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• #RAPHAEL WARNOCK LEGACY RACIAL TYRANNY FREE#

African slavery helped shape white identity as a relation of both difference and privilege from Blackness. So just how divided was that Revolutionary heritage?Īny story of the racial meaning of American democracy must begin with the paradox of slavery and freedom that emerged in the British colonies of North America.

When the MAGA rioters simultaneously deployed symbols like the Confederate flag and Revolutionary garb, they were rejecting the changes these Amendments brought, invoking instead, slave state secessionists who maintained that it was they - the secessionists - who by resisting the “tyranny” of overweening federal power were safeguarding the legacy of the American Revolution.

These Amendments abolished chattel slavery, established color-blind birthright citizenship and equal protection of the laws, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting rights. Constitution during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The pro-Trump insurrectionists were mounting a counterrevolution against an inclusive vision of democracy that became possible only with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. It is worth recounting this early history in order to appreciate how far we have come (although we still have a distance to go), and how vigilantly we must defend our progress against those who seek to make white supremacy mainstream once again. The story of American democracy is inextricably linked with ideas and experiences of race. Yet, the hard truth of history is that disagreements among Americans about the identity of “the people” at the heart of democracy have predated the birth of our republic.

#RAPHAEL WARNOCK LEGACY RACIAL TYRANNY FREE#

Indeed, when President Abraham Lincoln, who won that race on a free labor Republican ticket, described the Civil War that followed secession as a “People’s Contest,” and later at Gettysburg, resolved that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,” he was linking the fate of democracy irrevocably with the preservation of the Union. The events of January 6 constitute the most serious crisis of democracy since South Carolina seceded from the Union because it could not live with the outcome of the election of 1860 - an outcome that threatened the institution of African-American enslavement anchoring the economic and political power of elites in the antebellum South. There is now widespread consensus that the mob was there to nullify the legitimate results of a free and fair Presidential election, and that the lawmakers who refused to certify the Biden-Harris victory were enabling their actions. The world watched in horror the next afternoon as gun-toting Trump supporters laid siege to Capitol Hill amid images of nooses, sweatshirts bearing the inscription “Auschwitz,” and angry white men hoisting Confederate flags. My partner and I, naturalized Americans born in Nigeria and India respectively, fielded a flood of congratulatory messages from friends and family around the globe on our adopted nation’s comeback as a beacon of light on the international stage.īut if the arc of democracy seemed poised to swing once again toward inclusion, it was going to have to reckon with the burden of history just a few hours later. A state that once belonged to the vanquished Confederacy was about to send two progressives, Raphael Warnock, the African American son of a former cotton picker, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish entrepreneur, to represent it in the U.S. News from the Peach State offered reassurance that the spirit of the civil rights icon John Lewis lived on. I went to bed with a smile on my face and Georgia on my mind late on Tuesday night, January 5. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. (Created by Chicago : Kurz & Allison, Art Publishers, 1891. Burnside fighting Confederates led by Gen. Image of Trump supporter with Confederate flag (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images, courtesy, ), inserted by author into Chromolithograph titled “Assault on Fort Sanders” depicting “Union troops led by Gen. Insurrection for White Supremacy - Then and Now.