A Dozen Score & Four—the Lofty Experiment after All These Years

the great American celebration—the sober reflection

by  the editorial board

It was 10 days ago that Americans celebrated all the years—a dozen score and four—since the beginning of the lofty experiment.   Lincoln famously and so succinctly described, after just four score and seven, what the question that this experiment tests has always been: whether any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can endure for long at all.   The greatest adversaries of that conception and that proposition have never come from outside of this country but have always been we Americans ourselves.   And just as in the day when Lincoln was speaking those famous words, we in this day are again at a great crossroads of this experiment.

Nearly four and a half decades ago, on a new TV show called Saturday Night Live that’d debuted just a few weeks earlier, Richard Pryor, the stand-up comedian who’d gained fame—and laughs—with his brilliantly insightful cultural and subcultural observations and mimicry, poked fun at this simple, straightforward, obvious notion: our problem is that we just don’t know how to deal with the white man.

And this is of course not only the case for all of us of color; it’s also just as true—in fact at least as true—for all of us who are white.   A dozen years before Pryor’s joking observation, James Baldwin, the writer and activist and one of the 20th century’s most keenly analytical and articulate commentators on American history, culture, and society—just a few weeks before President Kennedy was killed, in the depths of the civil rights struggle—incisively pointed out this core, basic need: for white people to look into their own hearts.

When they, 244 summers ago, proclaimed that bold conception and professed that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare” that brash and brazen proposition—while “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” and “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”—those white people were making the absolutely clear determination that they should allow themselves to be the ones to run their own country.   So we all—whether white or of color—have certainly come to the day when we absolutely should begin to take a reckoning of the results of those particular white people letting themselves attempt it—to begin to keep score of (to paraphrase the famous verse used by Samuel F. B. Morse to test his great, world-changing invention) what the white person hath wrought.   As we try to look into their hearts, we might start by taking consideration of—

who they were, where they came from, how they got here, what they did then, and why:

The Day of the Turkey or the Day of the Giving of Thanks: a celebration and Profiting or Profiteering: Rerenaissance, Rereformation, and an Open Note to Greta and The 400th Anniversary of Francis Bacon Publishing Novum Organum: & the value of science (of knowledge) becoming controversial and Americans—No Shame in Guilt: a Reason Why Whites Disdain Blacks and The Disappointing Fact that There Aren’t Any Bad Cops to Blame in Any of the Murders by Police

how they, as colonies of a great imperial power, turned to France, another great colonial imperial power, to gain their independence and to be freed from the empire—and the special relationship this created between them and France:

Come!   Citizens!   To the Bastille!!: the great celebration of France—the nation that handed the US its existence

how they have come to finance and build up a global economy—and have become a great colonial empire themselves—and how they have brought it to the precipice of collapse:

Into the Heart of Darkness—of Money: Upstream to Its Source and The Year the Earth Stood Still: Shutting Down a Global Economy and Having to Be Culturally Mainstream to Work in America: Taking the Mainstream Whiteness Test and Accountability for the Unanticipated Lockdown: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

how they have fared in the foreign wars that they have engaged in, including fulfilling that special relationship—by freeing the French from occupation in the only foreign war the US has ever won (over a century and a half after France handed them their independence) and by trying to maintain (starting a decade later) the imperial dominance that France had set up in one of its colonies:

The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month: a commemoration and D-Day—to Take Back a Continent: a 76th anniversary remembrance and Liberation of Saigon Day, Fall of Saigon Day: lessons & mislessons of America’s begotten & misbegotten war on the 45th anniversary and The Foreign Wars in US History: One Win out of Seven

what they look like—to themselves and the rest of the world—and accomplish at those times when they have stood up for those principles of equality for all humankind that they pledged their lives and (that which was much more important to any of them than life) their fortunes and (what was far more important to all of them than even their money) their sacred honor:

He Dealt with Crisis—Whither the Trajectory He Left Us on: a diamond jubilee remembrance of FDR’s passing

what they look like—to themselves and the rest of the world—at those times when they have lost track of those principles and ideals and goals that they pledged to stand up for:

The Wretched Refuse of Our Own Teeming Shores: réfugiés américains and Hud—the Hunk, the Real Boogeyman: the white American, the white Texan

Soberly reflecting on what we may discern in that heart of theirs is not a process that will be completed in a minute or an hour or a day.   Yet, as we so closely approach a quarter of a millennium since the inception of this experiment, and try to make that discernment, we may take note of a process that South Africa attempted, as it was trying at the end of the 20th century to move on from its apartheid past: truth and reconciliation.   A clear and basic shortcoming with this approach—why it was a failure before it even could begin—is obviously that reconciliation will always be impossible in circumstances where there had never been conciliation in the first place.

If Americans ever find anything in the white person’s heart that could give hope of ever achieving those principles and ideals and goals that they proclaimed their dedication to, it seems that the self-evident and inalienable truth is that all Americans will have to come together to find and institute mechanisms of full truth and complete conciliation.   Meanwhile—whatever may have been “the rectitude of” the “intentions” of those white people who launched this experiment—that “Supreme Judge of the world”, to whom they appealed, continues—moment by moment—to tally the score.

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