Deconstruction redux

by David Benjamin

“Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other will stop.”
—Frederick Douglass. “The Lessons of the Hour,” 9 January 1894

MADISON, Wis.—America’s first attempt at Reconstruction, begun with the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, lasted twelve years, ending in 1877 when Republicans, desperate to install Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, consented to remove all federal troops from the former states of the Confederacy, thus acquiescing to the night riders’ reign of terror and the enshrinement of Jim Crow laws throughout the South.

Our second short-lived Reconstruction, begun with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, survived for fifteen years, slipping into regression with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In each “deconstruction,” the compelling ideology—a shibboleth of the American paradox—was white supremacy, which has always been implicitly wed to the imperative of male supremacy.

Both times, the Supreme Court pounded the last nail into the coffin of civil, human, minority and women’s rights. In 1896, the Court snuffed the last hope for equality in American society by ruling, in Plessy v. Ferguson, that racial segregation, under the comic fiction of “separate but equal,” was the law of the land forevermore. The seven judges who sanctioned the proliferation of Jim Crow discrimination were, of course, all white, all male—as was the lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, who wrote: “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race … is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.”

In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, wielding the non-existent legal theory of “equal sovereignty” among states and intoning the fantasy that “Things have changed in the South,” aborted America’s second Reconstruction in his opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. True to form, four of the five justices—joined by a Stepin Fetchit negro—who ripped the heart from the Voting Rights Act were white males. If there was a sign of progress for equality, it was the one-vote margin in the decision, in which a white male joined two lady Jews and a Latina in dissent.

In a historic speech in 1894, Frederick Douglass foreshadowed the Plessy travesty, describing the effect of deconstruction as a decline in the nation’s moral sense. That moral decay, he said, was signified by a burgeoning of race hatred and white racial violence. In his speech, “The Lessons of the Hour,” Douglass identified three pillars that supported the brutal othering of black folks in post-Civil War America.

The timeless devices for justifying the separation, suppression, persecution and—in the worst cases—execution of a despised minority are dehumanization, fear and demographics.

One of the sustaining justifications for slavery—insinuated even into the Constitution in the “three-fifths” doctrine—was that black people are not people at all but a subhuman species of primate not entitled to, or capable of the blessings and responsibilities of citizenship.

Douglass recalled the 18th-century dilemma of whether to baptize a slave: “The sprinkling of him with water was a very simple thing, but the slave holders of that day saw … something more dangerous than water. They said that to baptize the negro and make him a member of the Church of Christ was to make him an important person—in fact, to make him an heir of God and a joint heir of Jesus Christ.” Baptism, Douglass noted, threatened to deem the negro a human being.

At the time a certain Dr. Godwin solved the quandary by splitting the negro like Solomon’s baby, consigning mastery of the slave’s body to a mortal owner while “his soul belonged to his Master in heaven.” The slave, Douglass observed, although shared by two masters, was still property.

This reluctance to grant humanity to the designated outsider is sacred to white supremacy. Throughout history, its echo resounds. Today, our leading bigots focus their dehumanizing rhetoric on immigrants deemed “illegal” or just unworthy, and particularly those refugees who are not—you guessed it—white. Our once and future president has referred to the southern hemisphere’s teeming masses as “vermin,” “poison,” “garbage” and “shit.”

“These aren’t people,” shouts (white, male) Donald Trump. “These are animals.”

Deploying the epithets “rapists” and “murderers,” Trump invokes the second pillar of Frederick Douglass’ thesis: fear. Before Abe Lincoln emancipated the slaves, white men of property were outnumbered by black men in chains. Slave holders lived in dread of a black rebellion sweeping across the South, burning plantations and killing their overseers.

History, of course, records few rebellions and none that succeeded. With the end of slavery, the creation of a near-slavery sharecropping system, the rise of white terrorism and the spread of Jim Crow laws, the danger of negro insurrection disappeared for almost a century. A new fear was needed, profound enough to sustain race hatred among all strata of white society.
Sex came to the rescue!

Suddenly, in the latter 19th century, the meek field hands of yore were reborn as horny monsters whose appetite for young innocent, snow-white Southern virgins was ravenous. Accusing a black man of raping, or touching, or even looking at a white woman, was sufficient to get him lynched, burned and castrated by an angry, but strangely festive mob of white avengers. The poster child for this Southern tradition was Emmett Till, age fourteen, whose murder was foreordained when he allegedly flirted with Carolyn Bryant in Money, Mississippi in 1955.

Frederick Douglass, a serious man not given to sarcasm, could not help but note the irony of white men homicidally protective of women who were far more often raped and abused by their white guardians. “The charge,” he wrote, “is not so much against the crime itself as against the color of the man alleged to be guilty of it. Slavery itself, you will remember, was a system of legalized outrage upon the black women of the South, and no white man was ever shot, burned or hanged for availing himself of all the power that slavery gave him.”

By conjuring the lust of the dusky molester and applying it to his fancied “invasion” of convicts and psychopaths across the border, Donald Trump revived the sustaining theme of the lynch mob, the Klan and the arsonists of Greenwood. His mantra could have been uttered beneath a flaming cross, a century before, by a Grand Wizard: “I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them.” He made clear whom these frail and supplicant white women should fear.

“I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in,” said the president who once boasted—on national television—his prowess as a sexual predator, from “the savage criminals who assault, rape and murder our women and girls.”

Finally, there’s the matter of demographics, of white people being overwhelmed by a flood of obscenely fecund darkies and pet-eaters swarming the land like locusts, breeding like gerbils, shrinking the population—and threatening the dominion—of real Americans. In 1894, Douglass noted, there were eight million free black folks. Their presence inspired a movement to have them all rounded up, like beeves on the open range, herded (with no irony intended) onto ships and exported to Africa, thus cleansing America from their inky stain. Advocates of this notion cited Africa as the native land of the former slaves, although none had ever lived in Africa, known its cultures or spoken its languages.

Douglass, an ex-slave, wrote, “The native land of the American negro is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews are all American. His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived, and labored, and died on Americasn soil, and millions of his posterity have inherited Caucasian blood.”

Today, the outcry among America’s white nativists—plus all of Bob Dylan’s pitiable immigrants who got through the door and want to lock it behind them—is for the “mass deportation” of eleven million people, most of whom “have lived, and labored, and died on American soil” and have little memory or knowledge of the land from which they or their forebears fled.

The white supremacist minority who have regained a fingerhold on power in Washington have grand plans to purify the American race and forestall the dark day—sometime in midcentury—when people for whom their whiteness is their identity will be fewer than those who either identify with a different ethnicity or just don’t care what color they are, or anyone else. With any luck, that moment will begin a third Reconstruction that resurrects the possibility—the dream—that “little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

That’ll be the day when Frederick Douglass rests a little more easily in his grave.