A House Divided Cannot Stand, Because it Cannot Breathe

A house divided cannot stand

Abraham Lincoln

If the story of Jesus Christ teaches us anything it's that people hate the truth. But make no mistake about it: in truth, America is and has always been, a house divided, despite an overwhelming devotion to denying this is true. Just ask any Native American that has managed to survive our little "experiment in democracy."  And it was designed that way, on purpose. 

 Everyone throughout history who has attempted to draw attention to this infallible truth, from Fredrick Douglas to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Martin Luther King to even Colin Kaepernick, has been attacked for failing to express it in a way that is acceptable to those who enjoy the luxury of not having to worry about whether it is true or not.  And rather than address the reality of such truth, the conversation is always reframed and refocused on statistics, which Mark Twain aptly described as "damned lies. Such reframing has become the knee that presses down on the back of the neck of the horrible truth about African America until it has been suffocated beyond the point that it can cry out for help or redress. 

America has a problem. It has always had this problem. Indeed, it was born in the blood and tears of this problem.  And we cannot embrace "the better angels of our being" until we are willing to face and deal with those problems, because they have always festered in the very heart of America itself.

In 1944, this problem was studied extensively by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. In a study of race relations in the United States entitled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Myrdal painstakingly detailed what he saw as obstacles to full participation in American society by African Americans in the 1940s. According to his findings, ideals of liberty, justice, and fair treatment of all people formed an “American Creed” that shaped all political and social interactions in the United States.   But despite this creed, Myrdal saw a vicious cycle in which whites oppressed blacks, and then pointed to blacks' poor performance (or even riotous response to injustices) as a reason for the oppression. The way out of this cycle, he argued, was to either cure whites of prejudice or improve the circumstances of blacks, which would then disprove whites' preconceived notions. Myrdal called this process the “principle of cumulation." To Quote Myrdal:

“There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of white Americans desire that there be as few Negroes as possible in America. If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites' approval—provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved.”

Four decades later, Ronald Reagan would announce the War on Drugs, and the “means” by which “the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in number” was finally enacted via the legal system that met with ‘white approval.’   Myrdal went on to describe how:

“White prejudice and discrimination would keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners, and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ each other.”

In Black-White Relations: The American Dilemma, Junfu Zhang gives this description of Myrdal's work:

“According to Myrdal, the American dilemma of his time referred to the co-existence of the American liberal ideals and the miserable situation of blacks.  On the one hand, enshrined in the American creed is the belief that people are created equal and have human rights; on the other hand, blacks, as one-tenth of the population, were treated as an inferior race and were denied numerous civil and political rights.  Myrdal's encyclopedic study covers every aspect of black-white relations in the United States up to his time.  He frankly concluded that the ‘Negro problem’ is a ‘white man's problem.’  That is, whites as a collective were responsible for the disadvantageous situation in which blacks were trapped.”

Unfortunately for millions, this American Dilemma, as Myrdal described it, is as true today as it was in 1944. Reasons for this are legion, but perhaps the best place to start to understand such a problem is in America's prison houses, where the treatment of Floyd and minorities overall is more often the rule rather than the exception. After all, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged,” Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “by entering its prisons.” Because by entering America's “for-profit” prisons, we can see how the same ugly truth that contributed to the murder of George Floyd has been at work in American society for centuries and does so today behind a patina of economic and political rhetoric, and the face of a faux morality.  Unmask the rhetoric and look into America's prison system, however, and it becomes clear that America has always tried to sweet its race problem under the rug of incarceration, the same way it hides its mental health problems behind a faux morality of fighting crime.

The protests of the likes of King and Kaepernick become all the more necessary because those who attempt to awaken Americans, of all colors and creeds, to the ugly reality that simmers beneath the glitz and glamour of wealth and celebrity culture is simply ignored by far too many people, no matter how many books are written and speeches are given, trying to explain, indeed pleading with society, to address the depths of the pain and despair it is built on.

The books repeatedly ignored by America on the whole include, for example, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander; Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas Blackmon; Worse than Slavery, by David Oshinsky, about the epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the civil rights era - and beyond; Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs, by California Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, who attacks the War on Drugs, describing the harm it has caused and laying out the other options; and countless others. 

And if you think the War on Drugs has nothing to do with the murder of the George Floyds of America, the Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo demonstrates otherwise.   

  

The Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, an experiment was performed that showed how socially and institutionally supported powers of authority could inevitably lead to increasingly more brutal means of violence and apathy by those charged with maintaining a system of order. In a two weeklong experiment, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo selected twenty four male students to play assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison, built in the basement of the Stanford Psychology building. Over the course of the experiment, the treatment and psychological abuse inflicted by the guards on the prisoners escalated so quickly, that two prisoners quit early and the entire experiment was ended abruptly only six days later. Such results were reminiscent of a poem by the Hungarian poet György Faludy in which Faludy described how, during his stay in a Stalinist concentration camp from 1950 to 1953, young guards developed erections as they beat the political prisoners in the cellars of the secret police.

Zimbardo concluded from the experiment that the situation, rather than people’s personalities, caused the participants behavior. In 2007, Zimbardo wrote about the striking similarities between his own Stanford Prison Experiment and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq from 2003 to 2004 in his book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.  And make no mistake, the power of the drug of violence used in such a way is not simply reserved for prisons, but pours out into the community from which those prisons inhale their inmates, and exhale as an indifference to the cries of Floyd and an entire community of people who have all been screaming the same thing for centuries on end: “I can’t breathe!”    

This is why everyone from Milton Friedman to Thomas Sowell has condemned the War on Drugs as not only pernicious but completely immoral. And refusing to understand how the brutality and indifference borne of the former leads inevitably to the consequences that took Floyd’s life, as officers simply stood around ignoring the torture being applied to an innocent man who cried out for his mother, amputates the effect of the latter from how it is caused by the former. Indeed, the best way to show that “Blue Lives Matter” is for officers across the nation to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, with both standing shoulder to shoulder against the actions of the Derek Chauvins of the world. Because more than anything else, it is the actions of people like Chauvin that puts far more officers at risk than any other action committed by minorities in America today.  And the inaction of Chavin's fellow officers who stood by as it happened, who all failed to “protect and serve” the poor, the tired, and the huddled masses, only contributes to a constant state of fear among all minorities of becoming the next George Floyd.  And today, that fear has ignited in riots across this nation.
 

Martin Luther King defined riots as "the language of the unheard." But to be clear, this does not mean that anyone has a moral duty to support rioters. It does mean, however, that every community has a moral responsibility to understand the true cause of such riots in the first place. Rage boiled over, which everyone has experienced at least once in their life, has always exploded in senseless, destructive, and counterproductive measures. We all know this, and indeed see this same behavior exhibited in everyone from children breaking their toys to adults starting senseless wars to riots after a sporting event to shopping for Christmas. 

The point is not to condone such behavior, then,  but to understand how such behavior is always the inevitable human result of those who feel threatened or have been wronged. Indeed, those who walk into stores fully armed with semi-automatic weapons to protest state lock-downs designed to preserve life are threatening even worse action against anyone who challenges their right to refuse to shelter in place. 

 But focusing on condemning the results of injustice more than on the injustices that caused such results is to focus more on condemning how a child responds to being tortured psychologically than on condemning and trying to stop the child from being tortured in such a way the first place. The only way we can all breathe, in short, is if we dissolve the color line between Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, and we all stand together against the Derek Chauvins of the world, to defend the George Floyds of the world. Because a house divided cannot stand, because it cannot breathe.