AMERICAN INCOMMENSURABLES

By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

I first consciously encountered the word “incommensurable” while reading Plato’s The Laws, a treatise on nation-building in his hypothetical, ancient Greek nation of “Magnesia.” 

My next encounter with it was in Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, a mathematical, mechanical masterpiece founded upon esoteric Biblical wisdom. 

To be used by such icons of world intellectual tradition, automatically places this very rare, recondite word in the ionosphere of incomparable scholarship.

But, it was not until afterwards, as I was feeling its presence, and intuiting its unnamed application, in Frances E.W. Harper’s wonderfully redemptive, Civil War-era novel, Iola Leroy,Or, Shadows Uplifted,  that I was inspired to write about this profoundly provocative and mysterious word, “incommensurable.” Whether Ms. Harper belongs in such august company as Plato and Newton is for the reader of her novel to determine. Her poetry and her prose impress me!

Com·men·su·ra·ble (k-m n s r--b l, -sh r-) adj.  means:1. Measurable by a common standard. 2. Commensurate; proportionate. 3. Mathematics Exactly divisible by the same unit an integral number of times. Used of two quantities.

Based on this definition, simple fractions would be mathematically incommensurable, because the integers producing them are NOT “exactly divisible by the same unit an integral number of times.”

Whether or not something is measurable by a “common standard”—another definition-- is more problematic, because “common standard” is subjective. For example, what is the “common standard” of beauty or courage or freedom or justice or intelligence? These value-laden qualities or virtues are, per se, “incommensurable.” Yet, a “common standard” is imposed upon such words, concepts, and people, with procrustean efficiency, regardless of variations or consequences. Such societal, normative impositions are rarely challenged by those most adversely affected, by those most detrimentally afflicted, usually.

The word, “Incommensurable,” does much more than negate commensurable quantities.  Beyond negation, it also debases, deprecates, demeans, and dehumanizes. It denies substance to its objects. Its diminutions, in fact, plumb the depths of metaphysical abnegation, transforming matter into antimatter! Beyond zero, its objects represent negative forces which require quarantine.

This amorphous concept has suffused philosophy, mathematics, science, as well as African American literature millennia apart. Yet, in a matter of less than a month, we—me and “incommensurable”-- had met thrice, in widely divergent contexts: Plato, Newton, Harper. “How curious,” I mused, “this must mean something. Let’s write about this incommensurable ‘tri-incidence!’”

Yet, how can anything existing on earth be really and truly incommensurable with any other thing existing on earth? If it exists on earth, isn’t it necessarily commensurable with all else that exist on earth? Is not Earth-life, itself, the “common standard” of each thing’s existence? Space, time, motion, matter define the physics of life on earth, per Newton. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen define earth’s elemental chemistry. These are common to all things.

 Christianity agrees: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified.” Romans 8:28-30.

Yet, generations of American ‘Christians,’ curiously, have been among the most strident, incommensurable of creatures by so readily demonizing others!

The word “incommensurable” means “adj. a. Impossible to measure or compare. b. Lacking a common quality on which to make a comparison. 2. Mathematics a. Having no common measure or number of which all the given lengths or measures are integral multiples. b. Having an irrational ratio. n.   One that is incommensurable.”

There is a dimension of life, “The Soul,” per Plato, with priority and dominion over physics and chemistry! It is the domain of the spirit.  It is the unknown and unknowable source and end of life, from which everything has come and to which everything returns! Also, known as the Unmoved Mover and the Uncaused Cause, this Spirit has innumerable names. I simply say “God” or “Amen.” Plato wrote of “the Gods” repeatedly in The Laws. They define the parameters of morality. Newton’s esoteric Biblical references in the Scholia of his Principia are nuanced, oblique and intrinsically laced within his mathematical demonstrations. Prudence demanded such seclusion, given his contemporaneity with Galileo, and the mortal risks he faced in light of his own “apostasy.” 

