‘Caste’ for Young Einsteins –– Awake or Woke

Review by Bill Doughty––

When Albert Einstein, a Jew, escaped persecution in Germany –– just a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor –– he arrived on America’s shore and was shocked to see institutionalized prejudice, discrimination, and often outright abuse of African Americans.

Albert Einstein

After establishing himself as a professor at Princeton University, New Jersey, Einstein took a personal stance against bigotry: For example, when black opera singer Marian Anderson performed in his new hometown she was shunned at Princeton’s Nassau Inn because of the color of her skin, Einstein invited her to stay in his home. He frequently used his growing fame and prestige to speak out on behalf of equality, justice, and humanity.

Referring to the racism he witnessed, he said, “The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.

“Here was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived,” Isabel Wilkerson writes, “refusing to see himself as superior to people he was being told were beneath him.”

Alexander Wilkerson

In “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” adapted for young readers (Delacorte Press, 2022) Wilkerson weaves the conclusions of critical thinkers and philosophers into her discourse as she examines the arbitrary concept of race, the power of hate and hierarchy, and the proliferation of Confederate monuments across American during the civil rights movement.

Isabel Wilkerson is the proud daughter of a Tuskegee Airman in World War II. After the war her father worked as an engineer building bridges. 

She sees patriotism as defending the ideals in the Constitution and standing up to authoritarianism in whatever shade or color.

Last year Wilkerson spoke at the University of Richmond and received a standing ovation.

“My father would be so proud to see this moment,” Wilkerson said, responding to the ovation. 

Her father was born in nearby Petersburg, Virginia. “In everything that I do, I think about my ancestors. It was against the law for my ancestors to read and write, and here I stand with a Pulitzer Prize.”

In 'Caste,' she recounts Einstein’s gentle but powerful heroism: first to escape Fascism and Nazism in Germany and then to stand up to racism and casteism in his adopted new country.

Wilkerson writes:

“To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system –– the twelve-year reign of the Nazis –– can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil.’

‘It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration,’ wrote the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has studied cultures of dehumanization. ‘It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.’

It is also temping to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put-downs of marginalized people shared at the dinner table and say nothing for fear of alienating an otherwise beloved uncle. The people who are willing to pay higher property taxes for their own children’s schools but who balk at taxes to educate the children society devalues. Or the people who sit in silence as a marginalized person, whether of color or a woman, is interrupted in a meeting, her ideas dismissed (though perhaps later adopted), for fear of losing caste, each of these keeping intact the whole system that holds everyone in its grip.

‘Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire,’ the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote. ‘Case is a notion; it is a state of mind.’

No one escapes its tentacles. No one escapes exposure to its message that one set of people is presumed to be inherently smarter, more capable, and more deserving than other groups deemed lower. This program has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And, high or low, without intervention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed.

And yet, somehow, there are the rare people, like Einstein, who seem immune to the toxins of caste in the air we breathe, who manage to transcend what most people are susceptible to. From the abolitionists who risked personal ruin to end slavery to the white civil rights workers who gave their lives to help end Jim Crow and the political leaders who outlawed it, these all-too-rare people are a testament to the human spirit, that humans can break free of the hierarchy’s hold on them.

These are people of personal courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, secure within themselves, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, people of deep and abiding empathy and compassion. They are what many of us might wish to be but not nearly enough of us are. Perhaps, once awakened, more of us will be.”

Key word: “Awakened” –– not the misappropriated, misunderstood and maligned “woke.”

Her book is a warning to us in 2023 and 2024..

To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, who also warned of dictatorships, it can happen here.

“Caste” is a must-read book for anyone interested in bridging the great divide caused by the Big Lie, Lost Cause, and forces of fear, hate, grievance, and resentment. The book is indispensable when considering the fate of military monuments and namesakes that honor the insurrectionist leaders of the Confederacy. (In the weeks ahead many military bases and sites will be renamed to stop honoring insurrectionist Confederates.)

Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth speaks with soldiers of 25th Infantry Division at U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii, Jan. 24, 2023. (Sgt. Rachel Christensen)

According to Defense News, U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth recently finished reading “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" after hearing Gen. Peter Chiarelli endorse it.

We had the privilege of reviewing Wilkerson’s compelling book last year, and a new paperback version was published last month.

The version of Wilkerson’s book in this particular review is written for young people, at least at a high school reading level. It’s accessible without watering down any of the message, vocabulary, or concepts. Not surprisingly, “Caste” has reportedly been banned at some libraries, including in Texas.

“Caste” was a Book Club recommendation by Military Families magazine when it was first published. According to reviewer Kate Lewis:

“Like Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, ‘The Warmth Of Other Suns,’ ‘Caste’ has already won near-universal adoration from literary circles. ‘This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,' Oprah Winfrey said when naming the book to her bestseller-making list, and Wilkerson’s powerful nonfiction narrative lives up to the acclaim.”

In fact, echoing Oprah, “Caste” is one of the most important books we’ve featured over fourteen years on our Navy Reads blog. And this version for young people is absolutely excellent.

I’ll Vote for That: ‘Race’ as ‘Caste’

Review by Bill Doughty––

Although science says there is no such thing as race, that doesn’t mean there is no “racism.”

Under a guise of racism, a dominant class can subjugate, discriminate, and try to control a subordinate class, including by suppressing or subverting their right to vote –– based on superficial differences.

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson makes the case for recasting, so to speak, “racism” as “casteism” in her indispensable book for our time: “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (Random House, 2020), an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

As for “no such thing as race…”

Scientists call ‘race’ an artificial construct. Wilkerson writes this, citing a great Navy veteran scientist:

“Two decades ago, analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. ‘Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,’ said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000. ‘We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.’” (Venter is a former Navy corpsman and Vietnam War veteran; we have featured his work and his autobiography several times here on Navy Reads.)

Now DNA kits ordered by mail show “that race as we have come to know it is not real,” Wilkerson says. “It is a fiction told by modern humans for so long that it has come to be seen as a sacred truth.”

Wilkerson interviews a Nigerian-born playwright, who says, “You know that there are no black people in Africa. Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who embraced the nonviolent teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, saw the issue of racism framed as casteism. Sixty-three years ago, in February 1959, he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, traveled to and within India, where MLK self-identified as “an untouchable.” The Kings visited the grave of Gandhi, laid a wreath, and prayed.

In India, people are born into castes that are supposedly divinely dictated. Discrimination against people considered part of the lower classes was acceptable, lawful, institutional. While civil rights laws in India in the 1940s (and in the United States in the 1960s) have made it illegal to discriminate, "both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not."

Casteism in the U.S. began more than a century before we became a nation.

Actions 

Beginning in 1619, Europeans brought Africans to the English colonies as property and to the very bottom of a social hierarchy. Confronting the morality of the institution led eventually and with great upheaval to the Emancipation Proclamation and American Civil War nearly 250 years later. But like it or not, racism, constructed within a framework of casteism, had been already institutionalized.

“In the decades to follow, colonial laws herded European workers and African workers into separate and unequal queues and set in motion the caste system that would become the cornerstone of the social, political, and economic system in America. This caste system would trigger the deadliest war on U.S. soil, lead to the ritual killings of thousands of subordinate-caste people in lynchings, and become the source of inequalities that becloud and destabilize the country to this day.”

“After the Civil War, Confederates blamed the people they had once owned for the loss of the war,” Wilkerson writes. There was a backlash to “take our country back.” The Lost Cause. The Big Lie.

South Carolina's Hammond

Wilkerson contends, “Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenge is flawed without it.”

She presents dozens of examples of the horrors inflicted by the dominant class in America over previous centuries, including torture, riots, and lynchings.

