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Another Reconstruction?
Yesterday in The Atlantic, an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School argued that America needs to enact a “Third Reconstruction.” From his perspective, the first two attempts to solve the problem were too short and largely unsuccessful with respect to manufacturing black success and parity. What follows is a partial insight into the framework of this Third Reconstruction:
So what is needed for a successful Third Reconstruction? Perhaps it begins with sweeping criminal-justice and voting reforms that could transform the United States from the world’s leading carceral state into a truly multiracial democracy. It might also entail direct investments in Black communities to guarantee stable housing, universal health care, and high-quality education, necessities for achieving a more inclusive economy and greater wealth parity. But whatever its shape, a Third Reconstruction must rekindle the aspiration of a nation molded in the ideal of perfect equality, understanding that thinking big—and going big, too—is the surest way toward “a more perfect Union.” Success also demands that national leaders heed some lessons.
The next period of Reconstruction must contend with the effects of the prior era’s deconstruction. America’s undoing of interim progress has only added to the weight of history and increased the burden for future generations. The unmitigated injury of slavery and racism did not end with abolition or the civil-rights era; instead, like interest on debt, its impact has compounded. The upshot of this is that continued inaction and delay amount to opportunities lost, and will make racial justice ever more difficult to achieve.
In addition, a Third Reconstruction will require many things, three of them vital: truth, reconciliation, and recompense. At no point in American history has there been a major national effort toward achieving any of these things separately, much less collectively. But we have no shortage of models for doing so. Many governments and universities have inquired into their ties to mass atrocities. The United States, too, should establish formal means to unearth and understand the enormity of state-sanctioned repression, dispossession, exploitation, and violence toward Black Americans, as well as the extent to which the remnants of those ills persists in our economic, political, and legal systems today. Only then will the nation be primed to engage in the long-overdue discussion about how to restore the human dignity stolen and to repair itself. (On this, too, thereisnoscarcityofideas.) The task will be made much more difficult because we suffer from a collective amnesia, and now operate in a post-truth world. But without accurate accounting of and penance for the original sin and its progeny, we’ll get nowhere. History has revealed a recursive white weariness from trying to solve “the Negro Question.” The work of reconstruction will be less exhausting—and the results far more stable—if everyone participates in crafting the solution. It’s not enough for elites to design a project and dictate its terms and conditions. Instead, achieving meaningful progress will require us to join together “in the work of remaking this nation … block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”
And, finally, on color blindness: Acknowledging race is necessary. Identifying its impact is necessary. Drawing on it to fashion solutions—solutions to problems caused not by Black inferiority, but systems infected with virulent, mutating strains of white supremacy—is necessary. The Supreme Court may have dismantled Plessy v. Ferguson, but through its insistence on the charade that is constitutional color blindness, it has warped a 19th-century conception of progress and has left 21st-century America leaning on a faulty pillar. Healing racial wounds may demand race-sensitive ointments, and a successful Third Reconstruction requires us to pursue that possibility.
In our contemporary context, any talk about a “Third Reconstruction” is reparations by another name.
In our current cultural context, any talk about a “Third Reconstruction” is reparations by another name. Moreover, reconstruction a morally-loaded term– one of authority and obligation– to justify another massive program of government interventionism on behalf of blacks. The author thinks that by arguing for another reconstruction, he’s an advocate for improving black progress. Maybe he wants to take advantage of the moment where racial deference is en vogue.
However, like most racial dispensations whose purpose is leveraging the reclamation of moral authority, this ‘reconstruction’ asks nothing of blacks. The lack of black obligation to contribute to be active contributors to their own fate continues the stain of black helplessness. Consequently, this idea is about trying to facilitate the purgation of the guilt of white racism than about black development, advancement, and self-determination– by the strength of their own hands– in the age of freedom.
Frederick Douglass’ words are still appropriate here. He said–
Published in Politics“Everybody has asked the question… “What shall we do with the negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, — don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner-table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot-box, let him alone, — don’t disturb him! If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone, — your interference is doing him a positive injury… Let him fall if he cannot stand alone.”
This needs to be posted all across the country.
“Letting alone” confers no political advantage. It is notable that the Smithsonian Institution Museum of African American History and Culture has a exhibit on ‘Whiteness,’ informing patrons on how not to act white. The phrase ‘acting white’ was sure to trigger my brother in his sojourn in the salt mines of public teaching. “The kid has a chance to be somebody. Doctor, lawyer, whatever he chooses. But it’s like crabs in a bucket. The ones at the bottom keep pulling down the ones almost to the rim.” One has to not only maintain the perception of second-class status, but maintain the basis of the perception itself.
