The arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice – it bends because ordinary people have forced it into a more just shape. And that deserves be celebrated.
There’s a comforting truism that tends to coalesce around social movements: that the arc of the universe ultimately bends towards justice.
The idea behind this powerful phrase is that while justice may creep along in fits and starts, its overall direction inexorable. And while its enemies may prevail for a time, standing against it is like trying to hold back the ocean.
As a call for resiliency in the face of the real setbacks that any push for social change worth its salt is going to encounter, it serve admirably. When elevated from an aspiration into an operating principle, however, it can sedate us to how justice is actually secured.
Because here’s the thing about the bending of that moral arc: the universe has jack squat to do with it. It bends because calloused hands have forced it into a more just shape.
The eight hour work day, women’s suffrage, the dismantling of Jim Crow: these imperfect but real gains didn’t just ‘happen’. Every one of them was wrestled from a system that was set up to monopolize power, wealth, and dignity for a select few. In spite of America’s self-professed image as the land of liberty, the republic didn’t begin its life as a democracy – at least by how that term is understood today.
The United States began as an ethnostate where the benefits of democracy were reserved for a privileged in-group: white, male landholders. Yet this herrenvolk republic was born with a fatal flaw – an internal contradiction that would pave the way for the vast social transformation that would follow.
‘We The People’ *
When ‘We The People’ was penned, it was understood at the time that ‘The People’ didn’t actually include everyone, coming as it did in an epoch where humanity itself was a graded category.
The Enlightenment ideals of universal liberty that the US Constitution was drawing from also codified race as an institutional reality with a fervor that would have made the Spanish Inquisition blush. One where full personhood – and an accompanying capacity for self-governance – was co-extensive with being a white European. And the polis that was being constructed in the image of its Framers was restrictive by design.
The selective equality being championed by the Founders rested upon a taken-for-granted dominator hierarchy with white male property owners at the summit, and everyone else bearing the weight below. The same men who signed the Bill Of Rights would also go on to codify – whether by conviction or acquiescence – that black bodies were three fifths of a person. And that women weren’t full members of this polity, but subjects who were bound by its laws without having a voice in shaping them.
Not every Founder was comfortable with this arrangement – Thomas Paine, John Adams, and Benjamin Rush were all outspoken opponents of slavery – but they were outvoted and outmaneuvered by those with more to lose. And the system they helped create was built around the compromise that was reached with slaveholders – not its dissenters.
We’re used to thinking of hypocrisy as a bad thing, but here’s it’s upside: falling short of a stated ideal opens the door to change. What most of the signatories to this compact didn’t anticipate is that those who were systematically excluded from the benefits of this arrangement might use its lofty ideals as a crowbar to pry open doors that were never meant for them.
For as long as there has been an America, there have been people who’ve refused to make peace with this vast chasm between stated ideals and reality.
That long struggle – and what it produced – deserves to be celebrated.
Radical Honesty
So let’s do so, while being honest about our history. Articulate a vision of America that’s worth celebrating. One that doesn’t whitewash where we came from. That doesn’t fall into the dangerous assumption that what was wrestled from that system can’t be clawed back – the decade since Trump descended from his golden escalator should have made that much abundantly clear.
National mythologies are tricky things. In most times and places they tend to congeal into ‘here’s what’s so great about us’. Few nations indeed have been able to look themselves in the mirror and reckon honestly with what stares back.
America’s inability to arrive at an honest self-appraisal – or one that’s broadly shared among a wide cross-section of the public, at any rate – just puts it in the mainstream of other countries, where sweeping unpalatable parts of the past under the rug is the norm.
So let’s make an attempt to buck that trend, and see what can be salvaged when the sanitized veneer is stripped away.
The United States was founded upon a successful genocide of its indigenous inhabitants. For the first third of its history, its promise of universal liberty co-existed with a form of chattel slavery that among the most brutal the world has ever known. After a civil war that bled the nation white, it would be another century before the promise of full citizenship for black Americans was even partially honored. For the last sixty years, opponents of these unfinished gains have been working methodically to roll them back.
Taken together, that’s a closet that’s as packed with skeletons as anything that came out of Europe in the 30s and 40s – just spread out over a much longer timespan. Yet accountability begins by dealing with Reality as it is, rather than how we wish it to be. And that involves acknowledging the gap between who we claim to be, and what we’ve actually done.
But this legacy isn’t all we are.
We’ve also been a nation of iconoclasts, with no shortage of people who grabbed that crowbar and got to work: Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, Eugene Debs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joe Louis, MLK, John Lewis, Malcolm X, Rachel Carlson. Also: the Underground Railroad, the Suffragettes, the Freedom Riders, Black Lives Matter, ICE watch patrols in occupied Minneapolis. A long lineage that’s refused to settle for half measures and broken promises.
What this record shows us is that we have a choice for how we hold this history, and what kind of country we want to become.
The Two Paths
Two paths lie before us.
We can embrace the path of willful ignorance, where we soak in the warm bath of self-congratulatory narratives, scrubbed of anything that complicates the story. One where we tell black and brown Americans to ‘get over’ racism. Where we give the powerful and well-connected free rein to tread on everyone else. Where men are free to exploit women, so long as the victims in question are people no one really cares about. Where we avoid bringing up that many of our family members, co-workers, neighbors voted for a fascist and a rapist, out of a desire to avoid talking about ‘politics’.
Or we can embrace a more courageous path. One that involves some radical acceptance about what this country has been like for non-whites, for women, for non-gender conforming people. To accept the leftist critique of America as valid, while channeling it towards the type of coalition building that can actually move the needle. To agree with liberals on the importance of rebuilding of our institutions, while recognizing that our institutions won’t save us. To embrace the libertarian ideal of freedom from coercion, but for everyone – not just those who lucked out in the birth lottery. To put into practice what generations of conservatives have been preaching, and take some personal responsibility for the problems we’ve inherited. To address the psychological vulnerabilities that reactionaries are exploiting, without ceding a single goddamn inch to their repulsive, authoritarian vision of America.
And to recognize that none of this is going to be quick or easy. That all of us can get burned out, and that stepping back for a time is okay – so long as we come back.
For me, that’s an easy choice.
Which is why I’ll be participating in the All Of U.S. Nationwide Mobilization for Truth, Equality, and Freedom on Saturday, June 27th.
Call To Action: All Of U.S. 250 Mobilization
This year marks the 250th Anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, and our country is at an unprecedented crossroads. At a time when our country should be coming together to celebrate all that we are, how far we’ve come, and commit to finishing the work to make America a place where freedom and equality are truly for all, a white supremacist faction is pushing our country in the opposite direction.
The MAGA regime is in the midst of trying to whitewash our past so they can whitewash our future. We can see this in their attempts to not just erase the history of enslavement and genocide, but roll back hard-won civil rights victories.
We refuse to comply. While they plan a whitewashed celebration of the 250th. We are coming together to:
- Repair our full history rather than erase it.
- Celebrate the progress we have made through struggle.
- Commit to the work to ensure liberty and equality for All of U.S.
Find an event near YOU here: allofus250.org