We learn of the horrid senator of South Carolina James Henry Hammon, who said, “God created slaves for us.” Hammon raped women, including his own daughter, and sexually assaulted four of his nieces. We also read the crushingly sad story of Willie James Howard, a 15-year-old black boy who made the fatal mistake of having a schoolboy crush on a white girl in 1943 in Grand Gulf, Mississippi. And, we hear of ludicrous practices under endogamy, miscegenation, and eugenics laws and theories.

A eugenics book published in 1916 by an American, Madison Grant, titled “The Passing of the Great Race,” became popular with white supremacists.

Adolf Hitler called it his bible.

The Nazis were inspired by how the American upper class treated blacks and especially indigenous peoples. But, fascist Germans of the 30s and 40s escalated and intensified the evil when they exterminated millions of people based on eugenics and claims of Aryan supremacy.

Hitler and Nazi casteism

A caste system set up by Hitler and the Nazis justified the torture and deaths of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma people, and people with disabilities. To the Nazis, it was “obvious Jews were a separate race.”

When Einstein, a Jew, escaped Germany as an immigrant to the United States, he was shocked to discover he had moved from a country of castes to another country where, this time, people of color were considered a subordinate class.

Once we accept the reality of caste systems, it helps us understand the point of view of others.

That includes many people in the privileged dominant class who feel fear and resentment when they start to lose their privileged position. “A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy,” Wilkerson contends.

Will the dominant class –– through fear, anger, and resentment –– do anything, accept anything, to try to retain the power hierarchy? Think: sedition, treason, secession.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of members of the Oath Keepers, including the far-right group’s Texas-based founder, on charges of seditious conspiracy related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Oathkeepers stack into the U.S. Capitol, along with other Trump supporters, during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2022.

Reactions

People confronted with scenes of outright violence respond in different ways. Some –– like those who attended lynchings of black people in the American South, or German citizens who swooned when Hitler’s stormtroopers returned from invading Poland –– react with joy. Other people may be outraged at first but later find justification for ignoring or even condoning the violence.

For example, despite being an advocate of slavery Secretary of the Navy James K. Paulding reacted strongly after he witnessed what Wilkerson describes as “barefoot men and women locked together with the weight of an ox-chain in the beating sun, forced to walk the distance to damnation in a state father south and riding behind them, ‘a white man on horse back, carrying pistols in his belt, and who, as we passed him, had the impudence to look us in the face without blushing.’” Paulding said he was outraged to see “such flagrant and indecent outrages upon humanity … a villain, in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without being charged with a crime but that of being black…” [Paulding, SECNAV from 1838 to 1841, was a contemporary of David Dixon Porter, Isaac Hull, and John Rodgers, serving with them on the Board of Navy Commissioners. Paulding was an ardent defender of slavery and called abolitionists “satanic.” He is also remembered for being opposed to steamships and engineers in the Navy.]

The armed services have come a long way in promoting equality and dignity, especially since the 1960s; nevertheless, military readers will cringe at some of the lack of empathy and outright prejudice and bigotry in the past.

MA1 Laymoun Ferguson lights a candle on National Holocaust Remembrance Day at Commander, Fleet Activities Sasebo. (MC3 Mackenzie P. Adams)

Wilkerson reminds us that during World War I, black soldiers were segregated not only from their fellow white warfighters but also from their European counterparts in uniform.

“American military command informed the French of how they were to treat the black soldiers, clarified for them that these men were ‘inferior beings,’ no matter how well they performed on the front lines, that it was of the utmost importance’ that they be treated as inferior.

“The fact that military command would take the time in the middle of one of the most vicious wars in human history to instruct foreigners on the necessity of demeaning their own countrymen suggests that they considered adherence to caste protocols to be as important as conducting the war itself.”

Black American heroes like Pvt. Burton Holmes and Cpl. Freddie Stowers, both killed in action, were blocked from receiving the Medal of Honor, despite nominations by their white officers who witnessed their bravery and “broke with caste” to nominate them. [Holmes was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously in 1919; Stowers’s sisters accepted the MoH on their brother’s behalf in 1991, presented by Navy/WWII veteran President George H.W. Bush.]

