A Tale of Two Countries: The Abused, the Neglected and the Politics of Backlash

The Three Construction Eras of America

On November 9th, the world was witness to the most rousing win for the President of the United States in contemporary history by the most unlikely candidate in all American history. Despite there being no equivalency for this election, there are several historical equivalencies for the conditions that spawned this momentous occasion. History is often the best teacher and a dissatisfied citizenry is always ripe for unprecedented political decisions. The United States is deeply divided between two communities, the neglected and the abused. The neglected live in communities that have been gutted of their jobs over the past two decades. The abused largely live in communities where no such opportunities have ever existed. Both have very fragile foundations in the economic framework of America. Those foundations rest upon the trust that is invested in the political and corporate elite to provide jobs and economic opportunity for them.

Some of the job losses are the result of globalization which is a lightning rod issue for the neglected who live in areas like the Midwest and feel betrayed by the corporate elite who moved their once high paying jobs abroad with the help of the political elite. More of those losses can be attributed to advances in technology that have rendered many of those jobs obsolete. Either way, the ground beneath them has shifted in a seismic way and left them with no footing. The abused are either corralled into inner cities or isolated in the rural southeast and largely have never known sound footing in the first place. The neglected, descendants of pre-twentieth century European colonist and immigrants who arrived in the last 100 years; the abused, Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement and immigrants who arrived in the last 100 years, similar in so many respects, but separated by melanin - and they blame each other.

The fallout from this paradigm has proven disastrous at pivotal moments in history as it often provokes political backlash that upsets the entire population before it comes to rest oppressively on the backs of the most vulnerable citizens. American history elevates three distinct re-construction periods that have yielded legislative reprisals and shifts in policy which annihilated entire segments of the population;

• 1676: Bacon's Rebellion expedited melanin based enslavement and spiraled quickly into the 1705 slave codes over a 30-year span of time.
• 1865: The end of the Civil War, also in 30 years resulted in the 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson segregation decision.
• 1965: Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act - served to deepen the division between the historically abused and the disproportionately neglected that continues today.

The Pre-Construction of America: Bacon’s Rebellion

Since before the founding of the United States there has been a strong correlation between economic condition and social policy. In colonial Virginia indentured servitude was the socioeconomic policy that was employed to build the foundations of America. The "Headright System”, provided incentives for growers to import labor from Europe. For each worker that travelled across the Atlantic, the planter was incentivized with 50 acres of land. This system proved to be a massive wealth generation strategy for colonial aristocrats as it dramatically increasing their land holdings.

On the other side of the transaction, the indentured servant would receive an all-expense paid trip to the “new world” for the benefit of working for the grower for a stipulated period, usually five years. Room and board would be provided until the completion of the contract, at which time the servant would receive a severance package known as "freedom dues," which might include land, money, arms, food or clothing. Approximately 60 percent of indentured servants died prior to the completion of their contracts.

In 1676, planters in colonial Virginia were growing frustrated with England’s aristocratic leaders and wealthy land owners who enjoyed a much different quality of life than did they who were struggling to eke out a living on small, lower yield parcels of land. Their experience was not much unlike those of African descent, many of whom heretofore were also current or former indentured servants. Both European and those African colonists who did not assimilate into the indigenous population were increasingly on the receiving end of the resistance struggle by aboriginal people who were also fighting for their own right to exist.

Angry that he could not receive political support to go to war with the indigenous people, Nathaniel Bacon was the first organizer to wage war against the elitism of English colonists who were already finding ways stack the deck in their own favor. He took personal issue with the rule of Governor William Berkeley and mobilized European and African planters both bond and free in insurrection against the landed gentry. Although the effort was eventually put down, it struck a fear in the aristocracy and accelerated the most decisive legislative to divide the neglected and the abused, the repercussions of which are felt until this day.

