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A Dying Mule Always Kicks Hardest
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Posted on Nov 18, 2016
By the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II / Moyers & Company
(http://billmoyers.com/story/dying-mule-always-kicks-hardest/)
Barack Obama taking the oath of office in 2009. (Master Sgt. Cecilio
Ricardo, U.S. Air Force
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama#/media/File:US_President_Barack_
Obama_taking_his_Oath_of_Office_-_2009Jan20.jpg) )
The reactionary wave that swept across America with the election of Donald
Trump is not an anomaly in our history. It is an all-too-familiar pattern in
the long struggle for American reconstruction.
The story of our struggle for freedom is not linear: Every advance toward a
more perfect union has been met with a backlash of resistance.
When African-Americans became full citizens of the United States during
Reconstruction, a violent backlash arose in the Redemption movement that
included both the violence of the Klan and the voter suppression of Southern
Democrats. The same kind of backlash followed the legislative victories of
the civil rights movement - what many historians call a "Second
Reconstruction." Richard Nixon's "law and order" campaign of 1968 was an
intentional effort to appeal to racial hate and fear without using overtly
racist language. His adviser, Kevin Phillips, called it the "Southern
Strategy."
Donald Trump's unanticipated victory could not have been possible without
the election of Barack Obama as America's first African-American president.
Trump entered national politics by waging a crusade against the possibility
of Obama's citizenship. It proved to be the perfect way to touch the psychic
wound of so many Americans who have not faced our legacy of racism. Anyone
familiar with the Mississippi Plan of 1876 or the Southern Strategy of 1968
can be surprised only by the ease with which Trump adapted them for the 21st
century.
Trump's attacks on immigrants, Muslims and the LGBTQ community were
political ploys based on the fundamental racial fear at the heart of the
American experience. When he told white Americans that he was their last
chance to make America great again, he was touching a wound passed down
since the lost cause religion of the 19th century.
America must not waste time asking ourselves how this could have happened.
It happened because it is a habit written deep in our public memory. If we
are willing to see ourselves as we are and have been, we will also see our
potential for prophetic resistance, even in times like these.
For we are also the heirs of great dissenters who've stood for right even
when they were a minority of one. When the Jim Crow laws of the solid South
were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson,
only one justice - John Harlan of Kentucky - dissented. But his dissenting
opinion laid the legal groundwork upon which Thurgood Marshall built his
case over half a century later in Brown v. Board of Education.
When Woodrow Wilson showed "Birth of a Nation" at the White House a century
ago, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and the interracial NAACP challenged the
most powerful man in America to face his racism. When three civil rights
workers were brutally murdered in the first days of Freedom Summer, black
and white students chose to press on together, challenging Mississippi's
brutal racism.
Less than a majority of Americans elected a mortal, not a god, when they
cast their ballots for Donald Trump. They did not un-elect the foundational
principles of our Constitution, nor have they overwhelmed the moral
convictions of our faith.
Across lines of division, we can continue to build the moral coalition that
is already a majority in this country. We can and must face the race and
class question together and not as separate issues.
Yes, we have some difficult days ahead. But our foreparents were up against
more with less. And they taught us that a dying mule always kicks the
hardest. Our work continues: we must work together for a Third
Reconstruction in America.
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