HOW WHY WHEREFORE AMERICA ?
America's leading legal minds that convened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 were brought there to repair the impoverished national government, whose taxes were few, voluntarily paid to it by the States, and whose powers were commensurate with its tax revenues or even less. This was the state of affairs that prompted the drafting of the Constitution and the concomitant scuttling of the too feeble "Articles of Confederation."
Unfortunately, the nation's material income was derived from a slave labor base in the North by banking, shipping , insuring , supplying, and manufacturing. In the South it was raising cash crops: tobacco, rice , indigo, sugar , lumber, food, meat.
The North and South were to each other as the head is to the body.
As such, their new government documents came to reflect their social, economic, political, cultural, realities of "Enlightenment Era" white men with power to dictate the decisions, directions, future of their "new world" while competing with Europe, England, France, Spain, and, of course, the indigenous natives for the same opportunity of governing the vast wide acreage from purple mountains' majesty, amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea.
The rights of slaves were not even considered, except to the extent that they could augment the power of white men who ruled over them.
All of America's white competitors were slaveholders in 1787. For it was free black-slave labor's, low maintenance costs, durability, profitability, that produced economic marvels in the Caribbean , Central, South America, North America .
At the same time that the economic juggernauts were rushing forward, so, too, was its philosophical and cultural correctives, known as the "Declaration of Independence" in the United States and the "Rights of Man" in France. Both seminal documents had been written by an English itinerant revolutionary, named Thomas Paine. His words, fervor, his vision, fueled the notions that all men "are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Thomas Paine's powerful poetic prose laved white slave-economics in theology.
So while the white men were busily setting rules of spoliation among themselves, in 1787, during which , at best, they may have genuflected at Thomas Paine's stirring rhetoric that had imbued a spirit of national brotherhood, that was convening them, it was only an afterthought.
There was too much money to be made. There was too much land to be confiscated, cultivated; platted, taxed, incorporated into the nation.
Every law, feature, everything, was designed to secure the perpetual empowerment of the ruling white men for the good of the nation, and for the suppression of civil rights of black men to the same extent.
The slaves, free blacks, were all the while carefully watching, listening, communicating, plotting, planning as well; especially so were former slaves organizing and preparing.
The currents of economic power in America have always had to reckon with, contend with, underlying counter currents to its own national creed. Those who most upheld the national creed were the blacks who were most abused by its breach, by its violations in law courts, in banking, in business, in education, in social institutions, in all public accommodations. The wars waged by these competing oceans' currents resulted in a Civil War and a Civil Rights War; now a backlash!
The problem with the "backlash" is that it had and it has no moral core, except the law of the wolf, vultures, skunk, rabid dogs, and wolf packs.
The "backlash" lacks any intellectual rigor, being ethically and morally moribund. It is fortified by lies, about history, religion, science, sociology, and it is enforced by physical racial violence in its character, conception and especially in its execution. Except for the Confederate States of America's secession documents, the "Dred Scott" decision, it lack textual and doctrinal consistency.
Dating back to the all-too-brief "Reconstruction", 1865-1873, with the fleecing of the Freedmen's Savings Bank by Wall Street and Congress, following closely behind was the "Betrayal of the Negro," the blacks, and of the American Constitution in the Hayes-Tilden Comprises of 1876-1877.
It rolled into and through the Jim Crow Era, 1883-1954 (the 'Civil Rights Cases' to 'Brown v. Board'; through Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, "Watergate" (1968-1976); Ronald Reagan's "Revolution," tepid but well-intended Jimmy Carter; both Bushes' staying the course of white privilege with occasional gestures toward the blacks; through Barack Obama historical black but obstructed and too-timid toward blacks ruling philosophy, and now to Donald Trump's white supremacy ascendency, we blacks were and have been the ones who were true to the creed, the course the hallowed American current.
We were true to it, because it is true to us philosophically, pragmatically. We yet wonder how those who claim one thing could do the opposite thing, consciously, remorselessly to fellow Americans? Maybe these few ideas may explain how, why, wherefore they still do!
