Race and the American Republic
Race and the American Republic
Affirming and expanding the insights of Glenn Loury
In today’s commentary, I take as my point of departure a video posted on April 22, 2024, in Substack Notes, in which Glenn Loury reads from a prepared statement.
In the fullness of time, we have become equal citizens of this great republic.
Should that have taken another hundred years? No.
Neither should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place.
Slavery has been a commonplace human experience since antiquity.
Emancipation: The freeing of slaves en masse after an abolition movement.
That was a new idea. It was a Western idea.
It was an idea brought to fruition over a century and a half ago in our own United States of America, with the liberation of 4 million people, an achievement which would have been impossible without moral commitments and philosophical insight cultivated in the 17th and 18th centuries in the West.
This is a beautiful statement, rooted in objective truths. It discerns the dialectical complexity of the human condition: enslavement and the idea of emancipation pertain to the same reality, a contradiction which unfolds through time, such that “in the fullness of time,” equality and a “great republic” have been constructed. It appreciates that the social sins of the American Republic have been commonplace in human history since ancient times, making them understandable and forgivable sins, which the nation was able to overcome by drawing upon its most important spiritual and moral resources. Loury is rightly proud to be a citizen of such a nation.
But we need to reflect further on the question of abolition and emancipation. We for the most part hold the principal leaders of the abolitionist movement in high regard, because they were clearly on the right side of history in moral terms. However, we tend not to analyze them with hindsight and with emphasis on the idealist pitfalls of political practice. If we were to do so, we might note that the major abolitionist leaders were known as “radical abolitionists” who rejected any proposal for the gradual abolition of slavery with compensation for the slaveholders. They called for immediate and uncompensated emancipation on strictly moral grounds, brushing aside the fact that the purchase of slaves was generally legal in the places where U.S. slaveholders purchased them, and if the state were to change the rules after the fact, it is logical that slaveholders would expect some compensation from the state. Moreover, it would be logical for slaveholders to want a gradual transition, so that necessary economic adjustments could be made. The notion of gradual and compensated abolition had much to recommend it, inasmuch as technological progress was rendering slavery an economically outdated form of labor. Compensated emancipation would have cost the U.S. government far less than the Civil War, in both economic and human terms.
In addition, if negotiations among key political and economic actors toward gradual and compensated emancipation had been comprehensive, they could have included attention to establishing the necessary economic conditions for a decent life for emancipated slaves, which the state in such circumstances would have had a moral obligation to attend. In this regard, more than formal political equality was required. Agrarian reform was needed, converting slave families into the freeholders of the land they worked, with necessary technical and financial support. Such a program could also have included white tenant farmers. The slaveholders could have been compensated for both the slaves and the land, accompanied by incentives for investing in the industrial development of the region, which would have complemented the creation of middle-class farmers (black and white), providing the agricultural and industrial basis for the economic development of the region, in which all actors would have a stake, regardless of race or class.
There was not sufficient political maturity to take such an enlightened road, and there are several actors to be blamed for this, not merely slaveholders and apologists for slavery. As is known, what occurred was emancipation and the partial protection of citizenship rights through the force of arms, which was abandoned a decade later, such that full citizenship rights were not attained until 1965. Many emancipated slaves and their descendants endured nearly a century as impoverished cash crop farmers, imposed through the violence and political oppression of Jim Crow.
Recognition of these facts does not negate what Loury has said. Abolition, emancipation, and full citizenship rights were indeed attained. It took longer than it should have, as Loury notes, but it in fact has been attained, primarily through the political maturity of the African-American movement and their white allies from 1919 to 1965, drawing upon spiritual and moral resources deep within the soul of the nation.
In addition to unpacking the story of emancipation, we also can expand upon Loury’s insight by looking at the international situation. Scholars and activists in the United States observe world events in a superficial manner, especially with respect to that other world of the global South, and therefore they tend not to appreciate that Western philosophical concepts have been appropriated by the anti-imperialist and socialist movements of what came to call itself the Third World. The appropriation of Western philosophical concepts is clearly evident in the New Culture Movement in China in the 1910s, out of which came the Communist Party of China, founded in 1921; in the emergence of Western-educated intellectuals from the traditional scholar-gentry class in French Indochina, especially Vietnam, in the 1920s; in the inclusion of the Vietnamese emigrant Nguyen the Patriot—later to be known to the world as Ho Chi Minh—by the French Socialist Party in Paris in the 1920s; in the emergence of a people’s movement in Cuba in the 1920s and the founding of the first Communist Party of Cuba in 1925; in the declarations of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1961 to the present, rooted in the 1955 Bandung conference held by leaders of newly independent nations in Asia and Africa; and in the discourses of leaders today in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and many other nations of the Global South.