Veterans of both world wars came back from the warfront to confront Jim Crow racism and the construction of more monuments to losing leaders of the Civil War.

The 90-foot tall, 17,000-square-foot carving at Stone Mountain, Kennesaw, Georgia, honoring the Confederacy. Carving began in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act and a year before the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The carving was dedicated by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970. It was completed in 1972.

Retractions

Confederates lost the war but won the peace, according to Wilkerson, especially when thousands of monuments, symbols, and namesakes to traitors who fought to defend slavery were set up throughout the United States.

Local governments removed statues of Robert E. Lee, including in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, last summer, and in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2017 after public hearings. In New Orleans:

“At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. ‘They are ashamed,’ he said. ‘The question is, why aren’t we?’”

Germany looks at its history “without blinking,” highlighting the shame of what the Nazis did –– and what good people failed to do; but, the Germans are neither ashamed nor too proud to confront their history. They reject the hate of the Nazis and honor the victims of the Third Reich.

Wilkerson notes that U.S. Confederacy monuments on pedestals such as those honoring Robert E. Lee –– as well as Georgia’s Stone Mountain, bigger than Mt. Rushmore, featuring Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson –– are up high so everyone has to literally look up at them. But in Germany, where there are numerous monuments to the victims but none to Nazis, people see stolpersteine, stumbling stones embedded in the cobblestones, each denoting a victim of the holocaust or other Nazi horrors. “Leaning over to read the names on the stumbling stones forces you to bow in respect,” Wilkerson observes.

Stolpersteine commemorate the victims of the Nazis, who receive no monuments in Germany for their lost cause. 

Traction

Sailors raise the flag on MLK Day in Yokosuka, Japan, Jan. 17, 2011.  (PO2 Devin Dow)

MLK’s famously said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” He marched in Selma for voting rights. He realized that voting rights in a full and open democracy were key to ending casteism.

Some of Wilkerson’s own personal first-hand examples of dealing with casteism, particularly in a restaurant, dealing with a plumber, or while flying first class, seem petty and unnecessary in the context of the moral universe presented in the bulk of her book. However, I can understand if others feel differently.

On the other hand, Wilkerson’s conclusions at the end of this great book are as big as an arc can be, and her optimism is inspiring:

“We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.

“Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?”

                A view of our galaxy. (NASA)

Wilkerson concludes that the answer is in our hands: “We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.” Isn’t the answer truly in our hands when we hold a good book –– or a ballot?

Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 President Barack Obama presented Wilkerson with the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."

Orwell on ICE II: Parasites

Review by Bill Doughty––

In his typically salty way, Orwell describes his beloved England in one of his essays written 85 years ago this month as a nation whose rulers are “parasites.”

Orwell speaks to us from across “the pond” and beyond the grave with observations still timely, relevant, and enlightening in "England Your England."

He has much to say about inequality within society.

“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly,” he writes.

Yet, the people of England showed supreme “emotional unity” during the crisis of the Second World War, when authoritarian forces threatened freedom and England’s very existence as a democratic constitutional monarchy.

Orwell calls his country “a family with the wrong members in charge.” Young people must “kowtow” to the rich and powerful and not question the upper classes’ source of wealth.

“It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.”

Orwell recounts the evolution of Britain from an empire with a feudal power system to a modern technological society. The people in country estates and castles became “owners” with no direct contribution to the economy, the so-called “idol rich.” Some are celebrities who get power and wealth by being famous for being famous.

'American Millionaires ... Privileges ... Bribery ... Tear Gas'

Referring to the ultra rich and privileged class: “They were simply parasites,” Orwell writes, “less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.”

“By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this.

By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them— into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.

There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land. It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and again startled the world. Since the 'fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the Air Force, have always been more efficient than the regular army. But the navy is only partially, and the Air Force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.”

That wasn’t the first or last time Orwell exempted the Royal Navy or Royal Air Force from the rampant incompetence of a caste system of leadership based on rich versus poor.

