Jamelle Bouie, pictured above, writes opinion columns for The New York Times. One of them, "1776 Is Not Just What Ron DeSantis Wants It to Be," is reproduced, in its entirety, below. I think it is worth reading.
I particularly liked Bouie's discussion of the Declaration of Independence, and how it has come to be seen as the essence of our national commitment to equality. Bouie writes, specifically, about how the following statement, from The Declaration, has come to be understood:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
The "standard narrative," according to Bouie (and according to legal scholar Kermit Roosevelt, quoted by Bouie) is that while the Founders didn't, actually, establish a government or society that reflects these high-flown assertions, The Declaration has become an assertion that our national commitment is, and will always continue to be, a commitment to "universal equality."
I have pretty much said that this "standard narrative" reflects my own understanding of who we are as a nation. I think that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s oft-quoted statement about how the "long arc of history" is bending, always, towards justice, is also a reflection of this understanding of our national commitment to equality.
Kermit Roosevelt, however, who is the author of a book called, The Nation That Never Was, believes that this "standard narrative" actually sends us off in the wrong direction. Roosevelt's point is that "We are saying, in short,
that justice can always wait since we’ll eventually reach the
destination of our ideals."
That understanding - and I certainly agree with Bouie in this - would be exactly the wrong message to draw from the statements in the Declaration. Bouie suggests, following Roosevelt's lead, that we ought to look to Abraham Lincoln, and what happened right after the Civil War, as the way to understand how we should fulfill our historic obligations to equality. According to Roosevelt, the history of Reconstruction, and the principles of equality that have been incorporated into 14th Amendment, are the best statement of what our national commitment has been, and must be.
In my own blog posting on this subject, "The Story America Tells Itself About Itself," I cite to both the Declaration and to Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. I think Bouie, and Roosevelt, make a good point, but there is a "both/and" way to understand our history. That, in fact, is exactly what I advise.
I don't want to skip past Roosevelt's main point however. Whether we look to The Declaration, or to the 14th Amendment and the legacy of Reconstruction - or whether we adopt the "both/and" understanding I am urging, it is far past time for us to "get that done."
There is a legal maxim that states, "Justice delayed is justice denied."
Let's not forget that. Let's take a lesson from Star Trek and "make it so."
oooOOOooo
1776 Is Not Just What Ron DeSantis Wants It to Be
As part of his ongoing war on public education and so-called wokeness, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, wants to put the state’s colleges and universities under strict political control.
Last
week, Republicans in the state’s House of Representatives introduced
legislation that would, with DeSantis’s approval, escalate and expand an
already aggressive effort to politicize higher education. The proposal,
House Bill 999, deals with both administration and curriculums.
It would make illegal
the use of any “diversity, equity, and inclusion statements” as part of
the hiring, promotion and tenure process, as well as give the
governor-appointed state university boards of trustees the right to
“review any faculty member’s tenure status.” The bill would also give
the trustees final say over hiring decisions, sidestepping faculty
member input as well.
When it comes to
teaching, House Bill 999 would remove gender studies and critical race
theory, “or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems,” from
college and university instruction.
There’s also a requirement
that those same general education courses not “suppress or distort
significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches
identity politics” or define “American history as contrary to the
creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the
Declaration of Independence.”
There is
much to say about this bill, and the Florida governor’s larger
educational agenda, as an attack on free speech and academic freedom.
For now, though, I want to focus on this requirement that colleges and
universities teach American history as consistent with “the creation of a
new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of
Independence.”
This requirement is
obviously partisan. But it rests on a bipartisan and widely shared
vision of the Declaration and the American founding, in which 1776 — and
the statement of principle at the heart of the Declaration of
Independence — is an engine of progress that leads inevitably and
inexorably to everything from the Constitution to the abolition of
slavery.
The founding fathers, in this
telling, may not have lived up to the ideals of the Declaration, but
their words would shape and inspire the struggles to come. “The
assertion that all men are created equal was of no practical use in
effecting our separation from Great Britain,” observed none other than
Abraham Lincoln, “and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that,
but for future use.”
That is the
standard narrative. But what if the standard narrative is off? What if,
as the legal scholar Kermit Roosevelt III argues in “The Nation That Never Was:
Reconstructing America’s Story,” “the standard story gives us an
understanding of American history that is not wrong so much as
backward,” one that “misleads us about who the heroes of our history
are” and about “who we are, and who we must be to become the heroes of
our story”?
In particular,
Roosevelt, who is a professor of constitutional law at the University of
Pennsylvania, says that we get the Declaration wrong. “The Declaration
of Independence was not a statement about human rights in the abstract,”
he writes. “It was not a declaration of concrete human rights, either.”
