Police Brutality Walks Hand in Hand with Slavery
The whole idea that our country started out with the “all men are created equal” thing in 1776 but plodded ahead with legal slavery for another 87 years is at first embarrassing. But then add in the 1790 census that not only divided the nation into free white men, women and slaves, with the slaves being only worth 3/5 a person for congressional representation, and your stomach just turns.
Look I’m not going to start bashing our Founding Fathers. I think given the hand they were dealt, somehow, we have made it through several hundred years of basic democracy. We’ve established ourselves as a land of law and order, but also a land of personal freedom. Our economy has thrived through innovation and free markets. And for the most part, we’ve moved forward in our acceptance of immigrants into our society.
Yes, we shafted the Native Americans. But in fairness our diseases killed most of them. Andrew Jackson, I’m sure much to his chagrin, only swept up the crumbs.
But on the other hand, as I look back on these critical architects of our Union, I am not so excited to build statues for any of them.
Instead I am reminded of current day issues and how they seemingly walk hand in hand.
For instance, the continued issue with police violence against people of color. As slavery had been in effect since well before we became a country, so has this murderous issue with those who have been sworn to serve and protect.
Police brutality against people of color didn’t begin with the videotaping of Rodney King’s arrest in 1991. It began with the great migration from the agrarian South to the industrialized North from 1910–1970.
You could even extrapolate that backward with the reason so many African Americans moved north to begin with. Jim Crow laws at the ballot box and domestic terrorism by groups like the KKK exacerbated violence against minorities.
So like slavery, this issue had persisted for many, many years, yet the public in general ignores it. And now thirty two years after Rodney King, the same thing happens in Memphis Tennessee to Tyre Nichols. Oh, and yeah, nothing has really changed.
Now considering this malaise that seems to be American Democracy, let’s talk about the Founding Fathers.
Pretty much all these suckers owned or condoned slavery. At least as far as the first 18 Presidents, which span through Ulysses S Grant, slaves were owned or were a significant part of their livelihood.
George Washington owned loads of slaves. Fortunately, at least he freed them at the end of his life.
John Adams-Didn’t own slaves. Was against slavery, but wasn’t an outright abolitionist, and basically felt like we needed to compromise and negotiate. (How’d that work out?)
But then basically every President up to Lincoln and even beyond, either directly owned slaves, some of them like Jefferson and other Virginia plantation owners, owned hundreds, or if not, compromised their anti-slavery positions, over and over again.
And yes, even Lincoln was complicit in this compromise. While our 17th President, Andrew Johnson, was VP, he persuaded Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to not immediately apply to the eastern portion of Tennessee, where he was from, and where he’d owned slaves.
So you wonder why people of color celebrate Juneteenth instead of January 1st, 1863, the middle of the Civil War as their true day of freedom?
The killing of black and brown people at the hands of the police is as bad as the enslavement of those same people.
What is it going to take to finally effect a change? More compromise? Or another war?