No True Equality Without Disruption

In “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Walter Johnson presents a bold critique of Eurocentric constructions of human rights and humanity. His argument to rebuild society in order to restore justice for oppressed peoples holds historical merit against the American mainstream belief that it is sufficient to provide the everyone the same rights as the most privileged. He states, “Several problems flow from the notion that every history of slavery is peopled by liberal subjects striving to be emancipated into the political condition of the twenty-first-century Western bourgeoisie.” When people talk about providing everyone with equal rights, they usually mean that we must provide everyone with rights equal to those in society with the most rights. Johnson elaborates on those rights as “the universal rights of democratic self-determination, freedom of conscience and expression, protection from political violence and, above all, the anathematization of genocide.” All of those rights are good and necessary, but focusing solely on them ignores the historical context from which people arrived into their present situations. Johnson supports this with the Marxist idea that ensuring equal rights only promotes quality within the “existing world order.” As a case study of writing equal rights into law without disrupting the existing order, let us consider the fourth amendment and reconstruction.

            Following the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, the fourth amendment was ratified to ensure citizenship and equal rights for black Americans. It says, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. While this amendment provided black Americans with equal rights under the letter of the law, it does nothing to address context that made black folks unequal in the first place. It did not disrupt white southerners’ political dominance over former slaves. It did nothing to repair. It did nothing to repay the generations of stolen labor or the giant gap in education and institutions that kept blacks at a disadvantage. Yes, you can counter that much of the damage done to blacks after the war was due to failure to enforce the law, rather than the letter of the law itself. But that failure to enforce was enabled by the oppressive order being allowed to continue.

Pledged, Matthew Coughlon

Works cited:

Staff, LII. "14th Amendment." LII / Legal Information Institute. November 12, 2009. Accessed October 13, 2017. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv.

Johnson, Walter. “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice.” Boston Review. September 06, 2017. Accessed October 08, 2017. http://bostonreview.net/race/walter-johnson-slavery-human-rights-racial-capitalism.