The American nation was created in the great optimism of the Enlightenment, which predicted that man is perfectible if given proper social, economic and political freedom. As history’s truly “new nation,” America stands as the very symbol of all that is optimistic and perfectible.
But this promised land has failed miserably in one aspect of its promises: Racial justice. The death of George Floyd, and other continuing cases of police injustice against Blacks, make the notion of American optimism and its confidence in human perfectibility difficult to claim as a reality. A recent Stanford University research shows that police discrimination against Black drivers — who are three times more likely to be pulled over — declines substantially only when it’s too dark to tell if the driver is black or white. In a land where all things are considered possible, its majority white voters cannot accept the simple fact that all men are created equal as declared in their own nation’s creed. Why is it so difficult to conceive of racial equality in a land where everything is deemed possible?
Racial injustices against Black people in America are rooted in, and explained by, the immutable simple fact that they are distinguished by their black skin color. If they were born with white skin, they would have simply vanished into the white world, just like the early indentured servants from Ireland and England, once their bondage was broken. Then, racial justice in America would not depend so much on the moral struggle of each individual white American as it does now. How crucial is the accidental play of skin color in ordaining America’s racial injustice?
During the Roman Empire, the empire’s slaves made up half of the population in Rome. When the Roman Empire declined and fell, as did its system of slavery, the freed slaves quietly dispersed into the many kingdoms and nations that sprang up. Once Imperial Rome was no more, its slaves vanished into the population as if they had never existed.
Far away from Rome in time and place, in the feudal kingdom of Korea, one quarter of its population served the kingdom as slaves until the slavery system was abolished only at the turn of the 20th century when Japan colonized Korea and outlawed slavery. Once declared free, slaves disappeared overnight, and a hundred years later there is not a single person in Korea who can be identified today as having had an ancestor who was formerly in bondage.
Both for the Roman slaves and Korean slaves, the distinction of slavery was not in their physical color that distinguished them, but in their paperwork. Impossible to distinguish the former slaves physically, nobody could tell who had been slaves once the paper system was nullified. The Roman slaves vanished into the teeming multitudes of Medieval Europe and the Korean slaves simply acted like other average Koreans and nobody could tell them apart.
Such a good fortune is not available to Black people in America and this mark of distinction for the former slaves is the basic torment that makes a mockery of the new nation’s claim that it is perfectible and anything can be accomplished if America puts its mind to it. In essence, every Black person announces every day to white America that he (or she) is the descendant of slaves (even if it is technically untrue). And every white American is reminded of this fact, making it utterly difficult, well-nigh impossible, to forget the horrid reminder of the bygone days. As human nature would have it, the first thing a white person recognizes in a Black person is that the latter is “black” in color and the first thought that comes to the former is that formerly the black person was a slave in status.
The Stanford study is remarkable in the simplicity of what it reveals: Where the color is indistinguishable, in the darkness of night, racism loses its potency. If white Americans recognized the cruel accident of providence, and how formidable their struggle is destined to be, they wouldn’t so casually boast of the great American optimism or its easy confidence in human perfectibility. Perhaps the greatest trial to test the veracity of the nation’s founding principles, overcoming this “color barrier” is going to take much more of America’s optimism and perfectibility than it now professes to possess.
Jon Huer, Professor Emeritus of Sociology from the University of Maryland, is a Greenfield resident.