With grater observation of worldwide dynamics, we possibly would be able to discern that the American Republic, having attained in theory and practice full citizenship rights for all, now must attend to a subsequent task of cooperating with the nations of the world in the construction of a world-system defined by respect for the principles of the equal sovereignty of nations and mutually beneficial trade among nations, as the basis for world peace and prosperity. The attainment of such a just world order would constitute the culmination of Western philosophical concepts, evolving in political practice through a dialogue of civilizations.
One nation, with diverse identities and cultures, but united in purpose
On April 23, Loury posted another short video on Substack Notes, again pointing to fundamental truths.
There are those who make a living by focusing on our differences.
By claiming that there is something fundamentally wrong with America.
These people are in error and their grave error threatens to tear us apart.
They must be opposed forthrightly.
It is far too easy to overstate our problems and to understate what has been achieved.
The right idea I maintain for black Americans and for the country at large is in the conduct of our public business to emphasize our common American interest and to de-emphasize our superficial racial differences.
If we were to observe the anti-colonial movements of the world in the past 100 years, we would see that many of the nations in the formerly colonized and semi-colonized regions of the world have made strides with respect to economic development and political stability. And they have done so by avoiding the “grave errors” that Loury identifies. When they criticized politicians and historic tendencies in their lands, they never suggested that their nations are evil in essence. Because such a message would have implied that the people would have no option but to attend to their own particular or individual interests and ignore the wellbeing of the nation and the world. Moreover, the politically intelligent leaders of other lands have always called the people to unity, recognizing diverse interests among the people, but calling them to a united program of action, focused on the economic development of the nation, with policies to attend to particular needs formulated in the context of a unity of national purpose.
There is a place for personal identity deeply rooted in African, Latin, and/or indigenous consciousness. Such life-style decisions should be respected, affirmed, and applauded. But, “in the conduct of our public business,” we must “emphasize our common American interest,” which is of greater importance in relation to the common good than are racial differences.
Loury notes that “there are those who make a living by focusing on our differences.” I have in previous commentaries discussed the denunciation of “race hustlers” by black conservative scholars and community organizers. See, for example, “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022.
Thank you, Dr. Loury, for your insight, your intellectual integrity, and your courageous rectification of errors.
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Further Considerations
The Third World socialist revolutions of the twentieth century are best understood as advanced manifestations of people’s revolutions. They are distinguished by their structures of people’s power and states controlled by delegates of the people. People’s states formulate national development plans—including a place for private enterprise—that are oriented to the development of the national economy, seeking to improve productivity and create a just distribution of goods and services. People’s states stress public education and public media, striving to develop a will-informed citizenry that is not manipulated by distortions disseminated by wealthy particular interests. People’s states have vanguard political parties that seek to guide the people with moral authority and effective persuasion, but not having privileged legal authority.
Third World people’s revolutions are based in the Western philosophy of the “rights of man” and natural law. Said rights include political and civil rights, but they also include social and economic rights, which are listed in the UN Charter, a document that the revolutions repeatedly affirm as a fundamental normative guide for humanity. And said rights include the right of nations to sovereignty, so that they can freely pursue economic development, which is the most fundamental of all rights, because without it no other rights can be protected in practice.
The Third World people’s revolutions believe in modern science, and they recognize and appreciate the West’s achievements in this regard. They have little in the way post-modern post-truth conceptions. They believe that the true and the right can be understood on the basis of human reason, empirical observation, and dialogue, including a dialogue among civilizations. They believe that scientific knowledge is central to economic development and to a better future for humanity.
The Third World people’s revolutions condemn Western colonialism as a violation of the principles that the West itself has so eloquently proclaimed. They are not interested, however, in identifying particular individuals to defame and discredit; they are more interested in understanding enduring economic and political colonialist structures that function as current obstacles to the socioeconomic development of nations and peoples.
They believe that ancient religions and modern philosophies formulated on a foundation of divine revelation and human reasoning in all regions of the world constitute the moral and spiritual legacy of humanity, which must and can be the foundation for a future era of peace and prosperity for humanity, constructed by means of cooperation, overcoming the prevailing historic tendency of competing imperialisms.
We ought to know and appreciate that on September 2, 1945, before a crowd of one-half million people continually shouting “independence” in Ba Dinh square in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Declaration began by citing the “undeniable truths” of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” And it cited the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen emitted by the French Revolution: “All men are born free and with equal rights and must always remain free and have equal rights.”
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