The police murder of George Floyd is just the latest killing in the very long history of white on black violence. Like so much in our history, racial violence must be understood as part of our ingrained pattern of thinking.
Our thinking has been shaped by the Bible-believing people who were among the first Europeans to reach our shores. A fundamental belief has been that of original sin. The American original sin is African slavery. The enslavement of blacks ruined the promise of a new Eden for English colonists in America. Slavery was the American version of the poisoned apple, pretty to look at but deadly, that Eve gave to Adam in the Garden. When Adam took a bite it was a sin because natural law, an echo of divine law, forbade it.
Yes, it’s a story, dismissed by cynics and unbelievers. But this is not about belief in the Bible story, and we need to put it in context. The Founding Fathers, our political and spiritual founders, did not believe in the Bible. They were Deists, believing in a divine intelligence but not what American Protestants or Catholics believe.
The Founding Fathers believed in natural law, even though they were fatally unfaithful to its logical conclusions, as when they decreed that a slave would only count as three-fifths of a human being. This fallacy was like the serpent tempting Eve. And that’s it, that is our “original sin,” the permanent blot we smeared on ourselves at the founding of the nation.
This is fateful because natural law rules our lives so that we don’t fall back into savagery. If you violate natural law you will pay for it, you will get sucked back into savagery, and who can doubt that, watching on TV for the 100th time Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck while the other cops stand and approve. Whether you believe this doesn’t matter. Intellectual understanding and subsequent belief or unbelief is not the point. It’s like the law of gravity, impossible to understand, but see what happens if you fall off the roof of your house.
The point is made clear in the Bible, our scripture whose laws we hold to be our national foundation (even if the Founders would not admit it), that the creator God will not allow sin to go unpunished. The consequences of racist slavery have therefore been the punishment of an angry God on the slave masters and their literal and figurative descendants. We are the descendants, no matter who we are. This punishment has afflicted guilty and innocent alike because it has warped our American dream and prevented us from realizing the beautiful future that has been so tantalizing close since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.
But let us be honest. Like the sin of Adam and Eve, which resulted in the loss of the God-like innocence that our first parents enjoyed in Eden, the enslavement of blacks has twisted the minds and hearts of the white people of this nation into believing an evil thing. This evil thing is murderous, like the corrupted mind that led Cain to murder his brother, Abel. This evil is the thing called “white supremacy,” the belief that European-descended whites are superior to other “races.” This is all the more tragic because “race” is a false perception, having no underlying basis in modern science. Human beings are simply too much alike genetically to belong to distinct “races.”
During slavery times we kidnapped millions from Africa, caused untold numbers to die chained in the slave ships, starved them, beat them, and worked them to death on the Southern plantations. This was brutality, the clearest example of white on black violence and justified by Christian people because they believed in white supremacy. And then we fought the Civil War, counting more war dead than all other wars combined. Yes, we fought to free the slaves, but as Lincoln, whose words would cancel out our original sin if we believed him, said, “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two-hundred-fifty-years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three-thousand-years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” And so it continues, the war we wage against ourselves, blood spilling from black bodies (and white and Mexican bodies), because we are in thrall to our original sin.
Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS, and a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He teaches American Literature, U.S. Southwest History and Culture, and U.S. Military History.
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COLUMN: The original sin of American racial violence - Colorado Springs Gazette
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