Life Matters, Part 1

All lives matter. African-Americans have lives. Therefore black lives matter.

Nice little syllogism, that, proving the facts of a major national issue in eleven words.

Logically speaking it's a sound argument with a valid conclusion. I never thought it would lead me to a long silence, let alone a crisis of conscience.

Recently the editor of Vox Populi called me out for a post I had submitted on this subject. It was, she declared, superficial and inadequate to the importance of the question.

She was right.

I am a white man of the Baby Boomer generation. I was raised in a middle-class racist family in an all-white, very small mostly racist town in a largely racist Midwestern state. By racist I mean that people of other races, ethnicities and nationalities were habitually spoken of disparagingly. A variety of epithets were used, depending on the background of the subject. I don't think anyone wished harm to any of those they spoke of--it was just the language one used.

My thoughts and speech echoed those of my family until I was about 13 and had a personal view of segregation during a visit to the South. My most persistent memory of that trip is of the "Colored only" and "White only" signs. They were everywhere: On drinking fountains, public restrooms, theater entrances, swimming pools--I clearly remember an arcade in an amusement park where side-by-side pinball machines were racially labeled.

It troubled my naive teenaged brain. I decided to experiment and started using "Colored" facilities whenever I could. Nothing happened. But I learned there could have been serious repercussions had I been "colored" and used "white" facilities. I could only ask why skin color made such a difference--and I'm still asking.

It's easy to say "Black lives matter." We can shout the slogan, wave it on a sign, wear it on a T-shirt, put it on our Facebook page, and feel virtuous. But do we mean it? Do we feel it? Or are we just being politically correct?

We need to remember that throughout much of American history black lives didn't matter. Or didn't matter much. After long debate in the Continental Congress on how to determine the number of persons in each state for the purposes of representation and taxation, it was decided that each Negro, i.e. slave, would count as 3/5 of a person.

We also need to consider that black deaths matter. How many of us remember that the first person to die in the struggle for American independence was an escaped slave named Crispus Attucks, who was given a hero's burial in Boston? How many slaves lie in unmarked graves throughout the South? How many were innocent victims of lynching? How many were never mourned?

I for one cannot come close to imagining how alienated African-Americans must feel from American history. It has been common knowledge for a very long time that many, if not most, of our Founders were slave owners. We even know some intimate details of slave/master interaction thanks to Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings.

The journals of the Continental Congress are full of matter-of-fact debates about how to treat "negroes" (the world is usually not capitalized)--not as people, but as property. Samuel Chase of Maryland, a signer of the Declaration and member of Congress for 20 years, put it plainly: "The negroes are wealth,"¹ i.e. chattel.

How do we reconcile the fact that some of the greatest men in the early history of our country contributed to its most infamous institution? Were they hypocrites, or pragmatists, or did it enter their thoughts at all?

Does the greater good offset the injustice?


--- Diogenes, July 13, 2020



¹ A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: Journals of the Continental Congress, July 30, 1776: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?hlaw:2:./temp/~ammem_Jvz3::