White America’s Zombie past that refuses to die
In his first address before Congress on April 28, President Joe Biden laid out a transformational agenda that would define American politics for the next 40 years. If he pulls it off history will put him in the presidential cohort of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. If he gets half of it done, he’ll rank with Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
I would add Ulysses S. Grant to this list because, if you’re Black, what he accomplished with Reconstruction was as monumental and transformative as anything any US president has ever done. The fact that the country wouldn’t sustain it and allowed Confederate traitors to rewrite American history is on the country, not Grant.
But this column is not about Biden’s speech, but Sen. Tim Scott’s Republican response and Biden’s and VP Kamala Harris’s response to Scott’s response.
Scott’s response consisted of the usual inane and absurd Republican talking points, but the one that got everybody’s attention was his assertion that systemic racism does not exist in America. When queried, Biden and Harris demurred on attacking the systemic racism comment, and said the American people are not racist, but the consequences of America’s “historical” racism hadn’t been addressed. All of this was followed by the usual outraged clutching of pearls.
What’s going on here, you might ask. I want you to keep in mind that Biden is trying to pass political paradigm changing legislation and Sen. Scott (we believe) is trying to do a real deal on national police reform with Sen. Corey Booker and Rep. Karen Bass, who had the best response to Scott, saying “he was talking to his caucus”.
And with that in mind, stay with me while I make a detour and historical stop.
The detour
Demonstrating their political bona fetes, people will say that politics is chess and not checkers. Usually alluding to the fact that checkers is a game of tactics while chess is a game of strategy.
What really separates chess from checkers is the pieces. In checkers, all pieces are the same, and they all do the same thing. Chess pieces, on the other hand, are all different and do different things. To play chess you must know what the different pieces do, and what’s their relative value at any point in the game depending on your strategy.
But chess is also different for another reason. It can be played in multiple dimensions. Three-dimensional chess (3-D) is any chess variant that uses multiple boards representing different levels, allowing the chess pieces to move in three physical dimensions. It’s played between two opponents who move pieces or attack boards alternately.
Three-dimensional chess is used colloquially to describe complex, dynamic systems with many competing entities and interests. To describe an individual as playing three-dimensional chess implies a higher order understanding and mastery of the system beyond the comprehension of their peers or ordinary observers, who are inferred to be “playing” regular chess.
Politics, when played by professionals, especially national and international power politics, is three-dimensional chess, except observers can’t see the other two boards. Which means nobody but the political players ever really know what’s going on. Everybody who knows ain’t saying, and everybody that’s saying don’t know.
The historical stop
In order to put all of this in perspective, I reference what a 19th Century master of three-dimensional politics, Frederick Douglass, had to say about another 19th Century three-dimensional master, Lincoln. The occasion was the dedication of the still controversial Emancipation Memorial in 1876 in Washington D.C.
Douglas said, “Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought and in his prejudices, he was a white man.
His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen.
Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound to as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Douglass knew who Lincoln was and who he wasn’t. More importantly, he and Lincoln understood who and what white America was. What Douglass and Lincoln were playing for, in their own ways, was everything. And when you’re playing for everything, you say what you have to say, you do what you have to do in order to carry the day. The only question you ever really must answer is: Do you wanna be right or do you wanna win?
So back to this Sen. Scott thing. What’s going on in Washington DC is a winner take all 3-D political chess game. Biden is playing for the future against a zombie past that refuses to die. Sen. Scott is or isn’t (we won’t really know until we see a bill) in negotiations to pass a national police reform bill with Republican support. You will not know what anything meant until the game is over.
Here’s another way politics is like chess. At the end of the game, you want to be the one that says, “check mate.”
