The big lie

Joe Biden says we must listen to each other, stop the shouting, lower the temperature and end this uncivil war. As if the problem between the two camps is not that one has been killing the other but a problem of decorum. As if the side with the Black Lives Matter placards “just want to be heard” – as liberal politicians continue to misrepresent – and is not ordering that we be left to survive.

Biden smiles, opens his arms, says: “Folks”, and just like that, otherwise critical thinkers who rightly laughed off pundits and commentators who, upon Donald Trump’s every flinch, wondered aloud if it may signify a pivot away from racism, now wonder if this is America’s moment. If this is the moment America might finally pivot in some significant way away from white supremacy. If it would finally “live up to its ideals” and, as President Abraham Lincoln charged, obey its “better angels”.

Biden echoed Lincoln’s unity-themed “better angels of our nature” inaugural speech in his own. He did not, however, mention that the purpose of Lincoln’s speech was to assure the white men of the South, on the eve of the Civil War, that they “were not enemies, but friends”. And, as their friend, he did not intend to steal into freedom the Africans they dragged about in neck shackles.

Liberals report feeling rested and re-invigorated. A late-night show put together a montage of Mount Rushmore and a Martin Luther King, Jr statue singing in celebration. The “push-him-left” crews are rolling up their sleeves. Arnold Schwarzenegger held up a sword. And a young Black woman was given a platform on the steps of the US Capitol to offer her art to the service of critical patriotism.

“Unity!” rings from the church bells and from the mouths of soldier and babe. Democrats warn Republicans no hugs without accountability but signal a way back to bi-partisan governance, once the last of the broken glass is swept under the rug.

Even white leftists are offering theirs and Black people’s forgiveness to white supremacists, sketching out ways for the far left to build bridges to the far right in the fight against liberal hegemony. Indeed, almost all of the colony looks forward to the day when they will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old white nationalist spiritual: “Unity at last! Unity at last! Thank God Almighty, we have unity at last!”

But all of this will not be enough. America, like Trump, will not pivot.

American unity is run through the ribs of the Negro. It has been white nationalist from its inception. As early as 1676, unity meant legislating into existence the category of “white people”. This new category of humans was to be given privileges Africans were explicitly denied. White people, it was hoped, made legally superior and thus led into supremacism, would never again be tempted to join Africans in a rebellion against the state as they had during Nathaniel Bacon’s anti-Indigenous rebellion of that year.

Bacon enticed indentured servants, white and Black, to join him, in exchange for their freedom, in a settler landowner’s war against Indigenous people which later spiralled into an all-out war against the government. Like the deliberate creation of a middle class in several African colonies, white people were, in part, invented to be a buffer between the anti-colonial population and the governors.

The American Revolution, as historian Gerald Horne has shown in his book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, was not, as is relentlessly advertised, the birth-pangs of a great experiment in liberty.

On the contrary, it was a colony-wide counter-revolution and its aim, in no small part, was to put down the nascent Black abolitionism of plantation rebellions and the fugitive formerly enslaved who joined the British to fight their former masters: the American Patriots.

Excerpted: ‘America, the big lie’ Aljazeera.com