So June 19 is the anniversary of something important in American history – it’s the day that, officially, the abolition of the legal institution of slavery was promulgated in the last rebel state to lay down arms in the Civil War, Texas. There had been the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 but that was a bit of a con job: Lincoln announced that slavery was outlawed in those states that had rebelled against the Constitution and the Union, but the Union largely had no control over the regions affected – and in states that had not rebelled, slavery remained legal. The 13th Amendment to the US constitution declared slavery illegal in all of the United States in December of 1865, but with the military defeat of the rebel states in April of 1865, the Union government had the power and the authority to enforce the Proclamation of 1863, and it was finally promulgated in that last large bastion of slavery on June 19, 1865. Given that both Mexico and Canada had long since eliminated the peculiar institution, we can thus celebrate June 19 – Juneteenth, as it came to be known by the newly freed black in the South – as the last day of chattel slavery in North America.
And as we all know, it was not the last day of racism in continental North America. Or anywhere.
Emerging in the last few decades is an academic theory called Critical Race Theory (CRT, which I’ll use as an acronym because I’m a lazy typer, although to me CRT means “cathode ray tube” and thus I’m occasionally absent-mindedly amused as I read headlines referring to the newer meaning). CRT says that the legal systems of various states – in particular those of North America, although the argument is extendible to the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Japan, and the other colonial-imperial powers of the Enlightenment world, really anywhere which have an intellectual traditional of racial thinking – are inherently racist. CRT thus effectively challenges the moral basis of those legal systems: if they are embedded with racist theories, they cannot posit a position of moral superiority, and any action of those legal systems must be called to question.
Recently in the US, there has been a reactionary backlash against CRT, which essentially says that “hold on, just because individuals are racist” – and except for the most ridiculous reactionaries, it’s acknowledged that some jackholes are still openly and ludicrously racist – “doesn’t mean that racism is systemic, or even more, that racism is a fundamental thread in our legal and institutional systems.” What I think this expresses is the common idea that “I’m not a racist”, and I get that emotion. I live in Maine, the whitest state in the country (except for Vermont or Alaska, depending on how you survey it), and people by and large aren’t openly racist, and they don’t actually have the opportunity to be implicitly racist: there just aren’t enough non-white people to discriminate against. Mainers will happily discriminate against New Yorkers, New Jersey-ites, and the Quebecois (although since the border shutdown, they’ve had limited opportunities to exercise their instinct against the last of those), but against black people or even Indigenous people, no, not so much: they’re few, they’re known, and they all shop for bargains at the Hannaford’s just like the white people do. Surely, therefore, we are not racist; surely, therefore, we have no racism embedded in our law or our societal institutions.
But simultaneously, we also have a kind of hero worship for Abraham Lincoln, who more than most was at least open about his racism. He didn’t “dislike” Blacks, but to start with, he was pretty sure they weren’t as equal as humans as white people were. It’s evident in his writings and speeches that as he evolved as a politician and thinker – especially as president – he came to realize that we are, in fact, all equal except for opportunity and societal constraints, but it came late, and in truth, he still wasn’t all that fond of black people; he kept an instinctive distaste for them to his premature end. Thinkers like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth never really thought he bought into the concept of a human whole, although they recognised that someone like him was essential to the process of destroying the institution without also destroying the country. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he was killed by racist scum who explicitly feared what he might do to further break down the barriers between whites and blacks… and more importantly, pretty much all of America today, and much of western democracies, grant to him a sort of transcendence. In his personal journey, he played out our own national journey: to come to know that we are, in fact, all equal as human beings, that the colour of our skin, the place of our birth, the fact of an XY or XX or other sex chromosome combination, means nothing as an expression of our human potential except something of equality with everyone else.
Lincoln said something extraordinary, though, in 1863 – in the shortest and most powerful address that, I think, has ever been given to humanity. The Gettysburg Address was delivered to the Union, struggling in the middle of a long war which the world has long forgotten was more deadly per capita than any war until the Eastern Front in World War II, after it had barely won a three-day slaughter and turned back the rebel Army of Northern Virginia from the north for what proved to be the last time. It asked us horribly powerful questions that we still must wrestle with today – and reading Confucius’s Analects this past weekend, it makes me realise that Lincoln has posed us with questions that will endure much longer than Master Kung’s directives will. Lincoln asked us to commemorate the tens of thousands of dead, still rotting on the battlefield behind him, with the following:
“that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The trouble with his resolution is that this government is exactly what he says it is: of the people, by the people, and for the people. And those people were racist to the core – both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line in 1861, still in 1863, and actually even more so in the reactionary years that followed Reconstruction after Lincoln was long dead. When he delivered that speech, the record indicates pretty clearly that he himself was still racist, that he believed Blacks were lesser beings to white people; he was evolving quickly under the pressures of that seminal war, but it was a process and it was by no means complete. The people who fought for the elimination of slavery came to resent the cost of that war and held it against the Blacks who were freed, who gained their full freedom in 1865 on Juneteenth and earned it in the constitution in 1867 and fought for it until the nation, exhausted, gave up and let the South resume their empire of persecution in 1876. The laws of the US – and let’s face it, of Canada (just ask the First Nations) and Mexico (again, ask the Zapatistas of their south, the peasants of the Tex-Mex border) – embody the racism and classism and fundamental rejection of the concept of a common humanity that Lincoln asked for in the Emancipation Proclamation, and pragmatically if implicitly noted was impractical in his Gettysburg Address.