The shift in economic policy led with the decision to rely less on European indentured servitude and more on African enslavement along with the enslavement of indigenous people whose hindrances were becoming increasingly more bothersome to the growth strategy for the colonies. Just six years later in November 1682, “African” and “Indian” were no longer legally recognized terms in colonial Virginia as the term, “negro” was adopted as the single classification that would define both groups as slaves and consequently laid the foundation for the 1705 Virginia slave code.

At the same time, the aristocrats took additional measures to ensure that they kept the European commoners at arm’s length from them while also creating a chasm between those lower-class Europeans and the ‘negro’ slaves. European indentured servants were given a tangential authority over the ‘negro’ slaves in the form of ‘law enforcement’ patrols to ensure that the human chattel remained within the bounds of the laws that were being drafted every year to maintain their place in the socioeconomic caste. Free labor and indentured labor were kept out of competition in the labor pool by stratifying the labor that was given to each group. From this place, it became very easy for the still quite neglected to find the key to their upward mobility in the continued oppression of the abused.

The Re-Construction Era: Post Civil War

Following the November 8, 1864 election, re-elected President Abraham Lincoln set about the business of rebuilding the newly re-United States of America. The first order of business was to attempt to unify a deeply divided nation, torn by the bitter struggle born of a nearly 100-year-old policy of legislative backlash by the colonial elites. In early 1865, he and the US Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, the charge of which would be to re-integrate the neglected and the abused, most of whom had never been integrated in the first place, into the socioeconomic infrastructure as full citizens of the nation. Less than six weeks later, he was assassinated.

Although the unified congress followed through with the 13th amendment, it wasn’t long before the pendulum of backlash started aiming for the heads of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement once again. Dismayed at rebuilding the economy that had been decimated by the throes of war, European southerners reverted to the model of the past, re-establish the social stratum upon which they had built their country in the first place. Just as Bacon had challenged colonial aristocrats in the previous century, leaders of the southern states shifted the political focus to strengthening the rights of states to exercise government with autonomy over their citizenry. As the slave code had reigned over the previous era, ‘black’ codes were enacted to maintain the social chasm between the neglected and the abused, with the abused realizing a marginally relative distinction in privilege and quality of life over the abused.

Within days of the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act which conferred citizenship to Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement, descendants of European colonists led by law enforcement, killed 46 people of Indigenous and African descent, destroyed 90 homes, several schools, and four churches in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, police killed more than 40 members of the Republican Party, of both Indigenous and African and European descent and wounded 150 more. It was during this time that the Ku Klux Klan, a secret order to protect the interests of European citizens was established in Pulaski, Tennessee.

There was however, a moment of brief reprieve for former slaves and their descendants. While the states were once again tightening their yokes around the necks of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement, the former disenfranchised group was exercising its right to participate in the democratic process by holding public offices at the federal level. In 1871, the 42nd Congress saw five members of Indigenous and African descent elected to the House of Representatives. The first Indigenous and African was also elected to the office of governor of Louisiana. He held the office for all of one month in 1872. That year, the Freedman’s Bureau was abolished. By 1896, ethnic segregation was the law of the land as the Supreme Court upheld the states’ right to maintain “separate but equal” laws for public facilities.

The New Re-Construction Era: Post Civil Rights

Nearly another century later, another rumbling among the masses of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement was underway. The economic catastrophe of the depression era fresh in their minds, this time the neglected were determined to keep the events of the previous two eras from usurping their tenuous position in American societal structure. President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal and millions of southern Indigenous Descendants of colonialism and enslavement packed their bags and headed for the economic security of America’s thriving industrial centers in the Midwest and Northeast. The corporate elite, took took a page from the previous two eras by again stratifying the labor pool by ethnic group and forcing Indigenous and African descendants to the bottom of the caste, with many historically neglected Europeans only a scant bit above. Yet, perception was everything, what mattered most was not to be stuck at the inescapable bottom. The lower volume of melanin the more assured was the potential to shed their ethnic characteristics and rise to the distinctly ‘Anglo’ echelons of the caste.