Instead, the Declaration of Independence was about, well, independence:
It first explains the origin and nature of legitimate political authority. It then explains when the exercise of political authority ceases to be legitimate. And then it endeavors to show that the situation of the American colonists fits the criteria that justify rebellion.
According
to Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of equality was not an
assertion of the need for equal treatment under the law or a declaration
of the rights of individuals to enjoy liberty and equality. Rather, it
was a standard account of Enlightenment social contract theory, brought
to bear for use in the Anglo-American conflict. In the Declaration’s
political philosophy, “People start out equal,” Roosevelt writes,
“endowed with natural rights but lacking the means to protect them. They
create governments to secure those rights, and the government’s
legitimate authority comes from their consent. If the government fails
to do its job, the people may reject it and start anew.”
Jefferson’s
equality, writes Roosevelt, “is a precise and limited concept.” It
exists in the hypothetical state of nature, not the real world of
political life. People may start out equal in the abstract, but do not
stay that way when they enter into society.
There’s
an obvious response to this: So what? What difference does it make what
Jefferson meant when what matters is what later Americans heard? As
written, the Declaration of Independence may not have been a statement
of universal equality, but it became one in the struggles against slavery and race hierarchy, as activists and politicians used it for their own ends.
The
problem, argues Roosevelt, is that tying our modern egalitarian
commitments to the Declaration and the founding is to say, in no
uncertain terms, that our values can survive, even thrive, in a world of
profound inequality and injustice: “In asking modern Americans to see
the founding as an Edenic movement, to see the founders as role models
who stated our deepest ideals, we are asking them to accept that those
ideals can coexist with slavery, with rape, with enslaving one’s own
children because of the color of their skin.” We are saying, in short,
that justice can always wait since we’ll eventually reach the
destination of our ideals.
But if not the Declaration, then what? Where, and with whom, should we root our values?
Roosevelt’s
answer lies in the Civil War and Reconstruction. It is Lincoln, after
all, who claimed the Declaration for a “new birth of freedom” in his Gettysburg Address
and gave it much of its modern meaning. But to do that, he and the
United States had to overturn the old order. “Many people,” Roosevelt
writes, “following Lincoln’s cue, think of Reconstruction as a process
of better realizing founding ideals, through the process of change set
out in the founders’ Constitution. We would do better to think of it as a
revolution that destroyed Founding America.”
The results of that revolution — the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — transformed American society. They were intended, as Frederick Douglass wrote in 1872, “to give full freedom to every person without regard to race or color in the United States.”
“In
order that this intention should be carried out and acted upon,”
Douglass continued, “power for that purpose was given by conferring upon
Congress the right to enforce the amendments by appropriate
legislation.”
And among those
amendments, the 14th was a truly radical revision to the basic structure
of the American republic. “There will be, its first sentence says, no
perpetual outsiders,” Roosevelt notes. “No hereditary exclusion from our
political community.” If the Declaration is about an abstract people in
a hypothetical state of nature, then the 14th Amendment is “about real
people born in the United States and possessing legal rights and
citizenship,” guaranteed by the power of the federal government itself.
The
Reconstruction story, Roosevelt argues, is a more honest one. It puts
the struggle for liberation at the center of our national political
imagination, and it doesn’t ask us to rationalize, defend or even
justify the worst actions of the men who founded the United States.
We
are not the heirs to the first American republic, Roosevelt writes, “We
are the heirs of the people who destroyed it.” Our political community
is based on an “inclusive equality” and not an “exclusive
individualism.” It is the difference between Patrick Henry’s cry of
“Give me liberty, or give me death!” and Julia Ward Howe’s great imperative “Let us die to make men free.”
By
no means do I think that any Florida legislator has this particular
argument in mind to condemn or reject. (In any case, under House Bill
999, Roosevelt’s book would be unteachable in Florida’s colleges and
universities.) But as everyone in this conflict over history
understands, education is as much about the creation and maintenance of a
social order as it is the dissemination of skills and knowledge.
Whether
you accept the standard story of the Declaration of Independence or
want to root our values in the Civil War and Reconstruction, it is true
that our embrace of equality as a national ideal in the 20th century has
been a powerful force for a fairer, more expansive view of individual
freedom and personal autonomy in American society.
The
question, then, for Ron DeSantis is not which allies he hopes to
empower or which elections he hopes to win, but what order he hopes to
create and usher into being (emphasis added).
Image Credit:
https://www.nytco.com/press/jamelle-bouie-joins-the-new-york-times-opinion-pages-as-columnist/
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