Black Lives Matter and the Last Reconstruction: A Letter to my Younger Siblings in the Streets
By: Charles Lawrence
Tags: Racial Justice, Democracy, Race, Protest, BlackLivesMatter

James Matthew Daniel / ACLU

The movement for racial justice has shown us what democracy looks like. The Biden-Harris administration must make that vision a reality.

Wonderful people,

I see you marching by the millions, raising your voices in dissent, shouting “Black Lives Matter,” demanding an end to police violence. On a single day this summer, more than half a million people join your demonstrations: in every state, in cities and small towns, in red states and blue. Fifty-thousand in Philadelphia; 20,000 in Chicago’s Union Park; 10,000 blocking traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; and thousands more on freeways in Los Angeles and Seattle, disrupting business as usual, demanding that we hear and know the rage you feel, challenging us to know that we are all hurting.

I see you and I see your comrades at your side: Asian, Latinx, Muslim, queer, trans, Indigenous. They have marched with us before, knowing that concentration camps, border walls, and transphobic murder are all kin to anti-Blackness. I see your white siblings marching with you too, more than I have ever seen before. I see you and I am filled with pride, joy, and gratitude.

Our Constitution promised a government for the people and by the people, a government that would make its chief purpose providing for the people’s welfare. The propertied white men who made this promise never intended to keep it. I am a law teacher, constitutional scholar, and abolitionist. For more than 50 years I have taught my students to use law in the struggle for humanization, to work against subordination, not for it. I still believe we can make democracy work and live out the promise of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. We can reconstruct law to work against oppression, to heal the wounds of 400 years and birth a nation where every life truly matters.

Police Killing, COVID-19 Killing, and the Truth We Know in Our Bones

On May 25, George Floyd is killed by a Minneapolis police officer. His murder is captured on video by a young Black girl: Floyd on the ground, a white police officer’s knee on his neck, the officer’s body language casual and contemptuous. For more than eight agony-filled minutes, Floyd pleads with the officer, “Please. Please. I can’t breathe,” until he falls silent and no longer moves.

A few weeks earlier, a young Dominican American woman stands outside a New York City hospital. Her mother is in intensive care, intubated and hooked to a ventilator. The last time they spoke, the daughter stood outside her mother’s apartment door, her mother on the other side looking through the peephole, already sick with the virus. Now the daughter stares at her cell phone. A medical worker has arranged a call. The worker pans her camera to the bed; her mother is still alive, fighting for her life, but she does not respond to the young woman’s voice. It is as if she has been swallowed by the machine that keeps her alive.

“Mama linda,” the young woman says to her mother’s image on the screen. “My beautiful mother. I love you so much.”

Sixteen days later her mother dies, the same way most of the pandemic’s more than 300,000 victims have died: alone without friends or family, the final consolation of her daughter’s voice coming through a phone held by a stranger.

We have witnessed death by police and death by disease as the government turns its back on our trauma. Our lives did not matter. We know these truths because we are witnesses who carry the knowledge that we could be next in a country that learned to devalue all life when it devalued Black life.

This is what you force us to see as you march.

Black bodies are made vulnerable to police by racist tropes filled with fear of Black invasion, domination, and sexuality. Black folks know this truth in our very bones. We see it in the white officer’s face, casual and confident in his contempt for the life expiring beneath his knee, confident he will escape judgment. We watch this knowing that we could be George Floyd, that he could be our father, brother, son. We know anew the slave-driver’s lash, the lynch mob, the Klan riding in white hoods. We come of age disciplined by the presence of this terror. These killings mark the measure of our worth and tell us Black lives do not matter.

COVID-19 reminds us of the vulnerability of our bodies to disease in a country where health care is not a right. The inequities of racism and poverty bring death disproportionately to Black, Brown and poor bodies. Why did we let this happen? Why did the world’s richest country let more than 300,000 people die? We keep our distance, strategizing to save ourselves, each of us alone and lonely as we face a killer disease.

Scientists tell us we can stop the death count through aggressive public health measures, just as other countries have done. But our politicians will not act. Our helplessness in the face of state inaction reveals a harsh truth: The disease that threatens our bodies is born of a sickness in our body politic, the vulnerability of our democracy.