The Holy Spirit is the centerpiece of Harper’s trope of the black slaves’ awakening, acceptance, and affirmation of their inherent worth as God’s creations, before, during, and after the Civil War. It addresses, centrally, the dilemma of “colored” children raised “white”, on a remote Red River, Louisiana plantation with black slaves. After their white father’s death, they brutally discover that they are themselves ‘colored.’ This ‘shadow’—their ‘Negro’ race-- deprives them of their patrimony under Louisiana law, as well as their status as ‘free.’ The novel explores their dislocations, dangers, flirtations, and restorative familial resolutions, within that transformative era freedom for the oppressed.

That above-referenced “unnamed application” of “incommensurable,” redolent of Plato and Newton,  read and felt by me-- an attorney, African Methodist Episcopal preacher, historian, poet, science student, and author-- is from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (Dover Publications, Inc. Mineola, NY: 2010 ; an unabridged republication of the second edition published in 1893 by Garrigues Brothers, Philadelphia).  That potent and portentous excerpt is below in bold italics:

“I think,” said Dr. Latrobe, “that we are right in suppressing the negro’s vote. This is a white man’s government, and a white man’s country. We own nineteen-twentieths of the land, and have about the same ratio of intelligence. I am a white man, and, right or wrong, I go with my race… You speak as if we wronged the negro by enslaving him and being unwilling to share citizenship with him. I think that slavery has been of incalculable benefit to the negro. It has lifted him out of barbarism, and fetish worship, given him a language of civilization, and introduced him to the world’s best religion. Think what he was in Africa and  what he is in America!...”

“Don’t you think,” asked “Dr. Gresham, that we have been too hasty in our judgment of the Negro? He has come handicapped into life, and is now on trial before the world. But it is not fair to subject him to the same tests that you would a white man. I believe there are possibilities of growth in the race which we have never comprehended.” (emphasis added)

“The negro,” said Dr. Latrobe, “is perfectly comprehensible to me. The only way to get along with him is to let him know his place, and make him keep it.”

Dr. Latrobe is an unapologetic racist! Voter suppression is justifiable against ‘the negro,’ this being a “white man’s country and a white man’s government.” The white man owns 19/20’s of the property, and owns that same amount of intelligence, says he.  Enslaving the negro “was of incalculable benefit to the negro,” according to Dr. Latrobe. Not sharing citizenship with the negro is perfectly normal. He also claims that “whites”—“introduced him [the negro] to the world’s best religion. Think what he was in Africa and what he is in America!...”

 Latrobe’s racial banalities were quite commonly held in that era. Their residue lingers, flaring up especially during election cycles, contaminating each new generation.  But, Latrobe’s blatant racism has, thankfully, morphed into latent racism. It is fueled by the clash between such unresolved national subtexts as—on the one hand:  certain whites’ subconscious guilt, their dissembled deceit, and backdoor betrayals of “the Negro;” and-- on the other hand: unresolved black grievances, unfulfilled promises, and governmental refusal of compensation for the deprivation of “commensurable,” if not “equal,” legal, political, economic rights.  Our national “center of forces” to use Isaac Newton’s phrase is reposed in our founding documents, whose centripetal forces pull on this nation’s political/economic infrastructure, viscera and conscience, inexorably.

Dr. Latrobe was right about this nation being, historically, a “white man’s country.” Yet, it was the black man’s indispensable loyalty, labor, energy, and inventiveness, which are inseparable from, and incommensurable with, that fact.

Two political compromises in the 1770-1790’s established this as a “white man’s country.” The first compromise was in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, itself. Therein, any reference to ‘slavery’ was purposefully omitted. And wisely so! Slavery had been out-lawed in England in June 1772 in the case James Sommerset v. Charles Stewart, http://medicolegal.tripod.com/somersetvstewart.htm 4 years before the slaveholding colonies declared independence by and through a moneyed cabal of Southern slaveholders and Northern merchants. The second compromise was in the United States Constitution, itself, in Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3, where blacks were given only fractional political status, 3/5’s of a man, for purposes of enumerating, and, thus, determining  the extent of Southern congressional representation and of direct taxation:

“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.”

