U.S. must atone for its original sins: Slavery, guns
Public television switched to re-runs of fireworks from cloud-free July 4ths of yesteryear. It all seems a grand metaphor for a country that is in a fog, squinting for clarity and the joy of color.
.. They are America’s original sins: Slavery and guns…and they have never been washed clean.
.. The necessity of a large and unified new nation to defeat Great Britain and create a truly independent United States meant massive concessions to the plantation owners of the South, including the notorious decision to count (non-voting, of course) slaves as 3/5 of a person, to boost that region’s representation in Congress.
.. But within the new nation, fears of an all-out slave revolt only grew as the population of black people in bondage eventually swelled to 4 million. It is here that the second vine starts growing: The American romance with gun culture. Remember the 2nd Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms in the guise of “a well-regulated militia”? By the time that amendment was drafted into the Bill of Rights in 1789,militias in states such as Georgia that were essentially slave patrols with the goal of putting down any blacks who dared seek their freedom.
.. As early as 1840, antebellum historian Richard Hildreth observed that violence was frequently employed in the South both to subordinate slaves and to intimidate abolitionists.”
.. As I mentioned here recently, invest two hours of your time at your local cinema to watch The Free State of Jones, which portrays how terror against freed blacks was launched in the South with virtually no gap after the war — white men trading their gray Confederate caps for the white hoods of the Klan.
.. But just as we ignore the horrors of the post-Reconstruction South, we also forget that the reaction to the civil rights era — especially when many American cities erupted into full-scale revolt — had arguably a greater impact on how we live today. Those uprisings led directly to the “law-and-order” administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and to “white flight” that left urban neighborhoods devoid of services, and created separate and unequal school districts.
.. The two most important developments were this: A draconian “war on drugs” that targeted urban drug use (while ignoring, largely, illegal recreational drugs in the suburbs); this in turn paved the way for stepped-up police activity and then so-called “broken windows” policing that led to the unprecedented and shocking mass incarceration of blacks — the New Jim Crow.
.. It was in the aftermath of 1960s racial unrest that the National Rifle Association went from a sensible, moderate voice for sportsmen to become the lobbying group for lucrative merchants of death that peddled fear and promised manhood until, remarkably, there were more guns in the United States than people.
.. Police in the United States are more likely than their counterparts in other nations to be killed by a civilian with a gun. That in turn makes police more suspicious and more anxious in traffic stops
.. Then think about how Castile — a working man with a responsible job caring for children in a school cafeteria — was pulled over and cited a remarkable 52 times by the police.
..Was he profiled and harassed because he was black? If so, it would fit the pattern of so many formerly middle-class towns that balance their budget by fining and harassing their citizens,