A Nation Constituted in Dehumanization

How have we become a people that tolerates inaction while disease carries off thousands of people each week? The connection between the vulnerability of the Black body and the vulnerability of our democracy begins with the middle passage: 12 million Africans kidnapped from their families and brought here in chains. This history binds us to one another, the killer to the killed. We know if we dare to look, to imagine ourselves in the hold of the slave ship — hundreds of bodies chained, the dark, the sickening smell, the screams, the moans. We know if we dare consider the embodied reality of the hundreds of years — both before and after the founding of the nation — when rape, torture, forced labor, the taking of children from parents, and the sale of human beings was foundational to American law and American wealth.

At the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, 800 weathered steel columns hang from the roof, the name of an American county where Blacks were lynched etched on each one. The names of victims of the lynch mobs line the walkway, telling the story of each killing:

“Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman.”

“Zachariah Walker, burned alive by 1,000 men, women and children.”

“Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.”

Only one generation separates us from these murders. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, my mother sat at her best friend’s kitchen table when neighbors brought news that her friend’s father was taken from his place of business, hanged, and burned. The trauma of this violence is bequeathed to me and to the children and grandchildren of the crowds who gawked at lynchings, bringing along their children and their picnic dinners. America’s psychic wound is a habit of inhumanity written deep in public memory. In George Floyd’s murder, our past is made present; a contemporary lynching now scars our children, too.

The founding fathers committed the nation to slavery as its economic means of independence. Their law made people property and made ownership of property basic to individual freedom. The contradiction between human property and liberty required that Black people be less than human. American freedom — white freedom — relied on Black people’s lack of freedom. This blood-soaked truth is the material and psychological residue of the history that shaped this country’s character.

A History of Resistance

Alongside the history of dehumanization is the history of resistance. Black people ran away by the thousands, challenging the system of slavery and subverting the primacy of property over humanity. Together with white abolitionists, the enslaved and their free Black kin moved the country to do the unprecedented and transcendent: to abolish slavery and declare Black equality. In the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Constitution’s contradiction was confronted, and our first Reconstruction began.

Whenever resistance movements challenge and disrupt racist structures and institutions, there is backlash. Whenever we move toward freedom the plunderers deploy the politics of fear to disrupt progress.

In the first Reconstruction, Black people ran for and held office; created their own schools and organizations; demanded work, land, autonomy. Soon, the government abandoned the freedom movement. Former masters employed fraud, economic coercion, and a reign of terror to strip Blacks of the franchise and economic autonomy. The 14th and 15th Amendments were effectively nullified.

A new generation of freedom fighters took up the fight for our democracy: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Panthers. They called us the New Abolitionists; we called ourselves “the movement.” Organizing, teaching, learning, and speaking out in the face of violence; caring for and being cared for by the communities we organized; disturbing the moral comfort of white America. We learned the beauty and strength of our own humanity. With each act of resistance, we gained a growing recognition that we could alter the conditions of our lives.

You know this truth. Revolutionary transformation comes out of active resistance. It comes from what people in the movement learn about themselves and their power to change their conditions. This is your legacy, the construction of American freedom you carry to the streets.

A Train Called Freedom: Demand Everything We Need

Throughout America’s history, two trains have run side by side. One train carries the deadly cargo of violence, slavery, and white supremacy. It carries the collective trauma of our history and the structural inequities that leave us vulnerable to police killings and pandemics. This train carries the language and politics of hate, of neo-Nazis proclaiming white power, and crowds cheering a bully who calls immigrants criminals.

The second train, the train you ride and conduct, is the freedom train. You are the newest abolitionists. You insist that we face the horrors of our past and present, reminding us that we are not Nazis; that freedom does not require lynch mobs, concentration camps, or border walls. In forcing us to respect Black life, you demand that our country live up to its promise.

I hear my father singing a refrain from a spiritual that his father sang to him: “This train is bound for glory, this train.” Just as we are bound for our destination, we are bound to one another. We will create this freedom together.

Your movement is about more than resistance to racism. When you chant, “This is what democracy looks like,” you ask us to look at the collective beauty of the people who march in solidarity with you. There is joy in your fight for our democracy. Your chant illustrates the world we are fighting for, a world where basic human needs are a collective responsibility.

