Shehryar Fazli in The Ideas Letter:
“The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing,” says the Black nurse Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set in the 1980s, “He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high no one can reach it.”
This statement may sound overly despairing to someone keen to reconcile America’s high principles to the daily experience of living in the nation, as Belize’s (white) interlocutor Louis is. Whatever the turpitudes of the Reagan administration, whatever the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, for Louis the nation has kept its holdings in the sacred honor that carried the Revolution, twenty years after the fulfillment of Black civil and political rights.
Belize’s line could have been the epigraph for the scholar Brandon M. Terry’s new book Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement, a powerful dissent from the romantic view of American history in general and the civil rights movement in particular. He tests the mainstream historiography of that struggle as an exemplary political action whose success incorporated “the excluded into this healthy political sphere and the mainstream of social life.”
In the romantic vision of the movement, the 1950s and 60s saw civic struggle, court rulings, and legislation defeat white supremacy in a reckoning with the past that would place the US firmly ahead of the Soviets in moral terms. It would also authenticate the promise of the Constitution, which in 1787 was “meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice,” as historian Jill Lepore wrote in her book, These Truths.
So ingrained is the belief in the constitution’s reflection of a political ideal, high above the facts on the ground, that no less a learned liberal commentator than Ezra Klein was surprised, in a 2019 interview with Lepore, to learn that today’s Electoral College was a byproduct of slavery.
More here.
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