Friday, January 5, 2018
AMERICA'S MUTANT MITOSIS
AMERICA'S MUTANT MITOSIS
Cells grow by division. Such growth is part of a process known as mitosis. We learn about it in biology classes. We observe its human applications in Bible study with Abram and Lot; Ishmael and Isaac; Jacob and Esau. In his 1967 classic, SOUL ON ICE, Eldridge Cleaver rhapsodizes about mitosis in a chapter, "Primeval Mitosis."
If at the most basic level of cell life, mitosis manifests , then it surely pertains to higher, larger life forms.
Not all splits or mitotic divisions are successful, however. In April 1861, the Confederate States of America (CSA) tried to separate from the United States of America (USA).
CSA nearly succeeded! But for the intervention of President Abraham Lincoln's January 1, 1863, "military measure" known as "Emancipation Proclamation," that freed the CSA's 4 million black slaves to fight for the USA, and against the CSA, for their freedom from physical and legal slavery, the CSA would have succeeded in splitting away.
But America's civil war mitosis was incomplete. A mutation was born from the conflict, the incomplete split. Under it, blacks had legal citizenship rights on paper only, but no political or economic equality to whites. In fact, in life, black citizens who had given their all to preserve the USA were thereafter blamed, lynched, stigmatized, ostracized, Jim Crowed, miseducated, lied to,

cheated, massively incarcerated , after the infamous white capital and political rapprochement in 1876, the Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel B. Tilden Presidential vote .
"Toward a more perfect union" indeed American mitosis continues now in 2018, to live up to its creed, and to be fair, just, honorable to all, most especially African Americans!