Re-wronging Rights
Banned Histories of Race in America
This is a true story, but it sounds fake as hell.
Twenty Black leaders were asked to meet with the US government. The government had a series of questions for them, but they all basically boiled down to one: What do your people want?
The answer was simple: Land. This was January of 1865. The confederacy had been defeated and reparations needed to be made. It was kind of a no-brainer, really. The US was whole again and a bunch of failed insurrectionists had a ton of land they sure weren’t going to be using anymore. So, what’s the problem, really? There wasn’t one. The government quickly agreed and a thirty-mile-wide strip of land from Charleston, SC to the St. John river in Florida was granted to the formerly-enslaved Black population of the United States of America.
This was more than a land grant. The land would be exclusively Black. Whites were not permitted to live there. It would be governed and managed by Black folks under the protection of the US military. Within six months 40,000 Black folks had moved onto the land and that was that…
…Except, you probably know that there isn’t a 400,000-acre territory of the south-eastern United States with a legally exclusive Black population. This is because after Lincoln’s assassination, the country was in the hands of his Confederate-sympathizing successor Andrew Johnson. In the fall of 1865, Johnson saw to it once again that Black folks were removed from their homes and the land was returned to the failed insurrectionists who owned it before the war. Reparations hadn’t lasted a single year.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “40 Acres and a Mule”, this is that story. One of the reasons that story sounds so fake is because, even though the goddamned enslavers got reparations, it is impossible to imagine the US government ever giving Black folks our due. It is so impossible that we’ve all accepted that the story of America is not of a country righting its wrongs but of countless groups of people endlessly and eternally and honorably seeking equality. We never quite mention with whom we are seeking to be equal. Or just who exactly is keeping us from that equality. On the rare occasion that America rights its wrongs, we never notice because it so quickly re-wrongs them, pats itself on the back, and tells us we’re all in this together.
I thought about 40 Acres and a Mule a lot during President Biden’s Juneteenth speech when he said of our collective inalienable rights, “We’ve never lived up to that promise, but we’ve never walked away from it either.” I thought of that story again just 10 days later when Biden reused that very same line in his comments on the Supreme Court overturning Affirmative Action. I thought of this story when LGBTQ rights got removed last week. And when Roe got overturned over a year ago now. I think about this story every time these base and bare-minimum freedoms are re-taken from us. And I wonder how long this can go on before we’re left with nothing but a story.