This Is Who You Are, America

Beginning

The only time the United States went to war with itself was over the basic idea of what it meant to be and have rights as an American. The Civil War (even within its name) indicates that it was a conflict over civilization and the ability of people to be people with one another. The slave holding south felt that the non-slaveholding north had encroached upon its “ordained” rights to self determination by creating a political climate hostile to the institution of slave-holding:

Those States have assume [sic] the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.[1]

The result was this first official act of secession:

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.

Adopted December 24, 1860[2]

At the founding of the United States, and in the best reflection of Enlightenment thinking, the “state” was the direct extension of the individual “man”. Of course, underlying both the concept of “state” and “man” is the basic premise that only specific men could have rights while others were merely non-rights holding (non-human) “property”. Indeed, the Civil War was entirely an argument among white men about having the agency to be white men of a certain kind. It was a conflict about honor among white men…which is part of the reason people hold so dearly to the legacies of the conflict today. Up to nearly three-quarters of a million people died over the struggle between white men trying to define the ethics of white manhood and the role of those ethics in the governing mechanism of the United States.

There are those who will strenuously object to this framing. They want to see the non-slaveholding part of the country as heroes. But it was the South that was willing to fight. It was the South that seceded and the South that fired the first shots while the North was only politically and legislatively “aggressive” and Lincoln and others were loathe to do battle over the differences. Still, some will attempt to make the case that the abolitionist north altruistically and nobly waged war “on behalf” of enslaved people and against the “peculiar institution”. My research into attitudes of some of the most vocal abolitionists, some of whom were Unitarians or aligned with Unitarianism paints a very different picture. While Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was aligned personally with blacks seeking freedom and invested in the work of John Brown and author and activist Lydia Maria Child wrote a deeply researched and comprehensive book about the full humanity of black people[3], others such as William Ellery Channing[4], Ralph Waldo Emerson[5] and Thomas Wentworth Higginson[6] held reserved, fetishistic and sometimes outright bigoted supremacist attitudes toward blacks. Their investment in abolition was not about black humanity; it was about how the institution of slavery reflected poorly on white (male) morality and how emancipation could be framed as a philanthropic gesture of white goodness and charity. A significant part of the abolitionist movement in the 19 thcentury was a project (at least among Unitarians) to perfect white manhood.

The result of the 2024 presidential election demonstrates that this is exactly who Americans are today. We have just witnessed a majority, racing to the defense and alignment with white manhood as the center and dominant symbol of American identity.

The agenda that has played out from the beginning of the American experiment, based on the words and thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, are still prioritizing his social location: wealthy, white, male, property owner. This is literally who just won the presidential election…again. The institutional systems of reward respond immediately to scratching this one itch, not because of some detached and individual “concept” of supremacy, or racism, or bias. The markets jump, like a fetus in the womb because this is the nourishment that allows that social location to be born and reborn into the world. It is the only being that is recognized by the American system as having full humanity. The United States is designed to function as the birthing chair for white maleness.

If this sounds rash, and before you throw me on the heap of “wokeness” or “trash” (thank you Ron DeSantis and JD Vance), ask yourself how invested in white maleness you are. Do you, or are you forced to measure yourself on a scale based on your proximity to white maleness? Has your professional life, family life, economic life, etc. been shaped by whether or not you could get a “typical” American job, in a “nice” American neighborhood and attend or send your kids to “good” American schools. Then ask yourself what makes them “typical”, “nice”, or “good”? In your minds-eye are your co-workers female? Are your neighbors trans? Are the teachers black? How have you been trained to assume and aspire first to white maleness and then had to retrofit yourself to reflect that way of being in the world? And if you are a white male, have you ever had to think about it other than when someone like me reminds you of it?

Reflection

The vast majority of homicides among trans people in the United States are transgender women of color[7]. As a reflection of the Jeffersonian ideal of what it means to be “American”, this makes perfect sense. If white, cisgender, maleness is the baseline assumption of being, then Black, Latin-x or Indigenous transgender femaleness is the ultimate defiance of that norm. In the factory dedicated to birthing white maleness, non-white trans-ness is only seen as a deformity against “nature” and therefore the least worthy of survival. The lack of attention to the rates of transgender murder and suicide, not to mention proposed restrictions on gender appropriate medical access and services is the same white male motivated eugenic solution that we’ve seen in previous generations whenever white maleness is threatened by being moved from the center.

When I look in a mirror and ask myself what I will do with this current situation, I first wonder: how am I complicit? How have I reinforced the white-cisgender-male-as “normal” paradigm? How have I, even as a black gay man, been invested in propping up the thing that wants to see me and my world silenced, put in a closet or maybe even dead? What might I do to work outside of that self-denying psychology? What is my alternative truth?

Go, look in a mirror. Regardless of how you voted, think about the election and admit that who the country elected is a direct reflection of what it means to be an “American”. Own it…own your role in it. It belongs to you. You participate in it economically, socially, creatively, intellectually, ethically and politically. If you don’t like the way those words stick in your throat, or clog your brain, then change it. There are alternatives.

It’s time the rest of us stopped dying for the ongoing war between white men.

-ALD

Notes:

[1] “Avalon Project — Confederate States of America — Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” accessed November 7, 2024, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.

[2] “Avalon Project — Confederate States of America — Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.”

[3] Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Allen and Ticknor, 1833).

[4] Channing, William Ellery, Slavery, 1836.

[5] Nell Irvin Painter, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons,” The Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (2009): 977–85, https://doi.org/10.2307/27694556.

[6] Christopher Looby, “‘As Thoroughly Black as the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire’: Erotics of Race in Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment,” January 1, 1997, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-004.

[7] “Everytown for Gun Safety Transgender Homicide Tracker — EveryStat,” Airtable, accessed November 7, 2024, https://airtable.com/appPLAJ5mUFwndPkQ/shrkgUrJPmtGxHZ0m/tblEhXLsohkNldLZp.

Originally published at https://spirituwellness.com on November 7, 2024.