Opponents of Critical Race Theory reject the idea that racism can somehow be embedded in the laws and institutions of a country that fought a war against racism and in the name or emancipation of Black slaves. But a government of, by, and for a people which were inherently racist would obviously have created laws which embedded racist concepts in them. Why is this even worthy of debate? Why is this even an interesting question? If you think Lincoln was right in defining what it is we fought for – in the war of independence, in the Civil War, in the world wars – that we fought for a government of, by, and for us, and if you accept that our government was born and much of its defining text was created hundreds of years ago by the people of those times, how could we think that their fears and evils would not also be baked into the laws of their land, which is now ours – in addition to their aspirations and goodwill as well, obviously. But laws of a nation created of the people, by the people, and for the people will reflect the entirety of the people. It may not do those people proud when viewed in the harsh light of history, but it will be there nonetheless.
We are called upon as moral individuals to treat each of our fellow humans with dignity, if for no other reason than we can’t expect ourselves to be treated with dignity if we don’t exhibit that grace ourselves. But even as we say that – the simplest formula for moral equivalency and the obvious reason why it should be observed – we know we fail in our own need to live up to it every day, in little and big ways, sometimes very simple (I raise my voice to my son when I could act with grace and kindness) and sometimes in large and complex ways (I endorse a zoning board policy which is unfair and wrong but I accept that it is the law and do not question it in the moment of voting on a variance for an organic farmer trying to build a vegetable shack in a residential neighbourhood). But we are embedded in a world of history and law which has been established by our forebears, who are just as flawed as we are. The concept of Critical Race Theory is nothing more than this: that our forebears were racist, and the record demonstrates it. They made our laws, and we maintain them until we change them, but change is hard, and thus we are challenged to complete any project of radical change. We may not want to be racist any more, but if we are to transcend racism – if we are to embrace all of our human friends and partners and, yes, criminals and those in need of discipline – then we need to reexamine the laws given to us by our forebears and think consciously, with difficulty, with real criticism, about how we can enact laws which embrace what we really want to feel. And we should be humble when it’s pointed out to us that laws that we didn’t think of as racist are, in fact, highly discriminatory, either in intent, in application, or in practical exercise.
If you listen to Lincoln, he’s telling you a powerful truth: we create the laws that describe who “we” are, the lawmakers. If the lawmakers didn’t include Blacks – and they didn’t for most of the history of North America, and even for a decent chunk of post Civil War America – then those laws will describe an incomplete picture of what we should be. Critical Race Theory’s core precept – that our laws are threaded with racism which resonates down today – should be obvious. Maybe its rhetoric is overblown (after all, it comes from academia, which is not a good starting place); maybe its purpose is endowed with some political aims which are, well, material (Critical Race Theorists also want to push for financial reparations). But that just makes CRT human – just like the laws we impose upon society today, just like the financial downstream impacts of those laws, which reek with the biases and prejudices and, frankly, the hatreds of those who wrote them long ago.
How fortunate it is that we live in societies – in Canada, in the United States, in the United Kingdom – where we can reflect on this and change. We can ask our representatives to re-legislate the laws themselves; as the executive, we can pause in exercising power which was appropriated over others without consideration; we can look to our magistrates to reject laws which are in contempt of the idea of respecting our fellow man. We can reform our government of, by, and for yesterday’s people, and make it reflect a society of, by, and for all of us today. It will never be perfect – that is not of this earth – but we can pay attention to how we create this society, how our forebears created what we face today, and shift to create something better.
The men and women who heard of their freedom in Texas 156 years ago ended up realising that their equality under law was stuck in a system that was overweighted with racism that couldn’t be eliminated in one fell swoop. We owe them an apology for the fundamentally overpromised expectations of what “abolition” and “emancipation” would mean on the ground and in both their lives and the lives of their descendants for far too long. But we can work towards something better, and part of that is acknowledging that we still have to unpack the burdens of our law, even as we seek to retain the beauty and liberty of all the amazing good concepts that are embedded within it. And we can still commemorate the sacrifices of half a million Union dead, of countless civilian lives disrupted or worse, of the blood of millions of enslaved Blacks, that was required for the United States – that grand project of the Enlightenment embodied on the earth of North America – to evolve and learn to embrace all people in its promise. With that, we’ll do something good. It’ll still be faulted and won’t be enough, but it will be good. And we can look to Lincoln for an example of how to be good, and human, and never enough.
Today, June 19th, Juneteenth, is now a holiday here, and well that it should be so. I wish I knew how to celebrate it – Champagne seems too French, so maybe I’ll go for a beer – and oddly, I’ll probably end up watching golf on TV, which seems off but oh well, at least it’s the US Open, and this year it’s being played on a municipal golf course. No matter what, though, I’m proud to be a part of this project.
Happy Juneteenth to all of you from the Essence of Water – cheers!