Responsibility and Guilt

Pt. 2 Conclusion

The history shows us that it was not just indignity of blacks being brought to America that created the denigration of blacks.  Freed slaves,or escaped slaves were treated just as indignantly.  And that was before emancipation.  But it continued after emancipation. People could be held in bondage after emancipation only if they were imprisoned.  So after emancipation the new freed persons who didn’t want  to return and work for wages were arrested for indigency.  To this day we arrest a few white people for criminal activity and black people for the offense of their skin color by manufacturing crimes.  

Justice Ms. Ketanji Brown-Jackson was inaccurate when she said America has never been colorblind.  The truth is America reinvented race as a means of worth.  The white person was labeled both through legislation and through social structures as simply being more valuable than black persons.  It was a deception that began after Bacon’s Rebellion to prevent another rebellion of indentured lower class whites from ever uniting with black slaves to amass a rebellion strong enough to overthrow the white masters.  To return to power required large resources from Britain to defeat Bacon. This resulted in new legislated classes of superiority. Using indentured whites on the plantations was prohibited (by common practice if not by legal fiat) and a system of identifying ranks among people by the color of their skin was legislated long before the Afrikaners developed their own apartheid system in the early 1950’s.  But just as the Afrikaners wanted to prevent the British whites from unifying with blacks as they had done during the Boer war, the new southern laws were aimed at whites who were insignificant to the upper classes from ever joining with the black man in rebellion against the masters.  It was not just defining whites as free and blacks as slave, some blacks were already free citizens.  Originally black slaves in Virginia were slaves only because they were not on a contract like the indentured white.  But at least in Virginia, after a certain amount of time as a slave, they could be freed. And until the 1830’s many could save up money and buy their freedom.  It is not true that no slave could earn money, or was ever paid for services.  While rare among field hands, skilled slaves (I mean these guys couldn’t even dress themselves so of course they had no skills other than lofty discussions about the meaning of freedom and why certain people were entitled to more.)  But after Nat Turner’s revolt, no more. 

Post the rebellion led by Bacon, however a free black could be legally punished by striking a white man, but a white man was not legally liable for striking a free black man.  A white man who held even a quarter of an acre in property could vote.  A freed black man like Frederick Douglas who actually became slightly wealthy,  could not. And he had immigrated to the north.  Jim Crow was invented in the north to marginalize free black men and revitalized in the south during the robber baron days of the gilded age.  Once again, out of a response to Oliver Cromwell’s rebellion in Georgia.  Farm co-operatives had begun to develop that attempted to give farmers direct access to the market and bypass the exploiters who paid less for the produce.  Oliver Cromwell and a group of blacks had attempted to form their own co-op but found they were still being prevented from directly selling to consumers. Cromwell arranged a better deal for his co-op to sell to a white co-op which created a mini-rebellion. It was very swiftly defeated when the Georgia governor sent in the militia.  In the 1870’s and the 1880’s, while all the remnants of white-black division had not ended, whites and blacks did use the same transportation systems and sat in mixed sections next to one another.  They shopped together at the same markets, they went to common schools if they were proximal enough and if any schools for the poor were built in their vicinities, and while housing was not desegregated there were no legal barriers other than affordability to where anywhere could live.  So black doctors might live next door to a white doctor, and laborers of all colors lived in areas where they worked.

Across the country there began a “populist” uprising against the dominant class. 

To return  to Georgia, populism had begun to split the white vote away from the democratic party.  In 1892 Populist party leader in Georgia, Thomas E. Watson saw a political advantage to his own success if he could unite the frustrations of the farmers, both black and white, to challenge the still remaining Bourbon overlords of both the economic and political structures.  Frustrations that had led to the development of both black and white farmer’s alliances that had attempted to unite had been bloodily resisted.  But their grievances were common/  The power of the railroads in shipping supplies to charge exorbitant rates and middlemen merchants made life barely sustainable. Watson called for nationalization of railroads, banking reform, and direct election of senators.  Watson appealed to the economically wounded, much as Donald Trump did, but at that time what was wanted was to increase the power of government and decrease the power of economic strongmen who also owned the state & federal government. 

He called for the development of a sub-banking system that would allow farmers to borrow against future expected farm earnings. (Exactly how billionaires like Bezos and Musk can pay themselves minimal salaries and borrow against expected future increases in stock valuation). Watson was elected to the house of representatives but his only notable achievement was getting the rural free postal delivery system established.  Lambasted as way too expensive and that it would bankrupt the government and that it just wasn’t fair to people who lived in cities to have mail delivered to people who didn’t and making those who got free delivery to have to pay for those who didn’t.  (?sound familiar? Student loan forgiveness? Follow the history.).  That was the argument.  