This fractional allocation was also effected by the same moneyed cabal of Southern slaveholders and Northern merchants, as had excluded mention of slavery from the Declaration of Independence. So, “the negro’s,” fractional constitutional status, made him an “incommensurable” denizen from the very ‘birth of this nation.’ White men were made whole persons, but not all others. Given such incommensurable status, Frederick Douglass’ biting inquiry in his 1854 speech, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July,” is understandable! http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=162

President Abraham Lincoln is popularly perceived to be a ‘friend’ of the negro, known as “The Great Emancipator” in American history. Yet, this quote from Lincoln sounds very much like Frances Harper’s character, Dr. Latrobe:

"I will say, then, that I am not nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races---that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race." -- Abraham Lincoln, "Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, September 18, 1858, Charleston, Illinois," in "Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings" (New York: Library of America, 1989), p. 636, and in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 5, page 371

These sentiments by Abraham Lincoln were expressed in 1858, over a year after Justice Roger Taney in 1857, had held similarly in the infamous Dred Scott v Sanford decision. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford  

Therein Dred and Harriet Scott, former Missouri slaves, who had also lived in “free states” and in territories not yet states, were turned back in their bid for freedom that other Missouri slaves had routinely obtained through “slave-litigation.” The profligate denial of the Scotts’ bid [“That the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect”] http://home.earthlink.net/~ynot/slacases.html somewhat hastened the eruption of Civil War.

Abolitionist patriots like John Brown eventually decided to pursue armed struggle, in order to extirpate the baleful blight of slavery from the country. First, Brown and his family moved from Ohio and fought in the Kanas-Missouri “Border Wars.” Then, later, he liberated a score of Missouri slaves and personally took them to Windsor, Canada and freedom from Missouri through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan on a 1200 mile trek via the “Underground Railroad. Finally, having resolved to die as a martyr for freedom, his now infamous, sacrificial raid upon the national armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in October 1859, elevated him to  revolutionary sainthood, even though he failed to secure arms for a planned slave rebellion utilizing the Allegheny Mountains’ crevices.   

But, in spite of John Brown’s vain heroism, it was Abraham Lincoln’s mundane election in 1860 that was the final straw for the insatiable South. If, in 1861, the South seceded in the face of such truculence, exhibited by Roger Taney in 1857, and by Abraham Lincoln in 1858, what level of racial prejudice, of racist rabidity did it actually possess? To what could it be compared?

Lerone Bennett, Jr., the former Senior Editor of Ebony Magazine, and author of such books as Before the Mayflower, and Forced Into Glory, has written relentlessly about Lincoln’s racism. But, conceding Lincoln’s and Taney’s racism, the South was determined and delusional! “My way or the highway!” was its creed!  So, the “Freedom War,” as slaves termed it, came!

The slaves, themselves, by escaping to Union lines eviscerated Lincoln’s desultory peace overtures toward the South! The slaves were waging their own “Freedom War” under the cover of the broader Civil War conflict!  Initially, they ran away, or sailed away. For example, in May 1862, the slave, Robert Smalls, stole “The Planter” a Confederate steam-powered warship of which he was pilot, from its Charleston, South Carolina, harbor and utilized his intricate knowledge and skill to sail her past Confederate mines, and batteries at Ft. Sumter and Ft. Wagner, into to a shocked Union blockade beyond. He took along his family and his enslaved crewmen and their families, under a white flag, in predawn hours. http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/civil-war/1862/june/robert-smalls-planter.htm  That amazing feat startled the nation, and delighted the Union! I t should have been an omen to the South.

Earlier, three male slaves had escaped from Confederate fortifications they were building by rowing themselves across the James River to Ft. Monroe, Virginia, in May1861, where Union Gen Benjamin Butler would term them “contraband of war,” in legal parlance. Butler, a lawyer, would refuse to return them to a Confederate officer, who sought them under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, due the state of rebellion then extant.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html?pagewanted=all

Later, the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry, created by Kansas U.S. Senator, James Lane, fought and won the Battle of Island Mound, at Butler, Missouri, in October 1862, against Confederate bushwhackers, at least twice its size, in defiance of Lincoln’s policy forbidding black troops. http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=54126

So, in these and myriad other ways, the slaves’ self-help insurgency continually forced Lincoln’s political hand!  His Emancipation Proclamation, of January1, 1863, freed no one, but it was great symbolic drama, which was widely celebrated as the herald of a new day by escaping slaves and by abolitionists: those lecturing, legislating, and writing, and by those in uniform fighting!.

