Fifths clause advantaged voters in slaveholding states with increased political representation by blessing human trafficking.  At ratification, pro-slave states held one-third more power in the House of Representatives based on the asymmetric proviso preventing the “all other” Black slaves from political, social or economic engagement in perpetuity, though allowing their bodies to credit a congressional preponderance for the voters in their state.  Let’s pause on this point:  all states with at least 50,000 slaves (vs. the 30,000 white persons; 30,000/50,000 = 3/5) were granted an additional congressperson, yet those voting for that congressperson could not be enslaved. 

Per the Constitution of the United States of America, human trafficking was consecrated as legitimate and respectable—and profitable and politically expedient—though the trafficked’s body could only convey profits and political power to someone else.  This is the actual American way:  seizing from “all others”, at the expense of “all others’”, then terrorizing those same “all others” with criminalization should they resist the law’s imposition of serfdom.  The Founding Fathers were unoriginal opportunists, weak and venal, merely recasting the same patrilineal system of advantaging their own offspring socially, economically and politically at the expense of those who actually did the work; what they claimed to be jettisoning by rejecting the Crown as had been expressed 11 years earlier in the Declaration of Independence.  

Presumably, Amendments XIII, XIV, & XV were intended to correct the injustices propagated by slavery, the glaring black-eye of an imperfect union.  But were the Reconstruction Amendments America’s cleaning itself up after being addicted to trading in flesh?   To answer this question, we should clarify the injustices and assess whether they were rectified by Amendments 13-15.  Slavery’s abuses to Blacks are well-documented: having no access to, or control of capital (systematic impoverishment); being bought and sold, having family members sold away (systematic destruction of the nuclear family unit); never being able to draw a clear correlation between work and remuneration in order to establish households/budgets, teach children the value of hard work and saving, or build nest eggs for their own futures as well as to bequeath to successive generations (systematic dispossession)...  But what about the injustice for whites?  Slavery taught whites that their Constitutional rights guaranteed them an opportunity to profit off other people’s labor, at those others’ expense; a “virtue” to which they continued to cleave ILLEGALLY after the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments.  It also taught whites that whenever Blacks were non-compliant with their authority, it was a criminal, or even capital offense.   But most importantly, slavery taught whites what Chief Justice Taney neatly expressed re the Dred Scott decision (1857): “[Blacks free or enslaved were] so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Because rights are enforced in tandem with the protection of property and profiteering, we should understand the axiomatic nature of his pronouncement: to reinforce the hierarchy the Constitution architected for the society over which his court presided. Simply and effectively, he was doing his job.

The Reconstruction Amendments seemed a well-meaning attempt to correct the injustices wrought by slavery—for both Blacks and whites—as condoned by the Constitution’s inclusion of the Three-Fifths Compromise.  But practically speaking, they could more accurately be characterized as a custom-blended concealer Congress used to outwardly appear racially just, though underneath still remained the fresh bruises and scarring of the systematic abuses requisite to maintain the American way of life: barring Blacks from economic and political participation, already normalized, heavily invested in, and fortified over almost 250 years by that point.  That is 250 years of mechanized impoverishment and political disempowerment monetized, capitalized, then bequeathed as political and pecuniary wealth from one [white] generation to another, as planned.  In fact, virtually the exact same system continued for another 100 years de facto or de jure as Jim Crow.  The last 50 years detonated a mushroom cloud of Black pauperization comprised of redlining, massive ghettoization, a predatory war on drugs, the prison industrial complex & mass incarceration.  The Reconstruction Amendments fixed nary an injustice for either Blacks or whites.  Nor has any legislation since.

For Black people to be made whole in this country, we will need AT LEAST the same reinvestment back into us as was siphoned out, over just as many generations.

Now that we know the truth of the American Way, where is the justice?