But Watson prevailed and rose to national prominence.  But that prominence did not win him a second term in the United States house (which we will return to momentarily).  But he did assume the role of the premier candidate for the Populist Party presidential nomination. William Jennings Bryan met him with him and led him to believe if he would unite the Populist party under the umbrella of the democratic party that he, Jennings, would support Watson for the vice-presidency.  In return Watson got the Populist Party to nominate Bryan as its candidate for presidency, uniting the two parties.  But Bryan then had the democratic convention nominate a banker for the role, Arthur Sewall.  Watson would later run as the Populist candidate in the next century .  

But  as we said, Watson could not regain a foothold in Georgia state politics. A longtime supporter for anti-lynching legislation and whemhe actually learned of a prospective lynching he went out before the crowd of would-be lynchers and faced them down.  So the black and whites united to send him to the US house in 1892.  But upon his rebid black voters departed from supporting him and he was defeated.  Why?  Well the generally accepted notion is that they were intimidated with threats of property foreclosures if they did so–and remember secret ballots didn’t exist—so any black man who marked his ballot for Watson would be foreknown and would face the likelihood of losing what he had.  The embittered whites blamed Watson for his own loss.  Watson began to write about that in his personal journals and upset by Booker T. Washington’s compromise to pacify black voters into support for the existing authorities, Watson turned bitterly against blacks.  He groomed Hoke Smith for governor in 1906 with a campaign favoring disenfranchisement of all blacks.   This of course sparked the Atlanta RaceRiots in 1906.  And the riots insured Smith’s victory and Smith’s victory insured further segregatory actions and those laws reinforced legal white supremacist ideology.

And of course, populism across the south swept in new leaders and the new leaders proposed a vitriolic rhetoric that only living next door to the black man, only sitting in a seat next to a black man, only having your children attending the same schools as black children, were the cause of all of the white man’s distress.  And of course, this didn’t happen in the north, the white north had already established the precedent of Plessy  in a Massachusetts supreme court decision from the 1790’s.

So of course America has never been color blind.  America created by legal fiat that accomplished its purpose of creating and defining in the souls of its citizens that seeped into the fabrics of every level of American consciousness.  The poor are not equal to each other in poverty  but the black poor create the white poor who are only poor because the rare successful black man creates the white man’s poverty.  And as long as the white man believes that, he can be divided against the black man.  As long as he believes that his own marginalized state of dependence upon other white men is caused by a black man, who is inferior to him, as long as he can shred his inferiorties by believing in his superiority to the black man, he can himself remained marginalized to the boss whiteman that continues to subterfuge his own needs to the bossman’s needs—well what do you expect?   

The color of one’s skin is genetically incidental, but the division of people into races is planned terrorism by the bossmen as a means to their own authority.

So yes, there is no way to repay that terrorism to America’s black inhabitants. But the first step might be for the white man to throw off his own yokes and recognize he is also being terrorized by the bossman.  The white man needs to be superior to the black man for the same reason he needs to be superior to their wives.  Being superior to another is a demonstration of one’s feelings of inferiority to someone.  Anyone who feels marginalized, disrespected, and unaccepted as an equally important person to the community will be unable to not attempt to marginalize someone else.

What is theft?  Is it taking from or taking back?  If something is created is it created collectively, or is it created by the singular owner?  Does anyone own anything?  Can we own anything but others?  Jeff Bezos has a lot of houses.  Did he lay one brick that built them?  So why has he more proprietary rights than those who did the labor?  What gives one more right to anything if more than one man participated in its creation.  If a builder  takes one of the bricks, is he the thief, or is the thief the man who thinks the house built by another is his alone?

If we lack the ability to  accept the responsibility for our wounds to others, if it is a game of blame, and lack of responsibility creates guilt in others, is that human nature or is that humans designing human nature?  The answer is to follow the history. The answer is humanity can not be paid back for what has been perpetrated upon it.  The answer is man, no man, is creator; no man is god, and responsibility lies within each of us to accept the wounds we inflict on others as our responsibility.  We cannot pay back the wounds, but maybe if we accept the responsibility for causing the wounds, maybe we will try harder not to continue to open the festering blisters. Or conversely, we will not follow the history and the wounds grow so large that we bleed ourselves to death.  The scars America has perpetrated on blacks by defining skin color as somehow a different type of humanity can never heal.  So the opportunity comes to us to accept the responsibility to quit following the history and to change the history.  To disabuse ourselves of our godly aspirative visions of superiority, or our elusively anthropomorphized gods that equals the same thing. 

The history should lead us to that conclusion. And until it does, the history continues.