Constance Hilliard
Today's Guest Post argues that it has always been that way, back to the beginning.
College classmate Constance Hilliard sent me an email that caught my attention. It was on a subject this blog addresses frequently, the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. She said that Trump's authoritarian is nothing new in America. A significant number of Americans have never accepted the idea that all people were created equal or should have equal economic, social, or legal status. An autocratic governance preserves inequality. Democracy puts it at risk.
Today's Guest Post argues that it has always been that way, back to the beginning.
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| Hilliard |
I had primarily understood Constance Hilliard to be a student of history and genetics, particularly as they relate to Americans of African heritage. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in African history and Semitic historiography. She is a professor of evolutionary African history at the University of North Texas.
She devoted her early career to tracking down and translating handwritten manuscripts from Timbuktu and other centers of learning in the region known as the Western Sudan (modern day Mali, Northern Nigeria and Chad). Her interests evolved.
She pioneered a sub-field of ancestral genomics. This methodology brought answers to some of the most troubling and persistent health issues in the African-American community. This group suffers a 75% rate of hypertension, which all too often led to kidney failure. Her research showed that their ancestors occupied the deep interior of West Africa, known to be one of the most sodium-deficient regions in the world. These communities evolved gene variants that allowed their kidneys to function on 200 mg/sodium/day. However, in the U.S., African-Americans consume the national average amount of salt, 3,400 mg/sodium/day. No wonder they struggle with chronic diseases tied to sodium metabolism: They consume 17 times the amount consumed by their ancestors. She told me her research
led her to examine other genetic maladaptations. These include new details about the low rates of osteoporosis in Black Americans and their high risk of some aggressive cancers related to calcium over-consumption in ancestral environments.
Guest Post by Constance Hilliard
Democrats are not too smart. We live in a fantasy world of our own making. My view is that America stands at a crossroads between democracy and autocracy, and the split is about 50/50. As to how we got here, that is easy. We never stepped away from it. In two-and-a-half centuries we haven’t budged a bit. Of course there have been all manner of social changes in our society. But what didn’t change was the fact that the democracy advocates shared power with the authoritarians. And sometimes the latter even took the lead. How else would we have ended up behaving in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, like a slightly more charitable version of Putin?
The democracy created by our founding fathers was a beautiful construct, in an artistic and intellectual, rather than realpolitik sort of way. The half of the American population that never believed in representative government or even the rule of law lived off slavery for half our history. Their privileges were protected. The South in fact won the Civil War with no land redistribution for the former slaves, with Jim Crow, lynchings, and discrimination within every sector of society.
The only reason we’re now faced with Trumpism and the anti-science craziness of right wing Christians is because, as with the Civil War, our authoritarian side is horrified by the prospect of their white privileges fading into egalitarianism. Having a Black president woke them up. But we Democrats on the other hand pretend that our democracy is so solid that we should keep pushing for bipartisanship with fascists.
17 comments:
This is a difficult post. If we what you say --that no political compromise is possible with racist and or plutocratic forces in the US -- would that not mean some form of civil war or political secession?
As counterargument, fifty years ago about 5% of Americans approved of a Black/White marriage. Today it's about 95%. And we did elect a Black president for two terms. I'd say that while the other side hasn't given up, it looks like time is on our side.
It's likely true that the founders weren't blind to the hypocrisy of slavery. Some of them spoke against it, but ending slavery is glaringly omitted from the "all men created equal" document memorized by schoolchildren. But it is also true that the founding began the long journey to the present, with mileposts like emancipation, voting rights legislation and an African American president along the way. As we saw this week, it continues with the first African American woman on the Supreme Court.
The democratic/authoritarian conflict is more complex that its racist component. The Regressive elements in American society are well entrenched, from religion to corporate influence in government. Americans are now enslaved by a materialist consumerist ideology that constrains their freedoms with debt and an ever increasing cost of living, dominated by the cost of healthcare.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What makes it so long, as Ms. Hilliard points out, is the number of people who gravitate toward autocracy. They’re more upset about Black history (which they refer to as CRT) being taught in schools than they are about that history itself. They’re more upset that Trump lost than they are about his attempted coup. They adulate Trump, not in spite of his contempt for truth and the rule of law, but because of it.
We’ve made a lot of progress since the days of enslaving Blacks and slaughtering indigenous peoples, but we obviously still have a way to go. This is no time to be resting on our laurels.
The polarization in this country is not all about race. People who try to cast it that way are just contributing to the polarization.
Calling people “racist” is fighting words, especially when something completely different is going on.
There’s an old sign from the Tea Party days that said, “it doesn’t matter what this sign says, because you’ll call it racist anyway.“
As we could tell by the Confederate flags, a lot of the Tea Party was racist - still is I'd wager, but now they're Trumplicans.
The best response to reflexive and careless accusations of racism coming from the left is to grin sardonically and repeat the brilliant words of Ronald Reagan:
“There you go again…”
Ignoring facts is what the republicans do best.
Michael T, I hope you aren’t saying this isn’t a racist country. Even here in liberal Oregon (only state whose constitution made it illegal for blacks to settle here) there are a plethora of racist pigs. My neighbor, but one example, once saw me installing a roof near his mansion (He became rich building Pineapple Bombs to blow the lower extremities off Vietnamese people who didn’t notice them under the forest duff-especially kids
So this jerk drives up to my construction site, and hollers, “Hey, Malcolm, have you heard the latest nigger joke”?
My response: “get outta here, Kenny” I don’t want to hear any more of your racist “humor'”.
Kenny says, “Are you calling me a racist?” I say, “well, duh”. He then throws a ringer: “I’m not a racist; I just hate niggers”.
So sad when diabetes started disassembling the racist pig. A toe, more toes, feet, legs, finally the death of his kidney and lungs took him out. So sad. And, of course, he smoked like a fucking chimney.
Kenny is a tiny fraction of the joco racist element, though he WAS more outspoken about it.
Malcolm,
The US is a country that has some racist people in it, just like everywhere.
It depends what you mean by “racist country.” I might or might not agree with you, depending on that.
Let’s get serious – we all know what racism is, and this comes as no surprise: Studies by the journal Nature “found that explicit racial and religious prejudice significantly increased amongst Trump’s supporters, whereas individuals opposed to Trump exhibited decreases in prejudice.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01287-2
There are many competing definitions of “racism.” We don’t all know the same thing.
Ask the victims of racism what it means to them.
Ask black people and you would still get different answers.
Let's not quibble. We know very well what racism is and that it's evil, sick and wrong, not to mention stupid.
Albert Einstein once said, “A theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” That goes for the social as well as the physical sciences.
Shakespeare once wrote, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dealt with in your philosophy.”
“Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.”
— unknown
... and it seems to be an unwritten plank in the republican platform.
If the US had not elected a Black POTUS the Tea Idiots would have stayed under their rocks.
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