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August17,20146:43pm
US has yet to overcome its tortured racial past
ByAnnetteGordonReed
Jeffersons doubts about black American citizenship still exist, writes Annette Gordon-Reed
or a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nations prospects, it was a darkly
pessimistic prophesy. In his NotesontheStateofVirginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if
as he hoped Americas black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an
inevitable descent into racial war.
And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of
Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this
month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war (sometimes hot, sometimes
cold) has been waged against blacks in America from Jeffersons time until our own.
It is hardly uncommon in the US for a young black man to die under questionable circumstances at the hands of the police. Many blacks
have stories about young men they knew, or knew of, who were killed this way. When I was at school, a black teenage boy in my home
town died in police custody. The officers spun a wildly implausible tale about what had happened to justify the teenagers killing. Our
tiny black community ached at its inability to achieve justice in a town still firmly gripped by the legacy of Jim Crow.
Jefferson saw slavery as a state of war between master and slave. It was a legal institution that categorised blacks as property and gave
all whites authority over every black person. Even after it was destroyed, the law and the officers who enforced it remained a useful way
of keeping blacks in an inferior position in particular, of policing the movement and behaviour of black men.
This was not war as Jefferson envisaged it, but the post-slavery experiences of black people were consonant with his predictions. Black
people, he said, would never forget the wrongs done to them in slavery and the white majority would never overcome its deep rooted
prejudices against black people. And this, he feared, would undercut Americas republican experiment for it would discredit a
republic founded on the egalitarian principles eloquently set forth in the American Declaration of Independence.
That document, which insists that all men are equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, would lose much of its
power if the society formed in its image contained a permanent group of second-class citizens. And so Jefferson offered separation as
the most viable solution. Blacks would have to leave the US to find true citizenship in a country of their own.
Perhaps nothing Jefferson ever wrote has caused more outrage and, in some quarters, ridicule among present-day Americans who have
come to take a diverse America and black American citizenship for granted. That these thoughts should come from the author of what
has been called the American creed seems particularly dispiriting to those who hope we will, one day, overcome. Yet in the two
centuries since the Notes were published, the doubts Jefferson expressed about the true quality of black American citizenship have
hardly been eliminated.
This is not to suggest that criminals should not be punished or to argue that law enforcement is anything other than an essential
cornerstone of any society based on law. It is to say that the deep rooted prejudices that Jefferson spoke of have warped this vital
social function and made black people, particularly young black men, presumptive felons outside the boundaries of full citizenship.
If you examine the record of police conduct from instances of brutal treatment of blacks in custody, to stop-and-frisk policies that
disrupt the lives of innocent people in black communities, to racial disparities in drug arrests and sentencing that is surely the
conclusion you must draw.
Yet merely to state it is to invite efforts to change the subject. What about black-on-black crime? What about the problems with
black families? As if the existence of these problems justifies diminishing the rights of an entire community.
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It is as if there is no language to talk about blacks as citizens of a republic in relation to their government. Witness the response to the
peaceful protests in the aftermath of Browns death the appalling spectacle of a militarised police force with the look of an invading
army, training their weapons on unarmed citizens. Compare this to what happened on the Bundy ranch in Utah earlier this year, when
white ranchers, many of them armed, protested against what they call the overreaching behaviour of the federal government. The stand-
off between federal officials and the ranchers was tranquil by comparison. There was no confrontation.
Our tortured racial past continues to haunt us. Blacks are not yet full citizens. Jefferson is sometimes vilified for anticipating the legacy
of slavery, and of the doctrine of white supremacy that permitted it. But he was more prescient than many would care to admit.
ThewriterisaprofessoratHarvardLawSchoolandwinnerofthe2009PulitzerPrizeinHistory