Note: This is my summary of chapter 4 of “The 1619 Project” (2021) – the book, not the television show. As in the book, “America” means US America and the 13 British colonies that it grew out of. Quoted text, except for the Jefferson quote (which is only referred to), is straight from the book.
This chapter was written by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander, she who wrote the book “The New Jim Crow” (2010) about the mass incarceration of Black men.
“Fear” means the fear that White people in the America have of Black people. It is the dark thread that runs right through the middle of American history.
Executive summary:
“The impulse to resist efforts by Black people to gain freedom and equality and to respond with punishment or violence, no matter whether demands are made through peaceful protest, lobbying, or outright rebellion, has been the definilng feature of Black-white race relations since the first slave ships arrived on American shores. This habitual impulse has been driven by chronic fear, not just of Black people … but, more deeply, of what true justice might require.”
America is caught in a vicious “cycle of racial oppression, rebellion and punitive control”. Attempts to break the cycle through reform (Reconstruction, the CIvil Rights Movement) only lead to a repressive, draconian White backlash.
It started as a fear of slave uprisings in the 1700s, made even worse by the nightmare-for-White-people-come-true of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803).
Thomas Jefferson in 1820:
“But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
But even after the enslaved were freed in the US in 1865, the fear did not go away. It only got worse, leading to Jim Crow laws, the Klan, lynchings, ghettoes, etc. Whites were too afraid to let go of the wolf’s ear.
President Lyndon Johnson in 1967:
“When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
White Liberals like Johnson understood all about “root causes” and mouthed the right words, but in practice they:
“capitulated to a narrative that segregrationists had been selling decades earlier – and that enslavers had embraced before them: namely, that Black people were lazy, had to be forced to work, were inherently or culturally criminal, and thus must be subject to perpetual control.”
And thus stop-and-frisk, mass incarceration, militarization of the police, and Donald Trump. Blacks and Whites are just as unequal now as they were in the late 1960s, it is just that now there are five times more Black people in prison. Repression not reform.
It is why no matter how heavily armed the police (or vigilantes) are, they still have a huge, irrational fear of unarmed Black people. And why that fear seems so strangely rational to the courts and the press and most White people.
The Alexander sisters cover the whole violent litany of American race relations, from the first slave patrols to Tulsa to Kyle Rittenhouse. Despite all of that they see a glimmer of hope in the George Floyd Protests of 2020: even in the midst of a pandemic and a Trump presidency, they had cut across race, age, class and even nation.
– Abagond, 2023.
See also:
- The 1619 Project
- The New Jim Crow
- the litany, in part:
- The invisible foot
- White Rage
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Abagond 
“It started as a fear of slave uprisings in the 1700s, made even worse by the nightmare-for-White-people-come-true of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803)…
And thus stop-and-frisk, mass incarceration, militarization of the police, and Donald Trump. Blacks and Whites are just as unequal now as they were in the late 1960s, it is just that now there are five times more Black people in prison. Repression not reform…
It is why no matter how heavily armed the police (or vigilantes) are, they still have a huge, irrational fear of unarmed Black people. And why that fear seems so strangely rational to the courts and the press and most White people.”
What nonsense. Just because they claim to ‘fear’ their victims doesn’t mean that’s the real reason for their actions. Trying to reduce a complex relationship to an emotion is nonsense. Blacks have been kept as an easily exploited, dispensable source of labor ever since emancipation, such precarity can only be maintained by brute force, hence the so-called ‘fear’.
Slavery was replaced by sharecropping and convict labor. The theft of Black labor is a feature, not a bug.
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“This habitual impulse has been driven by chronic fear, not just of Black people … but, more deeply, of what true justice might require….”
The whole “enlightenment” philosophical venture was flawed because it never dealt with the concept of “Justice” correctly. So colonialization, oppression, injustice continue and fuel fear and hate. That whole philosophy has to be dismantled and revamped in order to create societies (globally) with a much better grasp of “Justice”.
This also includes “Black reform” movements as they fundamentally intend to “reform” not dismantle enlightenment philosophical foundations….This means acknowledging that Black reform movement is also based on fundamentally “rascist” philosophical background. (As well as other “western” reform movements such as LGBTQ+, feminism…etc)
Because if we are to pursue “Justice” for the whole of society—-it is simply incorrect and unjust to “group” it to a section of populace by color, gender, lifestyle preference, religion….etc. This division is the very reason that “Justice” does not work….the concept must start by applying to humans as a whole in principle before carving out exceptions of rights/responsibilities for sections within. And Justice as a concept cannot work well without the balancing concept of mercy added to it. Without this addition, Justice will remain flawed and unbalanced. Epictetus said “if your brother wrongs you, remember not so much his wrongdoing, but more than ever that he is your brother.”
If a society is to re-write a new philosophy of “Justice” then White people, as well as the elites (class division) and those who are marginalized must come together in reconciliation and bring about a comprehensive and balanced concept of Justice that can be implemented equitably to the whole society.
One of the first things to go must be the idea that an individual is the “unit of measure”—while the concept of an individual human being is important in order to anchor rights/responsibilities…a society works as an interconnected unit. (Ubuntu philosophy) What effects one, will invariably effect the other—a society that does not take care of its poor, weak, sick, and helpless—will inevitably have to deal with the consequences of high costs of the consequences—incarceration industrial complex (police, judiciary officers, administrators, wardens…etc…) Healthcare complex (mental health, homelessness, epidemics, institutions….etc), and many other problems.
On the other hand…if these problems are prevented from starting by just and fair measures…down the line, the whole society is better off…..
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