George Moses Horton nods at Derrick Bell: Race in America
Alas! and am I born for this,
To wear this slavish chain?
Deprived of all created bliss,
Through hardship, toil and pain!Oh, blest asylum — heavenly balm!
Unto thy boughs I flee —
And in thy shades the storm shall calm,
With songs of Liberty!excerpted from George Moses Horton, “On Liberty and Slavery”
I hope our friends at the Poetry Foundation have accurately presented the story of George Moses Horton. Many poets strive to earn a living by their word craft. He strove to earn his freedom, literally. Alas, his words, talent, and humanity did not set him free: apparently, it took the Emancipation Proclamation and Civil War to end slavery for him.
Perhaps the ‘father’ of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell, was thinking about the experience of George Moses Horton when he wrote these words:
I am reminded that our forebears, though betrayed into bondage, survived the slavery in which they were reduced to things, property, entitled neither to rights nor to respect as human beings. Somehow, as the legacy of our spirituals make clear, our enslaved ancestors managed to retain their humanity as well as their faith, that evil, and suffering, were not the extent of their destiny, nor of the destiny of those who would follow them. Indeed, we owe our existence to their perseverance, their faith. In these perilous times, we must do no less than they did: fashion a philosophy that both matches the unique dangers we face and enables us to recognize in those dangers, opportunities for committed living and humane service.
- Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
I do not believe that “CRT” is a philosophy that can match the unique dangers faced by any community. A set of tools that might help? Sure.
Race is a social construct. So is money. Nobody questions how powerful money is.
We should scrutinize all of our social constructs. If we pretend they do not exist, or try to obscure their effect, we empower those who benefited from the legacy of those constructs.
But we should not despair. The world of 2020 is not the world of 1920, or of 1820.
If we cannot see where some forms of racism may have been squelched, and only where other forms persist, and still other forms may be under reconstruction, we miss the evidence of our own culture, preferring the feeling of anger to critical observation and capacity to act.
