The Corrupted Soul of America

As I spent some time over the weekend in Moss Point tending to my mom and enjoying family, the horrific images out of Chicago intruded. My emotions ran the gamut: from shock to rage to despair. So much is happening around us, and it is happening all at once. I kept thinking to myself that the country is fundamentally broken – the soul of America has been corrupted – and it will take revolutionary action to fix it. Maybe the fact that I am teaching about the Black Power era colored my thoughts. No matter. I do know, given what is happening and what I see and feel in my gut, that we cannot tinker around the edges of this. What is being revealed is a rot at the heart of America, U.S.A.

This thought about revolution led me to reach for my book, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. There I wrote about the need for revolution of value. Here is what I said:

If we are committed to American democracy, and by some twisted fate I must be, we have to work for something more transformative. A revolution of value upends the belief that white people are more valued than others. And that goes beyond a mere statement of our commitment to racial equality. We have to break the racial habits that give life to the value gap, and that starts with changes in our social and political arrangements. Most habits come to us in the context of our living in social worlds not of our own making—in our neighborhoods and broader communities. Without question, habits move us about until something gets in the way and interrupts the usual order of things. When they are no longer taken for granted, habits can change, because we notice they are out of sync with the task before us, with the moment we live in, or with the person we hope to be.

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In my more hopeful moments, I believe that the little boy who played Tonka trucks with me in Moss Point—now old enough to have his own son or daughter—doesn’t think of black children as niggers like his father did. Times have changed, and the blatant signs of white supremacy have been dismantled. But I am less optimistic about whether he believes that poor black children need a social safety net or decent schools or that those children’s parents deserve an equal opportunity to earn a living wage and to own a home without a subprime loan. Or that they deserve to grow up in neighborhoods where they aren’t always under suspicion or under surveillance, where jails or prisons or premature death do not cut short any reason for them to dream. Given that, I suppose I still believe he thinks, like his dad that I am a nigger. For what else does the word mean? It is just shorthand for a life less valued.

Remaking American democracy is going to require a revolution of value to transform our habits. This isn’t a call, as President Obama made during the press conference after the George Zimmerman trial, “to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our communities.” Something more expansive has to happen. It has to occur at many levels: in government, in communities, among individuals. Besides, calls to “widen circles of compassion and understanding” only reinforce the belief that durable racial inequality is, at its root, a problem of racial reconciliation: that if we could all just get along, our racial problems would disappear.

This is one dimension of the illusion that protects American innocence. “Getting along” does not measure up to a more fundamental concern about racial justice at how we are all complicit in racial injustice. The illusion hides the rot.

A revolution of value would seek to uproot those ways of seeing and living that allow Americans to support racial inequality [to stand by in relative silence and watch what ICE is doing] and yet live in ways that suggest they believe otherwise. It is a revolution to close, once and for all the value gap—to finally rid the country of “niggers.” It involves three basic components: (1) a change in how we view government; (2) a change in how we view Black people; and (3) a change in how we view what ultimately matters to us as Americans.

These shifts are not abstract considerations. They get to the marrow of what blocks the way to real change in this country, and they will require political mobilization and massive disruption of the status quo.

Dr. King urged the nation to undergo a revolution of values. The United States needed to shift, he said, from a “thing-oriented society” to “a person-oriented society,” to see that the gap between the rich and the poor reflected an economic order that stripped millions of people of their ability to even imagine a decent living, and to understand that war puts us on the road to “spiritual death.” As he put it, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the great triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Americans have to live together, in the deepest sense of the phrase—to make a life together that affords everyone (and I mean everyone) a real chance. This can happen only when we experience genuine connectedness, when the well-being of African Americans is bound up with any consideration of the well-being of the nation. When we are not asked to disappear and, instead, have the space to reach for our best selves.

Unfortunately, the value gap and our racial habits stand in the way of any major shift in the cultural and political life of this country. Too many Americans remain committed to the idea of white superiority and are willing to defend that idea at whatever cost. They refuse to give up the idea that white lives matter more than others.

That refusal, with all of its damning effects, requires a radical response.

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