Racism, it's Not Against the Law

Our nation has become immune to shock since President Trump, with the "Make America Great Again" mandate, has taken office. While listening to Michael Cohen's testimony this past week on MSNBC I learned that Trump used 129 million dollars in public money to pay for a Trump Links golf course in The Bronx, aside from the other little things his supporters have already dismissed, tax evasion, using charity money to pay for expensive self aggrandizing portraits, colluding with a foreign government to sway an election, paying mistresses for their silence, close to 500 instances of threatening enemies, and racist comments. What really struck me was that the commentators during the break in testimony in the context of Trump's myriad of illegal acts, dismissed his racist comments as "not against the law."

Not having committed a felony should be the lowest common denominator for the leader of our country, as it would be for a cashier at McDonald's. Moral and intellectual fitness should be equally important as a clean criminal record. Of course racism is not against the law. We have freedom of speech in the constitution, the wealth of our nation was built on the backs of black slaves, and for centuries our laws enforced slavery and white supremacy. Racism enforces this legacy. The evolution of social conscience, activism, and civil disobedience has gradually changed the laws to protect the rights of black people, women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ population. Changing the law is only one component of sharing power equally. The law does not punish racism, or even racist acts that cause harm, unless it is enforced.

Racism was incorporated into the law in the American colonies as a strategy to divide the races and render the lower classes less powerful against the ruling class. During Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, people of all classes and races united against Governor William Berkeley, driving him from Jamestown, and setting the capitol on fire. Following the rebellion, the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 by the Virginia House of Burgesses prohibited black people, regardless of free status, from owning weapons, black people could not employ white people, court protections were established for a free and legal slave trade, and the apprehension of suspected runaway slaves . The codification of a "white identity" encouraged lower class white people to think they had more in common with the white ruling class than they had with black people. Racism became the fuel to make the lower classes do the bidding of the ruling class.

Almost two hundred years later, in 1857, the Dred Scott Decision in the United States Supreme Court case, Scott v. Sandford, a slave, Dred Scott, attempted to purchase his freedom for himself and his family, but his master refused. After moving through a series of lower courts, his case reached the Supreme Court, presided over by Judge Roger Taney, where in a 7-2 decision it ruled against Dred Scott, establishing that black people, whether free or slave, could not be United States citizens, and could not sue in court, the right to own slaves as property was affirmed in the constitution, and slaves, even if transported to free states by their owners, would remain slaves. Written into this decision was that slaves were an “inferior and subordinate class of being,” and that a permanent and intractable barrier should be erected between slaves (black people) and the white race. Judge Taney summed it up with the infamous quote that black people, whether slaves or former slaves, and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Following the passage of the 13th amendment (1865), which freed the slaves, the 14th amendment (1868), which granted them full citizenship, and the 15th amendment (1870)which gave them the right to vote, full equality was still out of reach. In reaction to these Federal amendments, local and state “Jim Crow laws” perpetuated the legacy of racism for almost another century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legal segregation and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, or national origin.

The election of the first black United States president, Barack Obama was a sign of progress, but if you think we live in a post-racial society, consider how different the national reaction would have been if he had been alleged to have committed any one of the crimes or moral transgressions attributed to President Trump in the Senate Hearings, or if he had been alleged to have made "lawful," constitutionally protected racist comments against white people. The United States was founded on legally enforced racist white supremacy. So saying “racism is not against the law” is a bit of an understatement. The law should not be the only yardstick for what is morally right, as it is only a reflection of the values of the people currently in power. Change did not happen because the people in power willingly relinquished it. People demanded and fought for change, protested, and disobeyed unjust laws. The laws may have evolved to protect the people it originally exploited for free labor, but the attitudes that created those laws still exist. As the case of President Trump illustrates, laws are for the little people, not for the powerful, and they are selectively enforced to maintain the status quo.