I’m an engineer. I fix stuff when I can come up with a solution. Part of the process is to reject the ‘solutions’ that won’t work. ‘Repatriations’ are one of those.
I had an idea a few weeks ago about how to facilitate reparations. There are so many questions about who gets it and who pays it. People whose ancestors or they arrived after 1865? People who are from mixed families? Blacks who owned slaves?
Have someone create an escrow account. Those feeling white guilt can pay into it. Blacks who think they need reparations can make a claim on the account. It wouldn’t solve anything but those screaming the loudest and trying to use other people’s money for a solution should open their wallets.
In 2014, the Heritage Foundation estimated that $22 trillion had been spent in total on “Great Society” programs. Maybe it’s $30 trillion by now. I’d guess that at least half of that, probably more, has gone to Blacks. Isn’t that enough reparations?
A few years back I took a short vacation in Charleston. As a person from the Midwest I know about sick cities like Flint and Detroit, but I did not know much about the South and Reconstruction. It was interesting to learn that after the Civil War, the freed slaves had a lot of marketable skills: baker, smith, cobbler, … There were a few years of prosperity, until government effectively outlawed black-owned businesses. Jim Crow laws were evil.
I think our country needs something like a Reconstruction, but more of a Rejuvenation.
I think it will take a generation, but we need to have Right-thinking people partner with leaders of urban churches to make cities great again. But, we need to do it in a smart way. The Left-thinking people have been working to destroy families, churches, and self-agency for decades. We Right-thinking people need to do the opposite. We need to strengthen churches and church attendance. We need to restore the nuclear family in urban locations, which used to be a strength for Black families.
We need to work up the hierarchy of needs to free families trapped in blighted and dangerous cities. The base of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs is food, water, shelter. It doesn’t need to be fancy, just some noodles and protection from the elements. Lefties want to give middle class life-style away, but that is bad as it creates dependency and breaks up families and destroys esteem. Next comes safety. When children are raised in a nuclear families in safe neighborhoods, they will learn and they will succeed. Safety will be hard to create and prisons will need to be turned into remedial schools. Belonging will come from those rejuvenated churches and families. The self-made success will build esteem the pride of citizenship. Successful citizens will be naturally self-actualizing.
It all starts with finding some church partners and city that is willing to redo welfare and public safety.
It’s a start but wouldn’t fly.
The reparation grievance mindset is as such: volunteerism doesn’t communicate enough guilt and complicity of those who are said to be responsible for black obstacles, cultural dysfunction, and socio-economic inequity. For the “pay me” crowd, reparations must be mandatory like all other black racial preference programs. It doesn’t matter that more African and black immigrants have come to America post-slavery than were brought here during. It doesn’t matter that multiple ethnicities, including “white” variations, had nothing to do with slavery; they’re all, somehow, beneficiaries of ‘white supremacy’ or a/the structure of ‘whiteness’ that has proved advantageous to them at the expense of American blacks.
Therefore, nothing short of monetary transactions will do. Even then, it won’t be enough. The psychological aspect of this racial passion play is that it’s an attention-seeking consolation by blacks who know that by-and-large, mainstream America ignores us as much and as often as they can. The general public is simply sick of being blamed for black difficulty and then being asked (forced) to do more for a group who’s adopted grievance as identity. It’s a cycle of infantilization that has reinforced dependency in blacks and resentment in everyone else.
The only solution is a rescinding guilt-based racial programs and forcing blacks to demonstrate the ability to succeed on their own terms.
John McWhorter in his book, Authentically Black, persuasively makes the same argument.
When I was in college in the sixties in Pittsburgh we had parties often at each other’s homes. There was very little tension between blacks and whites. Most of the black students lived in one area of the city, Homewood/ Wilkinsberg. It was a thriving place with mostly black owned business and well kept homes. White students went to parties there with no problems. The Great Society ended all that. Now it is a disaster zone. No business at all, homes are boarded up or in disrepair. Drugs are sold on every corner. The police don’t even want to go there. I have no answer how to rectify what has happened. All the kids I knew from there have left and are doing well thank goodness.
I agree.
I was just saying to a friend today that the great thing about my job is that I get to interact with a LOT of welfare-dependent people. Most of the pathological ways of life attributed by the Initialized (KKK, BLM) to “blackness” are actually the result of welfare-dependency.
Eliminate—or seriously reform—welfare, and there would be a painful adjustment…and then black Americans would do what they are completely capable of doing, namely compete and succeed as free men and women. Frederick Douglass was saying (correctly) that black Americans—even recently freed slaves, for crying out loud!!!—don’t need help and pity and guilt. They are…y’know…human beings. They’ve got this.
Derryck, I agree with what you wrote, and I would like to add another perspective.
The assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School makes sense on the surface. But I say to understand the macro, look at the micro. How exactly are whites and blacks supposed to hold this position when they all exist in the same extended family and family friends? More so, how, for example, should a marriage between a black and a white actually carry out this paradigm?
To the first question, we see that whites try to persuade other whites to consider racism, any kind of racism, even racial “microaggressions” and silent and invisible presumed racism, as a real and existential threat, and that they should consider that “Healing racial wounds may demand race-sensitive ointments“, potentially including reparations.
[Added: But on the interpersonal level, I can’t imagine that race plays any part in the day-to-day interaction with their nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. At this intimate level one is only concerned with their personality and character.]
To the second question, first let me say that there are more important differences — genetic differences that lead to very different capabilities both mental, psychological, and physical — between any man and any woman then there are genetic differences between races. My point is that in the human condition, taking into account both individual conscience and society as a whole, race can and should be relegated to, at best, second-tier importance. But in considering race as the primary focus of undoing ubiquitous and pernicious racism, how is an interracial husband and wife, including their children, supposed to address, on a deeply personal, daily basis, the cure? The answer is: they are not supposed to.
Color-blindness may take longer than financial reparations, and longer than redirecting the culture which penalizes blacks, but it is the least problematic and the only non-racist way.
The answer is like how they fought smoking. 20 years and, say, 200 million dollars in PSAs saying “Colorblindness is Healthy, For You and Your Children” or somesuch.
I thought so. Seems that there’s a punitive aspect to reparations. Not sure why reparations has bubbled to the surface again. My wife got into an argument on Facebook with a friend she graduated college with. He was pushing for reparations. She came back with who is going to pay, who is going to receive, etc. He responded by calling her a racist. It’s sad that this division is being taught and pushed on people.
The problem is “Colorblindness isn’t Healthy. It could get me killed going to that neighborhood today.
Yes, it would be a long process going colorblind. And then again, is it strictly color that makes you avoid certain neighborhoods? Or are there other non-race-related things, like trash on the streets, roaming gangs, and boarded up houses?
When was the 2nd Reconstruction?
I thought there was only one, 1865-77
I love your thinking about this.
And from now on, whatever group is making the white liberals bow and scrape before them and clean their feet or whatever – they should charge the white liberals as well. A nice round number, like $ 500 or 1,000 bucks! I wouldn’t mind the virtue signalling so much if there was some financial pain attached to it.
virtue is overrated?
We should just round up the woke and enslave them. Let them be whipped by black people. I feel no guilt for being white.
But it isn’t about the money, it is about power and control. Everything the Left does is about power and control. Reparations and Marxism are just tools to bring about their socialist revolution, which gives them total power and control.
It’s not about the money because they don’t have to worry about it.
Marx was supported by Engels.
BLM has support from Soros and others.
Allende in Chile loved expensive Italian suits and wine. He did not live like a proletarian.
I know plenty of Black people who lead successful and productive lives through the age-old virtues of hard work and clean living. Some of the highest paid people in America are Black. Some of the most respected people in America are Black. There are Black American millionaires and billionaires. We elected a Black President. Lasting effects from Slavery or from the Jim Crow Era, if there are any, did not hold these people back. What the Hell is the problem?
Can’t like this post enough.
Reconstruction? Let’s talk about the trillions spent on entitlement programs since the 1960s. Trillions. Much of which was designed, at least in part, on helping minorities with housing, education, and health care.
Trillions.
How’d that work out so far, the gov’t “helping” people? Looking pretty good? Or not so much?
All of this is a vehicle to power for Democrats.
One other thing.
This would never, ever end. It would continue in perpetuity. If a handout is good once, it’ll be deemed good again, and again, and reinforce the permanent dependency upon the gov’t that I think the Democrats would be more than happy to welcome, since it’s a vehicle to power.
People are being used. Why would they let that happen to themselves? Nobody gives anybody anything for free. Everything has a cost. Even if it’s a delay in having to pay for it, or suffer its consequences.
Everything.
Your statements show another thing wrong with the Left. On the Right, people ask questions, are concerned about the process of implementation, want more information and clarity. Then on the Left, all of those responses trigger “You are a racist, so shut up.”
The Lefties do not even realize how this continual ad hominem style of attack indicates that many of them are nothing but overgrown Big Babies.
In my opinion, Welfare Programs that give money to young, healthy people, just end up making them worse people whose character traits become that of unappreciative spoiled children. It totally undermines the idea of working hard to improve one’s self through effort and responsibility. The person getting free money on Welfare is much more likely to identify as a victim than the person struggling to make an honest living. No wonder that drug usage is so high among Welfare recipients.
Its not possible to atone for my own sin, much less the sins of some long dead ancestor. 1 Cor. 15:22 applies.