Monday November 28, 2022; 7:43 AM EST
- “Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer.” —Toni Morrison, in “Playing in the Dark”#
- Singular is a tactful word for it, and not just for a writer, of course. Also for a citizen, or someone who might hope to be treated someday as a citizen.#
- Some of the Founding Fathers ignored the devastating racial oppression baked into the system for the sake of political unity, let's say, while others of the Founding Fathers simply wanted the economic benefits of devastating oppression.#
- By the time of the Civil War, the ignored had become un-ignorable. I seem to remember that the eroding balance in Congress between slave-holding and non-slave-holding states was helping to force the issue. Some people were trying to keep the moral issue in the public eye, too. Thoreau wrote about his obligation not to pay a tax to an unjust government after the Fugitive Slave Act passed, for example.#
- But Morrison's little book makes it plain that the acceptance of a grave moral contradiction, a grave injustice, was baked into the country's core there at the start.#
- Obviously it hadn't been ripped out by the time of the Civil War. Or Jim Crow. Or segregated housing, schools, and military units in the 20th century. How about now, with a wide acceptance of poverty in the nation, and enduring housing divisions based on past red-lining and other social divisions? People buying their way out of public schools, sometimes even with taxpayer money, so as to maintain divisions? Dismal rates of participation of different groups in some desirable professions? Any good reason to think that the cruel and indifferent things baked-in-at-the-start have been ripped out?#