America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The
question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the
people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken
the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not
mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you
and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of
“government of the people,” but the means by which “the people”
acquired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that
Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious
claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined,
indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to
ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce,
and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable
condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent
daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle
Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake,
a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond
the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of
naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and
physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and
hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the
notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that
they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new
idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up
hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike
us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the
machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else
before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite,
Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then
they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly
become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I
cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of
washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in
being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream
socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and