“This is what democracy looks like” says “we the people” are our Constitution’s framers. We will make a Third Reconstruction, to finally achieve the transcendent purpose of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; to replace the Constitution of slavery with the Constitution of freedom. This chant calls for a transformation that redistributes privilege; it says there is no such thing as too much justice.

If reconstruction requires transformative law, history teaches us that too often, reform efforts have merely modified systems of racial and social control: slavery reformed to segregation, segregation to mass incarceration. Our transformation must demand laws that name and quantify the material conditions of inequality created by racism. We must demand that those conditions end. No more study commissions to tell us what we already know, no more confessions of white fragility, no more hiring a diversity consultant to sit by the door. The mistake in this moment is to ask for too little.

Habits of Inhumanity: Why Black Lives are All Lives

White supremacy taught us to look away from human suffering, and so it continues unabated. Historically, our efforts to ameliorate ill health, poverty, and suffering are met with an old trope: “Those people” are not worth spending money on. Some people are justifiably poor, ill-housed, sick. Spending tax dollars will not help them, the logic goes; it will just encourage their natural indolence.

A version of this rhetoric persists in every effort to solve social problems. The binary of insider and outsider, worthy and unworthy, is grounded in anti-Blackness, learned in slavery’s schoolhouse, shackled to our democracy.

In a democracy, every citizen participates to create a polity that best meets the needs of every citizen. The deliberate and persistent exclusion of Black citizens is the reason our weakened democracy has so readily bent to meet the demands of the wealthy and so rarely met the demands of the least advantaged. In demanding full equality for Black people, we demand democracy in fact. Every civil right, every civil liberty, depends on undoing anti-Blackness. As we fight racism, we bring democracy from the streets and into our lives. Our success is measured by the quality of those lives.

In 1963, when I was young and our nation was on fire, our older brother James Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew. Baldwin used the metaphor of a mirror to capture how white supremacy is prolonged and propagated by our denial:

“[A] vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is

produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who

are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the

white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as

he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or

not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is

all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought

and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

The tyranny of Baldwin’s mirror, the fear of being judged by those whom you have oppressed, is also the fear of seeing oneself. The love Baldwin describes constrains the denial that keeps white Americans from seeing how anti-Blackness renders their own humanity unworthy of respect and love. When a raging virus kills them by the thousands and the government does nothing, it is not just Black lives that do not matter.

You call on to us to turn away from the mirror, to see how racism has harmed and harms us still; to see that freedom for one does not require subjugation of another, that freedom exists for none in a killing field.

The stakes now are as high as they have ever been. Our democracy is in crisis. It has struggled under a president who made fearmongering his platform and science-denial his strategy. We have watched men with guns bring murderous hate to places of worship. We have watched elected officials decline to criticize libelous conspiracy theories or gun-toting race-war militias as the siren call of white supremacy attracts increasingly vocal followers. Regardless of who is in office, we must rid our nation of the racist ideology and structures that make Trumpism possible.

From Shared Pain to Shared Freedom

When we acknowledge the suffering that comes from oppression, racism, alienation, and violence, there is a moment of epiphany. We see that our pain is shared, and we can breach the barriers that divide us.

Your pain brought you to the streets. As you march, you scream “stop killing us,” and “hands up don’t shoot.” You tell us, this hurts too much — we cannot bear to watch our mothers, fathers, children, and siblings be killed again. “I am Breonna Taylor. I am Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Ramarley Graham, Vernicia Woodard, Oscar Grant, Latasha Harlins.” The roll call goes on.

Your t-shirts reading, “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd and Eric Garner’s dying words, speak for all of us. Racism constricts our throats and souls, knees always on our necks. “I can’t breathe” is a battle cry. “I can’t breathe” is an alarm, a warning that racism and injustice suffocates everyone. The ordinariness of the violence hurts even more; the knee on George Floyd’s neck is not the aberration. It is repeated ritual. These murders do more than punish without due process; they signify the state’s contempt for black humanity. You reject this contempt. You demand recognition. You call for the nation to fulfill our Constitution’s promise — every right, every dignity, everything we need, embracing everybody.

We are at the crossroads of great turmoil and amazing possibility. We will either take the road backward to fear, terror, and annihilation, or roll forward on the freedom train to a reconstruction that includes all of us, truly equal, fully human, recognized, protected, cared for, and supported. This is what democracy looks like. This is the last reconstruction.

In love and struggle,

Charles Lawrence