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
AMERICA
HOW WHY WHEREFORE AMERICA ?
America's leading legal minds that convened in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 were brought there to repair the impoverished national government, whose taxes were few, voluntarily paid to it by the States, and whose powers were commensurate with its tax revenues or even less. This was the state of affairs that prompted the drafting of the Constitution and the concomitant scuttling of the too feeble "Articles of Confederation."
Unfortunately, the nation's material income was derived from a slave labor base in the North by banking, shipping , insuring , supplying, and manufacturing. In the South it was raising cash crops: tobacco, rice , indigo, sugar , lumber, food, meat.
The North and South were to each other as the head is to the body.
As such, their new government documents came to reflect their social, economic, political, cultural, realities of "Enlightenment Era" white men with power to dictate the decisions, directions, future of their "new world" while competing with Europe, England, France, Spain, and, of course, the indigenous natives for the same opportunity of governing the vast wide acreage from purple mountains' majesty, amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea.
The rights of slaves were not even considered, except to the extent that they could augment the power of white men who ruled over them.
All of America's white competitors were slaveholders in 1787. For it was free black-slave labor's, low maintenance costs, durability, profitability, that produced economic marvels in the Caribbean , Central, South America, North America .
At the same time that the economic juggernauts were rushing forward, so, too, was its philosophical and cultural correctives, known as the "Declaration of Independence" in the United States and the "Rights of Man" in France. Both seminal documents had been written by an English itinerant revolutionary, named Thomas Paine. His words, fervor, his vision, fueled the notions that all men "are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Thomas Paine's powerful poetic prose laved white slave-economics in theology.
So while the white men were busily setting rules of spoliation among themselves, in 1787, during which , at best, they may have genuflected at Thomas Paine's stirring rhetoric that had imbued a spirit of national brotherhood, that was convening them, it was only an afterthought.
There was too much money to be made. There was too much land to be confiscated, cultivated; platted, taxed, incorporated into the nation.
Every law, feature, everything, was designed to secure the perpetual empowerment of the ruling white men for the good of the nation, and for the suppression of civil rights of black men to the same extent.
The slaves, free blacks, were all the while carefully watching, listening, communicating, plotting, planning as well; especially so were former slaves organizing and preparing.
The currents of economic power in America have always had to reckon with, contend with, underlying counter currents to its own national creed. Those who most upheld the national creed were the blacks who were most abused by its breach, by its violations in law courts, in banking, in business, in education, in social institutions, in all public accommodations. The wars waged by these competing oceans' currents resulted in a Civil War and a Civil Rights War; now a backlash!
The problem with the "backlash" is that it had and it has no moral core, except the law of the wolf, vultures, skunk, rabid dogs, and wolf packs.
The "backlash" lacks any intellectual rigor, being ethically and morally moribund. It is fortified by lies, about history, religion, science, sociology, and it is enforced by physical racial violence in its character, conception and especially in its execution. Except for the Confederate States of America's secession documents, the "Dred Scott" decision, it lack textual and doctrinal consistency.
Dating back to the all-too-brief "Reconstruction", 1865-1873, with the fleecing of the Freedmen's Savings Bank by Wall Street and Congress, following closely behind was the "Betrayal of the Negro," the blacks, and of the American Constitution in the Hayes-Tilden Comprises of 1876-1877.
It rolled into and through the Jim Crow Era, 1883-1954 (the 'Civil Rights Cases' to 'Brown v. Board'; through Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, "Watergate" (1968-1976); Ronald Reagan's "Revolution," tepid but well-intended Jimmy Carter; both Bushes' staying the course of white privilege with occasional gestures toward the blacks; through Barack Obama historical black but obstructed and too-timid toward blacks ruling philosophy, and now to Donald Trump's white supremacy ascendency, we blacks were and have been the ones who were true to the creed, the course the hallowed American current.
We were true to it, because it is true to us philosophically, pragmatically. We yet wonder how those who claim one thing could do the opposite thing, consciously, remorselessly to fellow Americans? Maybe these few ideas may explain how, why, wherefore they still do!