The Dred Scott decision has never been judicially overturned. Instead, it was nullified by an estimated1,000,000 combined casualties and fatalities in the Civil War , 1861-1865, proving that the black man was, indeed, entitled to much respect, whether “incommensurable” or not! That historically condign, judicial decision was functionally superseded by the 13^th Amendment which freed the slaves, the 14^th Amendment which gave them due process of law, equal protection of law and privileges and immunities, and the 15^th Amendment which gave them the right to vote.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

No amendment gave the freedmen land, supplies, tools, back wages, restitution, or grant money. Nor did any ensuing law or judicial decree make them commensurable to white people socially, politically, or economically.

This financial dearth, this property poverty, this want of means and measures left the freedmen in a state of economic dependence upon their former masters, upon vengeful, returning rebels, or upon swindlers and hucksters of all hues and varieties. The Bureau of Freedmen and Refugees headed by Union Gen. Oliver Otis Howard helped some freedmen temporarily to adjust to their new-found status, providing food, shelter, and schools, most prominently Howard University in Washington, D.C. But, politics shut down the Freedmen’s Bureau too soon, Congress having appropriated too little for these millions of landless and penniless people, without whom there would have been no Union!

Soon, white men reached political rapprochement to abandon the freedmen to the South’s laws, customs, remedies, in exchanged for federal power. So, once again that cabal of Southern landowners and Northern merchants combined to cripple the black man’s independence and vitality for the white nation’s benefit!

The phrase from Harper’s character, Dr. Gresham, “But it is not fair to subject him to the same tests that you would a white man” is the application of “incommensurable,” sensed, felt, and used herein.  Equals may be “fairly” subjected to the same tests. But that is not so for un-equals. And, it is even less so for incommensurables—those for whom common measurement is literally, historically, impossible!  In fact, due to the effects of black chattel slavery,  followed by unrestrained white terrorism by government officials and private citizens on the federal, state and local levels,  it was sagely predicted that blacks would become “extinct” by some so-called “experts!”  Wrong!

Blacks are not bison. They are descendants of this planet’s original man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans From these “Africans,” “Ethiopians,” and “Egyptians”, all other homo sapiens evolved, along with all other civilizations, wherever situated.  The proof of their mettle is evidenced by their tremendous capacity to suffer, to love, to endure, to create, to fight, and to procreate, notwithstanding centuries of horrendous oppression. Their faith in God was their not-so-secret weapon. As Howard Thurman writes in Jesus and the Disinherited, slaves saw through the “white man’s preachers” and would “steal away” into bush arbors, away from white folks’ prying eyes and ears, where they would praise and celebrate their God in their own way, through preached word, spiritual music, and personal testimony, focused on freedom! Worship was hopeful and cathartic, as Benjamin Mays writes in The Negro’s God, published in the 1930’s, based on songs, sermons, poems, prose, prayer.  Blacks’ innate divinity fueled the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. It was “led” by Dr. Benny Mays’ gifted theology student at Morehouse College, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Council. King used “the sword of the spirit” to trounce “Jim Crow,” and massive civil disobedience demolish segregation.

Even so, centuries of discrimination, poverty, imprisonment, lynching  forced mass black migration into Northern ghettos where chronic unemployment, and depersonalization had a deleterious impact upon these “Exoduster’s” from Southern peonage and oppression! Dr. King’s remedies availed not in these teeming northern ghettoes. Here, traditional Southern values that had defied slavery, and defeated Jim Crow evaporated into the illusion of liberty. So, not only did Dr. King’s strategies not work, but even less effective were more militant approaches pursued by the Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam and others. The notion of “incommensurability” had entered into the blacks’ spirits!

