Rev. Barber is chief architecht of Moral Mondays, founder of Repairers of the Breach, and author of The Third Reconstruction (Beacon Press).
We need a moral movement to create change.
On election night I felt a great sadness for America?—not a Democratic or Republican sadness, but a sadness for the heart and soul of the nation. It is impossible to react to the election of Donald Trump with anything less than moral outrage. Trump is, as David Remnick wrote for The New Yorker, “vulgarity unbounded,” and his election has not only struck fear in the hearts of the vulnerable but also given rise to hundreds of documented cases of harassment and intimidation.Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because he was willing to trumpet their fury and affirm their sense, deeply rooted in this nation’s history of race and class, that a new world had conspired against their interests. Trump offered no answers to their fears. He merely said, “You are right to be afraid and very afraid. Obama is the bogeyman of coming diversity that will undo the world you grew up knowing, and I alone can save you.”
While we do, indeed, face a dire situation, this is not new. Trumpism is as American as apple pie. There could be no Donald Trump without America’s first black president. Brother Van Jones got it right on election night: we experienced a “whitelash.” And we must be clear: every stride toward freedom in U.S. history has been met with this same backlash.
We faced it during Reconstruction, in the shadow of slavery and amid the wreckage of the Civil War. African Americans joined hands with whites in the North and in the South who were willing to see one another as allies. Within four years after the end of the Civil War, white and black alliances controlled every state house in the South. Together, they elected new leaders. Almost all of the southern legislatures were controlled by either a predominantly black alliance or a strong interracial fusion coalition. They hammered out new constitutions from a deeply moral perspective.
These fusion coalitions 150 years ago also built the first public schools and in state constitutions gave all persons a constitutional right to public education—something that to this day has not been done in the federal constitution. In the state constitution of North Carolina they stated that “beneficent provision for the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a civilized and a Christian state.” They included labor rights and the right to “enjoyment of the fruit of your own labor” in 1868, long before the Knights of Labor came south with their first southern campaign. They knew then—black and white together—from a moral fusion perspective, that labor without living wages is just a different form of slavery. They expanded access to the ballot and wrote a new fairness into criminal justice.
But in four years, the experiment of the First Reconstruction faced powerful and immoral opposition. And we must understand that opposition then to understand America right now.
Many former Confederates saw black citizenship and interracial alliances—fusion coalitions—as inherently illegitimate. They organized the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize white fusionists whom they viewed as race traitors. They attacked black leaders.
We can’t make sense of what’s happening in front of us because, somehow, we’ve failed to see that this has been happening all along.
Conservatives began to wail against taxes. The cry about cutting taxes was an effort to end the First Reconstruction by keeping the state governments unable to fulfill the promises of the post-slavery economy and to lift up the former slaves. They wanted to keep the fusion coalition from expanding opportunity and enlarging democracy and supporting public education.
Why were they doing all of this—rolling back voting rights, taking away criminal justice reform, and undoing equal protection under law? They said they wanted to “take back America.” They said “we came to redeem America.” Look at that word “redeem”—they used moral messages for immoral activity. And by the turn of the century, all of the gains of the First Reconstruction had been overturned.
This same pattern of progress and backlash repeated itself during America’s Second Reconstruction—what we often remember as “the Civil Rights movement.” But we’ve glossed over this history too often. So we’re shocked by Donald Trump. We can’t make sense of what’s happening in front of us because, somehow, we’ve failed to see that this has been happening all along.
But inside this long, sad tale about America lies a roadmap for today. We must begin to think in terms of a Third Reconstruction. I believe the turmoil we are witnessing around us today is in fact the birth pangs of a Third Reconstruction.
The demographics are changing in the South and in the country. We know that if you just register 30 percent of the unregistered black voters in the South and you get them to vote along with progressive whites and Latinos, the South is no longer solid. We saw that with the breaking through of President Obama in 2008. It wasn’t about President Obama; it was the expanded electorate that broke through in North Carolina and Florida and Virginia. That was the first sign of an idea whose time has come.
When Obama broke through in North Carolina in 2008, we witnessed firsthand the whitelash that America is reeling from right now. Some folks are saying we’ll have to wait and see what a Trump administration decides to do. But we’ve already seen it in North Carolina. The blueprint for what it looks like to “take back America” in the 21st century was laid out in the extremist makeover of North Carolina’s government during the 2013 legislative session. What’s the policy agenda of Make America Great Again? I can tell you because we’ve seen it:
Give tax breaks to corporations and to the wealthy, attack public education, deny people access to health care, attack immigrants, attack the LGBTQ community in the name of “religious liberty,” strip environmental protections, and, finally, make it easier to get a gun than it is to vote.
But just as there’s been a Moral Movement in every era to raise a moral dissent against extremism, we’ve seen in North Carolina what a 21st century Moral Fusion Movement can look like. According to Public Policy Polling’s analysis, “Moral Mondays” laid the groundwork for the only successful resistance to the “Trump-effect” on down ballot races in the 2016 election. As such, PPP Director Tom Jensen argues, this movement offers lessons for resistance to a Trump administration.
Read more
https://thinkprogress.org/rev-barber-moral-change-1ad2776df7c#.giw443sr0
No comments:
Post a Comment