At least, he notes, the country’s rulers had not attempted to establish an authoritarian dictatorship or agitated for a civil war –– with a paramilitary force on the streets of London.

“It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police.”

Orwell saw a direct line to the Gestapo, Nazism, and spread of fascism as an outcome of the Spanish War of 1939 between Nationalists and Republicans. Although he had fought for the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists he later became disillusioned by the Republicans’ ties to Soviet Russia. His disillusionment would inspire his masterwork “1984” against totalitarianism.

While he lauds the fact that there were no secret police roaming London’s streets, he acknowledges, “Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.”

“Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered,” Orwell writes. “The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root.”

The same thing could be said about nearly all of the first 250 years of the United States’s history.

Fascist Diversity

In his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” Orwell says “When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew!”

He mentions a varied array of powerful men including Germany’s Führer/Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Vichy France’s Philippe Pétain, Croatian fascist leader Ante Pavelic, American media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, American expatriate and Mussolini supporter Ezra Pound, Palestinian Arab nationalism and Nazi collaborator Mufti of Jerusalem, Canadian-American Christian Supremacist and America First isolationist Father Charles Coughlin, among others.

“They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings,” Orwell writes.

[Interestingly, in another essay he decries his country’s discrimination against hiring immigrants to work in coal mines. Although he acknowledges the “wasteful, dirty and inefficient” nature of coal fires, he celebrates the idea of families of any “class” gathered around a fireplace.]

The ultra wealthy privileged caste, many of whom would be considered part of the “Epstein Class” today, tend to show disdain for immigrants, poor people, and workers. And what do working people ask for?

“All that the workingman demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than this war we are now fighting … The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police.”

Orwell staunchly believed in the rule of law and protection of voting rights within a culture of income inequality.

Regarding the English electoral system: “In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class” but “not completely corrupt,” Orwell contends. “You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted nor is there any direct bribery.”

But income inequality can lead to corruption, autocracy, voter suppression, and war –– both on foreign and domestic soil.

More about that in our next Navy Reads post.

By the way… 

Today we saw another gift from across the pond from musical artists whose roots are from the "working class" and lower-middle classes:

The islands that gave us The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin just delivered the Irish band U2’s “Days of Ash” EP with the lead song “American Obituary,” recounting ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis with these powerful lyrics: “What you can’t kill can’t die, America will rise against the people of the lie;” “I love you more than hate loves war;” and “the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.” U2’s timely and exceptionally good set of songs complement to America's Bruce Springsteen’s recent tribute to Renee Good and Alex Pretti, “The Streets of Minneapolis.”

Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 2, Equality

By Bill Doughty––

Based on his writings from the 1800s, Frederick Douglass inspired universal rights of men and women. His thoughts resonate today, especially his opinions about service in the military, immigration, voting rights, education, and equality.

Some of Douglass’s impassioned words are curated in “Speeches and Writings” (Library of America, 2022, edited by David W. Blight). Douglass illuminates history before, during, and after the American Civil War fought over the abolition of slavery.

On Equality –– In Military Service, Immigration, Suffrage, and Access to Books:

• “We are prepared to hear all sides, and to give the arguments of our opponents a candid consideration. Where an honest expression of views is allowed, Truth has nothing to fear.” (03/16/1849)

• “Why does the Government reject the Negro? Is he not a man? Can he not wield a sword, fire a gun, march and countermarch, and obey orders like any other? Is there the least reason to believe that a regiment of well-drilled Negroes would deport themselves less soldier-like on the battlefield than the raw troops gathered up generally from the towns and cities of the State of New York? We do believe that such soldiers, if allowed to take up arms in defence of the Government, and made to feel that they are hereafter to be recognized as persons having rights, would set the highest example of order and general good behavior to their fellow soldiers, and in every way add to the national power.”  (09/1861)

