There is very little in our polarized society that most of us can agree on. One exception to that is cancer. I don’t know anyone who is in favor of cancer. My extended family is definitely on opposite sides of the political divide, but we have all come together multiple times in common grief as people in four generations of our family have died from glioblastoma brain cancer.
Our saga began with my 86 year-old grandmother, then my mother at age 70, then a second cousin in his early 30’s, and what we hope is the last was that cousin’s 9 year-old daughter. The little girl’s memorial service was so large (over 300 people) they had to hold it in a big building at the county fairgrounds.
And I know our story is not unique; it’s just the one I’ve lived through most intimately. It’s a tragic story for anyone who travels that road. That brain cancer is still very deadly, but the good news is that medical science has made great strides in treating many other kinds of cancer.
What we haven’t found is a cure for is the cancer of racism that has threatened our American democracy from its very inception. As we near the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence it seems like a good time to reflect on that part of our story many would like to erase from our history books and our consciousness. But as with physical cancer, the longer we deny the malignancy is present the more deadly it becomes.
Contrary to the sanitized version of out history that the current administration is promoting, the fact is that 41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence actually owned other human beings. That’s 73% of those who signed this document proclaiming that “all men are created equal” and said “For the support of this Declaration… we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” did so while enslaving other human beings! And that practice had been going on in this country at that point for 157 years, and it took almost 90 more years and 600,000 lives lost in a Civil War before those black persons were emancipated. Do the math – people were enslaved in this country from 1619 to 1863, or nearly 250 years. We cannot celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday without acknowledging those two and a half centuries as well.
To be fair to the signers of the Declaration some of them repented and freed their enslaved persons later, but that token number pales in comparison to the total numbers of those in captivity. According to the 1860 U.S. Census, there were exactly 3,953,760 enslaved people in the United States, about 12.6% of the total U.S. population.
But according to the simple history I was taught in my public schools that problem was all rectified by the Emancipation Proclamation, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. End of story. My history text books omitted any reference to Andrew Johnson’s destruction of Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction, Jim Crow, thousands of lynchings, and destructions of black communities all over the country. I am pretty well read, and I didn’t know anything about the infamous destruction of Tulsa’s wealthy Black Wall Street community until we commemorated its 100th anniversary in 2021.
I review all that uncomfortable truth because there has been the temptation throughout our history to think the cancer of racism has been cured or put into remission only to have it metastasize and erupt in new and worse forms later. In my generation we fell into that trap at least twice. In the 1960’s more blood was shed in Selma, Birmingham, Memphis, and Mississippi, along with other cities across the country, but the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Brown vs. Board, and other victories for justice seemed to justify the terrible sacrifices made.
But then came the backlash in Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Ronald Regan, and the conversion of the Party of Lincoln to the very things the Republican Party was organized to oppose in 1860. And then the pendulum swung again and Barack Obama was elected as the first Black President of the United States. The once impossible became reality, and we dared hope that the malignancy of racism might be excised from the American culture for good.
Again, we were wrong. The cancer went back into remission for 8 years. It was not gone, but merely dormant until its smoldering embers were fanned into a roaring blaze by the son of a racist New York slumlord. When Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 he announced a campaign for President that appealed to the most basic fears and insecurities of white Americans who are threatened by a multicultural and diverse racial society. For 8 years of the Obama administration the fear and anger among whites who felt their privileged status threatened by any thought of equality with other races festered and metastasized into a resurgence of the systemic racism present in our history for 400 years.
What Trump and his oligarch buddies have done to our democracy in the last 10 years is almost beyond comprehension. We are living in a bad combination of 1984 and Project 2025. The billionaires are running and ruining our country just like the Southern Plantation Owners of the 19th Century and the Robber Barons of the 20th. One of those eras ended in Civil War and the other in the Great Depression. It remains to be seen how deadly this outbreak of American Racism will be, but we stand a much better chance of surviving this one if we celebrate our true history and not just the parts that make us white folks look good.
Peacefully Harsh 