An American Illusion
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
United States Constitution, art. I, § 2, cl. 3
Police officers shot another unarmed black man this week.
That news may not shock you, since state-sanctioned murder of black men on American soil has been ongoing since before 1776.
Overcoming 400 years of slavery, Jim Crow, and now the New Jim Crow, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) continue to survive in America as an oppressed class. Now, it seems that the tide may be turning.
Though the actions of the police were once hidden behind a curtain of hopeful ignorance, body and cell phone cameras have destroyed the illusion. We see with our own eyes the evidence of systemic racism. And we are ashamed.
In response, protesters of every race, color, and creed march in the streets and kneel in solidarity with their BIPOC sisters and brothers.
Recognizing the shifting of the tide, Republicans have responded in their own predictable way: they refuse to march, they refuse to kneel.
Instead, they devise various justifications for their rejection of equality, chief among them being the populist veneration of our country as the greatest nation to ever exist.
To them, America cannot be racist because its greatness simply would not allow such evil to exist.
This circular argument is summed up in an opinion piece, “Do Not Take The Knee,” published by the aptly-named website “American Greatness” (known for other venerated works such as “Cuck Elegy”). This particular piece stood out because it was written by Molly McCann, a fellow graduate of Thomas Aquinas College. Students at the college spend four years learning logic and philosophy. Unfortunately, Ms. McCann forgot to apply any of this training when she wrote her article.
After a breezy attempt to define her terms and a quick breakdown of what kneeling means (apparently it can only mean that America is a racist nation to its very core), Ms. McCann accidentally captures what has become the entire platform of the Republican party:
America is a great nation [and] our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are and always have been among the most, if not the most, honorable political documents ever devised by man. In short: America is not a systemically racist nation.
Leaving aside her leaps in logic, Ms. McCann’s argument amounts to nothing more than a vicious circle: America is a great country because it is not systemically racist, and America is not systemically racist because it is a great country. This faulty argument explains what most Republicans think about America: Since the nation’s so great, it must not be racist, right?
This belief in America’s greatness, at least with respect to race, requires one to ignore the truth: from the outset, America has had a problem with race.
Racism was baked into the Constitution itself from its origin through the Three-Fifths Compromise. It was explicitly built into the national economy for almost 100 years, and has been an implicit aspect of the economy since abolition.
America continued to oppress BIPOC neighborhoods through redlining, redistricting, gerrymandering, and other evil tools that perpetuate systemic racism. America was never perfect.
Republicans, however, refuse to admit that their idealized version of America committed these atrocities because they’ve tied their identity to the notion that America was, at one time, perfect. Admitting that the fantasy is such destroys the illusion. America cannot be great again if it was never great to begin with.
