It has long been known that American exceptionalism is little more than a marketing ploy, yet the world cannot look away from this troubled, young country. This year’s presidential election had millions around the globe glued to the results. As day after agonizing day crept by, the fascination only grew.
Chattel slavery is unlike any other form of slavery humanity has known, yet it has for far too long been erased from the American discourse.
From Senegal to Finland to New Zealand, the world did not hold its breath, but it certainly inhaled sharply a number of times throughout the tense week between the election and the result.
The day Joe Biden was announced as the winner, a friend in Iran messaged me saying the U.S. presidential election results may have more effect on his country than ours. The United States, through a combination of military might, neoliberal capitalism, and cultural exports, still dominates much of the world.
Am I falling into the hero complex so often exploited by Americans when I insist our responsibility to do better is not just for ourselves, but for the world? Our slide toward total fascism has been halted. Is this temporary? I hope not.
In any case, I do have an idea of how we can do better—perhaps even, in the words of our Lame Duck First Lady, “be best.” It’s not complicated but it is difficult: To have a better future, we must reckon with the past.
Critical history can illuminate so much about the moment we are living in today. The history I am thinking about critically today is one of the foundational horrors of this nation. Chattel slavery is unlike any other form of slavery humanity has known, yet it has for far too long been erased from the American discourse.
“The story of the African American is not only the quintessential American story but it’s really the story that continues to shape who we are today,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. The legacy of slavery has to be interrogated, understood, recorded, and constantly considered.
As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about critical history: “From time to time, however, this same life, which uses forgetting, demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness. For it should be made quite clear how unjust the existence of something or other is, a right, a caste, a dynasty, for example, and how this thing merits destruction.”
Surely the legacy of chattel slavery is such a thing; it needs to be destroyed. Instead, the racial oppression codified into the formation of the United States has been tinkered with, modified, lessened, but still rules the land.
As law professor Dean Spade has written: “We have moved toward formal legal equality and purported neutrality in law and policy, yet the racial wealth divide has grown, racialized-gendered criminalization has skyrocketed, and immigration enforcement is more significant a state project than ever.”
The destruction of these systems, as Nietzsche tells it, will lead to the creation of something better. Dividing up oppression into single-axis issues, like race or gender or able-bodiedness, will not do the job.
Black Lives Matter is an intersectional social movement. Its mission statement states: “We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.”
After the June revival of the BLM protests, it has become the largest movement this country has ever seen, according to number crunching by The New York Times. The movement has started to see success in reducing some police forces and in changing how they operate. It is deliberately diffuse in both its leadership and goals. BLM seems to take a multi-pronged approach, not a prescriptive one, and this offers the whole nation a map.
There is much to do, and many ways to do it.
BLM also invests time and energy into a “healing justice,” defined as a framework for Black people to “holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts, and minds.”
This is what the United States needs, and if it can achieve it, the whole world will do better, and maybe even “be best.”