• “The conflict between liberty and slavery, between civilization ad barbarism, between enlightened progress and stolid indifference and inactivity is the same in all countries, in all ages, and among all peoples. Your fathers drew the sword for free and independent Government, Republican in its form, Democratic in its spirit, to be administered by officers duly elected by the free and unbought suffrages of the people; and the war of to-day on the part of the loyal north, the east and the west, is waged for the same grand and all commanding objects. We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago. Thus identifying the present with the past, I propose to consider the great present question, uppermost and all absorbing in all minds and hearts throughout the land." (07/04/1862)

• “We want a country which shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie. We want a country whose fundamental institutions we can proudly defend before the highest intelligence and civilization of the age. Hitherto we have opposed European scorn of our slavery with a blush of shame as our best defense. We now want a country in which the obligations of patriotism shall not conflict with fidelity to justice and liberty. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, which shall be free from sectional political parties—free from sectional religious dominations—free from sectional benevolent associations—free from every kind and description of sect, party, and combination of a sectional character. We want a country where men may assemble from any part of it, without prejudice to their interests or peril to their persons. We are in fact, and from absolute necessity, transplanting the whole South with the higher civilization of the North. The New England schoolhouse is bound to take the place of the Southern whipping post. Not because we love the Negro, but the nation; not because we prefer to do this, because we must or give up the contest and give up the country. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, where social intercourse and commercial relations shall neither be embarrassed nor embittered by the imperious exactions of an insolent slaveholding oligarchy which required Northern merchants to sell their souls as a condition precedent to selling their goods. We want a country, and are fighting for a country, through the length and breadth of which the literature and learning of any section of it may float to its extremities unimpaired, and thus become the common property of all the people—a country in which no man shall be fined for reading a book, or imprisoned for selling a book—a country where no man may be imprisoned or flogged or sold for learning to read, or teaching a fellow mortal how to read."  (01/13/1864)

• “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue eyed and light haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world they need have no fear. They have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.   But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men.   I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth. If the white race may exclude all other races from this continent, it may rightfully do the same in respect to all other lands, islands, capes and continents, and thus have all the world to itself. Thus what would seem to belong to the whole, would become the property only of a part. So much for what is right, now let us see what is wise.   And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United states, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt.   It has been thoughtfully observed, that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of said knowledge.   I need to stop here to name or describe the missions of other and more ancient nationalities. Ours seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of Government, world embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is to make us the make perfect national illustration of the unit and dignity of the human family, that the world has ever seen.  In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here, from all quarters of the globe by a common aspiration for rational liberty as against caste, divine right Governments and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves; it would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed. The apprehension that we shall be swamped or swallowed up by Mongolian civilization; that the Caucasian race may not be able to hold their own against that vast incoming population, does not seem entitled to much respect. Though they come as the waves come, we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions.” (12/07/1881)

• “When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world. Such a truth is woman’s right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it. It was hers before she comprehended it. It is inscribed upon all the powers and faculties of her soul, and no custom, law nor usage can ever destroy it.” (03/31/1888)

Douglass struggled to understand the inhumanity of slaveholders. His writings before the end of the Civil War show he was beyond frustrated on the unwillingness of the privileged caste to fully embrace abolition, emancipation, and full military service for African Americans. He challenged people to live up to the ideals written in the Declaration of Independence and the amended U.S. Constitution.

How would Douglass look upon continued "replacement" fears, denial of paths to citizenship for children of immigrants, and ongoing book-banning initiatives and other restrictions on education?

We can only imagine how Douglass –– a champion of liberty and equality –– would perceive attacks on voting rights, women's health choices, and the insurrection of January 6, 2021, when a Trump supporter and white supremacist marched a Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol, achieving what even Gen. Robert E. Lee could not.

On the other hand, we must also consider how he would be amazed to see African Americans at the pinnacle of power, including a former president, current vice president, Supreme Court justices, senators and representatives. He most certainly would be pleased at efforts by the government, a government of the people, to continue to bend the arc of history toward justice.