![]() This will demand of us a new American story, different symbols, and robust policies to repair what we have done. We have to confront our national trauma honestly if we are to shake loose from the political frame of Reaganism and Trumpism, with its racial dog whistles and foghorns, its greed and selfishness, and its idealized version of America as “the shining city on the hill,” where the country’s sins are transformed into examples of its inherent goodness. George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher, was right to point out that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what he didn’t say is that those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters. We have to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this belief that white people matter more than others, or we’re doomed to repeat the cycles of our ugly history over and over again. By now, we should have learned the lesson that changing laws or putting our faith in politicians to do the right thing is not enough. Now we find ourselves facing a moral reckoning of the same magnitude. This post is excerpted form Glaude’s recent book. The Black-freedom struggle in the mid-20th century, what scholars call the Second Reconstruction, sought, among other things, to complete what was left of this “unfinished revolution,” as the historian Eric Foner describes it. ![]() With the Civil War amendments, they aimed to begin again. They understood that the three-fifths clause and the fugitive-slave clause had tilted the balance of power to the slaveholding states that the Constitution did not live up to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality that the actions of the states and the courts consolidated a view of Black people that mandated their inferior place in American society. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” Stevens and his colleagues went back to where we started. “Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. “Not everything is lost,” Baldwin wrote after the collapse of the civil-rights movement. On one level, what Stevens and others did was exactly what James Baldwin called on us to do a century later. Almost immediately, forces sought to undermine the promise of the second founding, but the point here is that Stevens and others sought to radically transform the country’s understanding of itself as they grappled with questions of equality, the right to vote, and the role of government in protecting the rights of all citizens. With expanded federal power, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Civil War amendments-the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth-Congress, led in many respects by the House Ways and Means Committee chairman and radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, put forward an idea of citizenship untethered to the issue of race. Reconstruction led to the formation of the modern U.S. ![]() ![]() Instead, we should set out to imagine the country in the full light of its diversity and with an honest recognition of our sins.Īfter the Civil War, the fabric of America was woven anew after fraying almost beyond its ability to hold. We need an America where “becoming white” is no longer the price of the ticket. What we need now is a third American founding. The second was the Black-freedom struggle of the mid-20th century. The first was during the Civil War and Reconstruction, which constituted a second founding for the country. The United States has confronted two crucial moments of moral reckoning where we faced the daunting challenge of beginning again both times we failed.
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