Time: The Perils and Promise of America’s Third Reconstruction

After three Reconstructions, maybe it is time to pull the plug on the Union? Just saying. I was ready for this over a decade ago. I’m tired of living in a country that revolves around blacks.

Time:

“W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps best known for introducing the term “double consciousness” into the lexicon of the Black experience. The term described the duality of being a Black American—neither fully African nor completely American, an enduring “problem” to be fought over in times of war and wrestled with during times of peace. The duality at the heart of double-consciousness impacts the entire American project. America itself possesses dueling identities, reflecting warring ideas about citizenship, freedom, and democracy. There is the America that proudly identifies itself as reconstructionist, home to champions of racial democracy, and there is the America equally proud of being redemptionist, a country defiantly committed to maintaining white supremacy by any means necessary. Since the birth of the nation, its racial politics have been shaped by an ongoing battle between reconstructionist America and redemptionist America. …

In our time we have come to the Third Reconstruction, the period from the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 through the recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and all that they have entailed. The debates, conflicts, and divisions of the Third Reconstruction have been the most volatile yet. The global health pandemic that started in early 2020 revealed beyond doubt how deeply the racial disparities in society have affected Black lives. That disparity is still rooted in the world America built just after the end of slavery. …

Redemptionists interpreted America’s political future through an entirely different set of experiences. From the ashes and ruins of Confederate rebels came a vow among white supremacists to “redeem” the South of “Negro domination” or perish. The Confederacy’s defeat compelled a change in strategy, but not an end to morally reprehensible tactics which redemptionists innovated during peace-time. No longer content to create a republic of slavery, they now endeavored to turn America into a Southern Nation. Racial terrorism accompanied political, legal, and legislative efforts to reestablish slavery by other means. Reconstructionists exhibited a passionate commitment to achieving the goal of multiracial democracy, but redemptionists matched their level of belief, and at times violently exceeded them, in their efforts to reestablish white supremacy …

Redemptionists identified themselves as heroic defenders of a misunderstood South. In their telling, it was the South that was under assault, and it was their duty to keep power out of the hands of impudent Blacks, who they said were unprepared to perform the duties of citizenship in an intelligent manner, let alone serve as competent legislators. But redemptionists also prefigured contemporary racial gaslighting. They were architects of racial oppression, but denied the existence of the edifices they built to stand in the way of Black citizenship. While they sometimes called openly for white supremacist rule as a bulwark against Black voting rights and citizenship, they simultaneously claimed that their righteous indignation had nothing to do with race. A version of white supremacy claiming to be color- blind began to take root during the First Reconstruction. Redemptionists normalized violent intransigence against Black citizenship by advancing the notion that African Americans, having been so recently uplifted from slavery, were simply not ready to assume the burdens of political power. Massacres of Black Americans took place in 1866 in New Orleans and Memphis, less than a year after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, but the reasons for the massacres were never fully acknowledged, and many denied they even took place.”

Obviously, I am firmly on the side of Redemptionist America.

Note: Did you hear that The Little Mermaid has been reconstructed?