The Salient Failures of American's Post-Civil War Reconstruction (original) (raw)

Reconstruction: It's About Time

The United States prides itself on its multiculturalism and pluralism, but both terms promise more than is delivered. While it is true that the U.S. has tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity, diversity is more often tolerated than celebrated; and it is often characterized as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to be embraced. Because northern European cultures played a dominant role in drafting the 18th century documents that “founded” the nation, their role in creating this contested terrain is critical. If racism and suspicion of others characterized as strangers are built into those documents, they are pivotal artifacts for understanding the categories “us” and “them” in a construction of northern European culture. In relations with indigenous peoples, with new immigrants, and, often, with descendants of immigrants, the political/economic structure of the United States violently instituted in the late 18th century and violently adjusted during the 19th has marked northern Europeans and their descendants as “us,” everybody else as “them.” In this paper, I examine the political philosophy that underwrites that division, with particular emphasis on Thomas Jefferson; describe the alternative to Jefferson that David Walker formulated early in the 19th century; and draw on Cornel West’s genealogy of modern racism, Alice Walker’s meditations on Flannery O’Connor and the South, and Toni Morrison’s “rememory” to suggest that it is time to turn our attention to reconstruction almost 150 years after the war that was supposed to initiate it.

Dismantling Civil Rights: Multiracial Resistance and Reconstruction

Social Science Research Network, 2001

SYMPOSIUM-YAMAMOTO learning I honor the African Americans and their friends who struggled in the schools, workplaces, lunch counters, buses, and streets for civil rights so that all might benefit. The conference organizers tell me also that I am here because my frontline and scholarly civil and human rights work, and the diverse civil rights work of this article's co-authors, crosses racial, geographic, and national boundaries. In our work toward justice, we engage the difficult task of trying to build bridges over the divides of race, citizenship status, gender, sexual orientation, age, and disability. Civil rights, we have come to see, start with African American justice and now also reach out like branches on a large tree to connect many others struggling for just treatment in America. 3 With these experiences as a background, my presentation for the "Civil Rights in the New Decade Symposium" and this collaborative article focus on the pressing need for progressives to cross traditional boundaries of race, national origin, and citizenship and, additionally, gender, sexual orientation and disability and forge lasting alliances to combat the hugely successful, orchestrated twenty-year conservative assault on civil rights. Border-crossing and alliance-forging by "those committed to genuine equality," which is how we define "progressive," has always been difficult. Now, it is even harder, and 4 See e.g., Florida Vote Prompts Demand for Investigation/Black Leaders Demand Answer to Florida Vote Questions, S.F. CHRON., Dec. 16, 2000, at Al (reporting that many of the precincts affected by voting irregularities were predominantly Black).