After January 6th it would not be hyperbolic to say the United States is facing a political crisis of potentially epic proportions.
No one can question that America in 2021 is now an unstable society, which means its future is up for grabs. That means we should be giving serious thought to what it means to be Black in America. That means we think about our future in America in the context of our history, there is some reason to hope, but little cause for optimism.
As President Ulysses S. Grant considered the possibility of another Civil War, he wrote, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
Now, I don’t know if America (meaning white America) is on the brink of a civil war, but white Americans are once again faced with an existential question about their identity – who are they and who are they to each other (they have never seriously considered the question about who we are or who we are to them).
The first time they were faced with the question was during the American War of Independence and the founding of the Republic, and the second time was the Civil War. To use Grant’s description, it is obvious today that the forces of superstition, ambition and ignorance are massing, and we are still waiting for the intelligent patriots to take the field.
But let us be clear.
Black people, People of Color (POC) and other marginalized communities, are not having a crisis. Yet we are once again potential victims of the crisis white people in America are having. What do I mean?
When white Americans resolved their first identity crisis, they didn’t include us in the constitutional solution as part of “We the People.” After the Civil War there was passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and Reconstruction – but all that was underdone by the white Compromise of 1877 that ushered in the era of American apartheid, aka Jim Crow.
No one can predict the future, but in order to prepare for the future one must spend some time thinking about it. I’m not talking about dreaming or fantasizing about some romanticized version that has no chance of happening. I am referring to serious, empirically based speculation about future possibilities and how current events will define, impact or influence unknown future circumstances.
You can put those thinking about the future into three buckets – optimists, pessimists and realists.
Usually, pessimists believe the fix is in because of some cabal somewhere pulling strings behind the curtain- think a real Wizard of Oz. Trump’s Neolithic base and their QAnon conspiracy theories are an example. Another is someone we all know, the ‘Conspiracy Brotha.’ They both believe the same thing, but each thinks the Wizard is doing something different. They are both wrong, and here is why.
The world is a complex place, and you can’t centrally manage complex systems. And even if it were possible to centrally manage complex systems, it could not happen in the United States, given the pedestrian intellect and marginal competence of the American leadership class.
Optimists are people who always see the upside because they fundamentally believe the universe is fair and just. But the optimists have a different but fallacious predicate. It is their belief in the inherent goodness of mankind.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said the moral arch of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice, but that is only true if someone bends it that way. Despite extraordinary technological advances since humans discovered fire, there is nothing preordained about human progress.
In fact, you could question the notion of human progress, because despite the extraordinary technological advances and the historic episodic outbursts of empathy and acts of kindness, Homo Sapiens remain the most pathologically violent, cruel and murderous species in the history of the planet.
Whatever progress we have made (in terms of our humanity) as a species has been despite who we are, not because of who we are.
But it is possible to remain hopeful about the future. My hopefulness stems from the random nature of the universe. I am a realist about the future. I believe at any point in time there are multiple future possibilities, and the future that emerges is always the result of decisions made or not made in the present. And whether you are an individual or a people, you get to decide every day what that future will be. That requires serious contemplation and reflection in this moment, so you won’t be reactionary in the next.
Rather than obsess about what white America will do or not do, something we have no control over, let us focus on what we should do. And it makes no difference, if for once they rise to the occasion and do the right thing, or again regress to the mean. We get to decide what happens next. As long as we understand the existential question Shakespeare had Hamlet pose when he mused, ‘to be or not to be, that is the question?” We are not always in charge of the options we get, but we’re always in charge of which options we choose.