by Julian Cola
After two and a quarter centuries, legions of Americans are calling for repair of the U.S. voting system by abolishing the Electoral College. However, white liberals just “lost an election, not hundreds of years of labor, their names, languages, cultures, and customs. But they insist upon repair, a rapid solution to an age-old problem.” There is an even more fundamental structural problem in U.S. society awaiting a fix: reparations for slavery.
Reparations Hypocrisy: God Bless The Liberal That’s Got His Own
by Julian Cola
“Can they challenge the legitimacy of the electoral college while, at the same time, ignoring calls for conciliation and reparatory justice as it pertains to black people in America?”
A survey was taken after Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article, The Case for Reparations, went viral in 2014. The results were all but unanimous—94 percent of white American respondents said they were opposed. Though it’s fair to assume that such a high percentage of naysayers, more likely than not, include liberals to KKK sympathizers (or actual members), progressives to white nationalists, devote feminists to the 53 percent of white women who voted Trump, in the fine words of the US president-elect, their disagreement with Coates was, “very unfair.”
White liberals have reached their tizzy boiling point per the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. Adamantly and ferociously, in every corner and crevice of the country, they curse the Electoral College, a vestige from American chattel slavery. Their demand—that ballot holders of this outdated system flip their vote come December 19—is not only righteous, it’s the only way to project the general US public as not being a bunch of democracy deniers. However, acknowledging the damage occasioned by the Electoral College this election season without recognizing the lasting harms caused by America’s original sin puts liberals in a catch-22 of epic, hypocritical proportions.
Time and again, Trump spoke an inconvenient truth—the system is rigged? Now, liberals, all of a sudden, have jumped on his bandwagon. But can they dump the messenger, challenging the legitimacy of the electoral college after Hillary’s overwhelming popular vote victory, while, at the same time, ignoring calls for conciliation and reparatory justice as it pertains to black people in America?
“The South wished to have enslaved black people represented in the final tally to improve their electability.”
Finally, the public is being informed that a political hoax has been perpetrated in America. The infamous Electoral College was, in fact, a governmental scheme, nothing less than a convivial compromise between northern politicians and slaveholding southerners. Neither wanted black people—slaves in the American psyche (or psychosis)—to vote. Whereas the North, having a majority of the US population at the time, preferred a direct voting system to win elections, the South wished to have enslaved black people represented in the final tally to improve their electability. A settlement was reached between both parties, enshrining in the US Constitution that enslaved black people would be considered three-fifths of a human being. James Madison, defending the US Constitution’s treatment of African-descendants as part human and part commodity declared:
“The true state of the case is that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property… The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixt character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied that these are the proper criterion…”
In the grand scheme of things, white liberals, grief-stricken by Trump’s presidential victory and their own highbrow inertia, have lost fairly little. Indeed, they lost an election, not hundreds of years of labor, their names, languages, cultures, and customs. But they insist upon repair, a rapid solution to an age-old problem. When white America devises a rigged electoral system to marginalize black people the joke’s not supposed to be on the jokesters.
Meanwhile, Lady Gaga urges all Americans to sign the Electoral College petition to void Donald Trump’s presidency and elect Hillary Clinton—reads the headline of an article published in the Inquisitir. The petition has reached over 4 million signatures in less than a week.
“All of the resources and profits accrued by the founding forefathers, and American society as a whole, has been passed down, generation after generation, without any atonement for their crimes against humanity.”
Hypocrisy runs rampant, as it always has, in America. White liberals carefully guarded bubble of edumucated, self-righteousness doesn’t even allow them to utter the same words of their, so-called, political foe—yes I say—the system is rigged. Instead, they carry protest signs—Dump Trump!—Not my president. Problem is, The Donald represents the very best of America—a country that lectures black people about the unviability of conciliation and reparatory justice. These arguments are shrouded in contrast and injustice.
Some are quick to say that the white power structures of today aren’t liable for the chattel slavery and Jim Crow of yesterday. But, in retrospect, all of the resources and profits accrued by the founding forefathers, and American society as a whole, has been passed down, generation after generation, without any atonement for their crimes against humanity. Others rush to claim that Africans sold Africans into slavery. Even a black man, Harvard-educated Henry Louis Gates, said it. Liberals to the Klan must have treasured his words like gold. However, such vague references about Africans selling their own kind intentionally ignore historical African leaders who resisted white slave incursions such Queen Nzinga, Samori Toure, Abdoul Kader Kane, King Menelik II, and others. Kader Kane, leader of the Futa Toro region in northern Senegal, wrote a letter to French authorities in which he stated: “We are warning you that all those who will come to our land to trade in slaves will be killed and massacred if you do not send our children back.” Resistance was so widespread that white slave-traders had to build fortified forts and barracoons along the west coast of Africa. Jean-Baptiste Durand of the Compaigne du Sénégal attested that protection was needed “from the foreign vessels and from the Negroes living in the country.”
We can also rest assure that, at no point, did Africans ever sell hundreds of years of white slavemasters, lynch mobs, fleeced labor, cotton fields, the KKK, or the copyrighted notion of white superiority to America.
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (popularly known as Malcolm X) often conferred an analogy to liberals and conservatives alike. Though their mannerisms and methods differ, like the fox and the wolf, both have the same motives and appetite. The fox (liberals) smiles and professes to be a friend of the negro. However, the big bad wolf (conservatives) maintains a fierce facial expression when hunting prey. But if you—“Love Me I’m A liberal” crusaders—are stymied by or just plain tired of outdated analogies, I recommend a modern, contemporary take on your Dump-Trump insignia. Just remember the voice of the outgoing US president:
1. The sun [will] come up in the morning.
2. We’re actually all on one team.
Julian Cola has a BA (cum laude) in Portuguese from the University of New Mexico. He’s been awarded a CELPE-Bras Certificate (Brazilian Ministry of Education) and a FLAS Fellowship (US Department of Education). He can be contacted at mjuliancola(at)gmail.com.
BAR Poet-in-Residence, Raymond Nat Turner, joins us from New York City to talk about his work and an upcoming performance with his group, Upsurge New York City.
Gerald Perreira of Organization for the Victory of the People in Guyana joins us to discuss the long running territorial dispute with neighboring Venezuela and the increasing activity of U.S. in the…
Any sign of even tiny opposition is enough to send Israel into a frenzy of bloodletting. Hospital attacks, murders of aid workers, violations of the sovereignty of embassies, are all par for the…
The statement on the UN Partition of Palestine by the Arab Higher Committee is a reminder of the sordid history of the U.S. in the expropriation of land and the attempted ethnic cleansing of the…
The totalitarian state of Rwanda is guilty of many forms of transnational repression, including the lawfare exemplified in the case of Eric Nshimiye.