For some groups, particularly those of Jewish descent who faced their own harsh traditions of hatred, violence and anti-Semitism in in Europe, it made sense to forge alliances with the abused in the United States as they migrated to the northern urban centers to widen the possibilities for a more open society. The founding boards of the NAACP and National Urban League were disproportionately comprised of Jewish members, as were the first two presidents of the NAACP both Jewish men. Jewish people found an ally in African American Judge Hubert Delaney and Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald gave generously to educate Indigenous and African descendants; prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis contributed legal counsel and shared his contacts with the NAACP. The Indigenous and African press covered the Jewish genocide in Eastern Europe and in turn the Jewish press covered lynching’s. Still, as had happened with other Europeans before them, the melanin base institutional caste would also take its toll on that relationship as the Jewish identity that once prevented them yielded to the European origins that eventually permitted them. The economic institution of the United States acquiesced to Jewish participation, leaving their Indigenous and African counter parts still trapped in the throes of a 300-year-old legislative backlash to divide the neglected and the abused.

A series of federal legislative acts including Brown vs the Board of Education, Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to once again extend full citizenship to Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement for the second time in history some two hundred years after they had been stripped away in the first place. True to form, the debate over state’s rights began to rear its head with the stand for political and legislative authority to govern the citizens without interference from the federal government. Also, true to historical pattern, the incidents of human atrocities at the hands of law enforcement and citizens increased in number and intensity and the divide that never went away was again center stage.

There is always a calm before the storm, and just as in the previous era, Indigenous and African people who had been caught under the oppressive foot of Jim Crow, are now holding elected office at every level just as their predecessors did a century before. In 2004, an African American senator from Illinois stepped onto the national stage at the Democratic National Convention and four years later, Barack Obama was President of the United States. The backlash to this unprecedented event was immediate and decisive with members of Congress and citizens of many states alike declaring legislative war against his administration before he took the oath of office. Over the next two years, members of the neglected class sprang into action to secure their place in the 400-year-old caste and gained control of both houses of Congress.

Already smarting from the worst economic crisis that the nation had experienced since the depression, the historically embedded inclination simply kicked in and the lines of demarcation were drawn. By now it is not even an act of awareness as much as it is of instinct for both the neglected and the abused to immediately corral the wagons around the community with which they identify and honker down in opposite camps. In the way that the Jewish community had found a common ground with Indigenous and African descendants in earlier decades, both side have been joined by others who can identify ideologically with them, though neither fully understands that the fundamental fight is still one that was not created nor perpetuated by either of them.

But there also seems that an awakening is underway. Neither of the political parties in which most eligible voters are members were prepared for the backlash against the political elite that occurred in the 2016 presidential election. Nevertheless in the spirit of “Bacon’s Rebellion”, half of the population, largely comprised of the neglected but also joined by a not insignificant representation of the abused joined once again to vote for an outsider in President-elect Donald Trump. Despite the fact that they also regard the elitism of multi-national corporations and their proclivity for globalization with contempt somehow this international business mogul managed to appeal to their interest in stabilizing their economic footing and once again solidifying their place in the American social strata above all who are otherwise identified with the abused as “others”.

A reflection on history places in perspective, the deep roots of the divide between the neglected and the abused. The patterns of the past reveal the possibilities for the trajectories of the future. If they hold, the relationship between the neglected and the abused will become more contentious. Law enforcement will continue to empathize with the neglected and will continue to be hostile to the abused. Commitment to post-Bacon’s Rebellion Pre-construction era and post-civil war Reconstruction era ‘law and order’ will continue to become the mantra for fortifying the institutional caste. The decision to control the presidency, both houses of Congress, numerous governorships and the supreme court is a full court legislative press to put this 400-hundred-year-old matter to rest once and for all. In the words of their newly elected leader, this is their “last chance” to have the nation that they desire.