From the Archives: Sept 2007
When I first began, some dozen or so years ago, to write seriously about matters of race online, I had just finished Cornel West's American Evasion of Philosophy. It was in that book that it was made perfectly clear to me that there were ample precedents in American thought and letters to support all the greatest desires for liberty and counter-oppression of all but the most radical of black political partisans. Satisfied that Americans had comprehensively made the case for full equality of the African in every respect, I began to search backward in time to figure out why this took so long.
Many folks behaved as if the Founders and their immediate progeny were too blind, immoral or stupid to fully grasp the implications of black freedom - that it was unfair to judge them against 'modern standards' when it came to matter of race. This is a self-serving fiction. When I finally read Russell Banks' 'Cloudsplitter' on the life of John Brown, it became extraordinarily clear to me that it is actually more unfair to judge contemporary Americans by the standards and convictions of such men as Brown and others associated with the Underground Railroad.
Yet before that proof was made to me, I wondered aloud why America's innovation as a state beyond the perils of monarchy might not also be beyond other evils as well. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders were clearly complaining against that which they could no longer tolerate. If they could no longer tolerate racism, would we not be a greater nation than we are?
In reading Hitchens on Jefferson, I came across the paragraph I had been searching for. And while it did not make the final draft of the Declaration, it demonstrates without a doubt that the Founders were profoundly aware of the iniquity of slavery. I deliver it to you as Hitchens delivered it to me:
He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the personal of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted the negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want to no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms amongst us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.
There isn't a great deal to conclude from this comprehensively. It does take some doing to contextualize all that Jefferson has said on the matter as well as his relationship with Sally Hemmings. Then again that's why they obtain scholars of Hitchens' caliber to handle such things. But as I expect to get into this discussion from time to time, I felt it necessary to get it out here.
April 2024
I recall my efforts to reconcile my Black Nationalism with American nationalism and those ideas which underlie democratic rule and undermine monarchy. While I remain nationalist and patriotic, I think several important democratic innovations are still laying about unimplemented.
We’ll have to clear a lot of dead wood for that to happen. I think Gen Zed will get it the way I did. They have plenty equivalent hippie examples to counter in their search for The Logos. So we will bank on their energy.