After assassinations, exile, and imprisonment  robbed the Movement of its best leaders in the 1960’s, those left  behind attempted to employ racial quotas to rectify undisguised systemic discrimination, or its more discreet twin, latent discrimination. But, Labor union funding and Jewish philanthropy—the primary sources of their organizational income-- balked at mathematical racial quotas as hurtful to their members’ interests.  So instead of hard quotas, “discretionary goals and timetables” –non-mandatory and advisory only—were used to impart belated quasi-proportionality to future:  jobs, private contracts, government grants or contracts. Mathematical quotas had been rejected or termed ‘reverse discrimination’ by cynical courts and critics, as well as faint-hearted “leaders”.

Thus, “incommensurabilty” continues between the wealth of the two groups and in certain other indices, including that of the spirit. Meanwhile, perversely, Blacks pushed ahead in the misery index, disproportionately, leading in incarceration, unemployment, homicide, poverty, and educational deficits. At the base of it all is the enforced “incommensurable” relation between blacks and whites in America. Simply put, in America, “whiteness” is property, as UCLA law professor, Cheryl Harris, brilliantly proves in her famous Harvard Law Review article. Conversely, “blackness” is property’s antithesis in America! http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=927850

Beyond cavil or quibble, the history of the “negro” and  of “whites” in the United States of America reflects a purposefully designed and implemented national construct produced by powerful moneyed interests to exploit “the negro’s” labor and produce for the sole benefit of privileged “white’s.” “Whites” are another designed class, part of that same national governing construct, comprised of traditional European combatants, who became “white” allies upon immigration to America, and powerfully privileged!  Ultimately, this arrangement worked well for the ruling cabal. It facilitated their rule over both groups, white and black. America from the middle 1660’s forward, whether as a British colony, or whether as an independent nation, since 1789, was designed by laws,  mercantile custom, force, violence and deceit to oppress “the negro” and to keep him down on the bottom regardless of any individual merit, as attested by Dr. Latrobe.

This master-slave relationship is and was, at bottom, economic and has remained so since 1789, when this country was founded, through 1865, when the Civil War terminated the formal master-servant relationship. From 1865 through 1876, there was a much-too-brief “Reconstruction”—“Restoration” is more apt term, since it restored the rebels’ full rights, lands, powers, privileges. Meanwhile the blacks were handed the allure of Republican politics as the pathway to freedom.  The ensuing “Jim Crow” era ended with the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act,  and the Voting Rights Act.  The resulting Affirmative Action era continues with and through the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2008 through today! His epochal election notwithstanding, Blacks remain, arguably, incommensuables, economically and politically!

Given this “Incommensurable” situation, Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television has proposed to Congress the following:

1. Allow black businesses to be eligible for government set aside contracts if they own 10 percent of a business rather than the existing 51 percent rule due to the 10-to-1 wealth gap; and significantly increase the dollar volume of set aside contracts for Black businesses across all government agencies.
2. Encourage majority-owned businesses to invest in black-owned companies by deferring the taxes on the economic gain similar to the FCC "tax certificate program" which motivated major media companies to sell to minorities.
3. Allow African American families earning less than $250,000 annually to defer federal income taxes, without interest, provided tax deferrals are placed into a 401(k) type savings account which can only be drawn out at retirement or upon death at which time the government would be reimbursed for the deferred taxes. The gain on the 401(k) investment would be available to the families at retirement or passed on to future generations.
4. Create a Treasury-backed fund to securitize short-term borrowing or emergency loans made by minority banks or other lending institutions to Black families provided these loans are marketed and made in a regulated and transparent manner. The securitized loans would encourage banks and lenders to make short-term or emergency borrowing available at reasonable rates and end "payday" lending as we know it today.
5. Require large banks under the Community Reinvestment Act to fund a nationwide marketing campaign targeted to the Black community with a focus on financial literacy and savings.

To this outstanding list, I would add a one-time economic stimulant of $2500 per individual tax payer, regardless of race, which will boost the economy greatly through consumption, investments, and savings both short-term and long-term, while it helps to erase debt burdens and restores faith in government.

In this manner, black American “Incommensurables,” their bane of poverty and stigmatization—their “shadow”-- having been “lifted,” will  be such no more.

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