American Foundings: Two Genealogies of American Racism
To be American is to have a relationship to the founding of this nation. This relationship can be celebratory or fraught, but it tends to be key to how we understand this country today. Debates about this founding have marked our country since the Revolution. We hear them in Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address" and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream speech.” Both speeches call for fidelity to the founding principles and the need to build upon them in the present. This meant not to increase territory but to expand justice. We build when we fulfill the promises of 1776 and 1787 by extending inalienable rights to all people. An American genealogy traced to 1776 faces intellectual scrutiny in contemporary discourse, and yet most still utilize the language of the foundation. The 1619 Project challenges the priority of the year 1776 by placing that founding at the beginning of American slavery rather than national independence. Yet it still carries on the language of founding events.
Our current relations to our nation’s founding is marked by different genealogies of racism. The first is conceptually analogous to original sin and the second to DNA. Each seeks to grapple with the grave evils of racism and white supremacy in the United States in relation to the founding of this nation. Both are metaphors that take seriously the persistence of racism and white supremacy while expressing the continuing influences of theological discourses.
The language of original sin speaks to a fundamental corruption in the American condition that is grounded in the origin of the country. However, original sin implies a good corrupted, which means that the country itself is marked by both a natural goodness and by sin. As King writes, “We are sinners in need of God’s redemptive power. We know truth, and yet we lie. We know how to be just, and yet we are unjust. We know how to live our lives on the plane of love, and yet we hate, or we are unfaithful to those we should be faithful to. We stand amid the high road, and yet we deliberately choose the low road.” Original sin speaks to the torn will in us. Wanting the good and the evil, we cannot arise from these contrary directions. This sin is traced to the origin; something went awry at the foundation. If racism and white supremacy are the original sin of the United States, corrupting the beginning and so permanently marking the nation, this does not mean that the nation is not itself good.
In Christian doctrine, original sin is revealed by suffering and hope. We become aware of our woundedness through the hope of salvation. In America, our awareness of our “original sin” has deepened, in part, by the progress made through figures like Lincoln and King. If Robert E. Lee or Bull Connor had won, we wouldn’t know our sin. On the flip side, the language of original sin rejects glib declarations that the end of racism is nigh and attitudes that treat white supremacy as a thing of the past. One cannot walk away from original sin. As Lincoln expressed in his Second Inaugural Address, this sin, an offense before God, has caused enormous suffering and its removal has never been easy. Lincoln saw American slavery as “one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove.” The removal of it was through “this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?” This terrible woe continued in the form of Jim Crow after the Civil War. Though we have ended Jim Crow and slavery, this terrible woe haunts this country. In light of this evil, Lincoln insists our task is to “strive on to finish the work.”
Despite this woe, and through this work, there is the chance for redemption from sin. Corruption can at least be partially healed. The healing fulfills the thing as it was meant to be. King repeated this again and again. In his final speech in Memphis, he said “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’" This is the logic of the political and theological reflections that both King and Lincoln express in their reflections on the sinfulness and goodness of the American project. Their speeches and writings were about redeeming the good by cleansing the evil. We need not abandon that project, but to speak of the sin truly, to strive to expunge it, and to seek to restore and advance the good inherent in the project.
The language of DNA bears some resemblance to that of original sin. It too speaks of a genealogy which traces contemporary ills to an origin point. The force of the 1619 Project is the way it seeks to track down the corrupt DNA of the American project. As Nikole Hannah-Jones writes for the 1619 project, “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Here the language of DNA is key. DNA is part of the nature of the thing. In this, the problem is not what we have done or persistently do; the problem is what we are. The language of racism in the American DNA carries a kind of Manichean account of sin, in which the evil nature of a thing must be negated. We must “unbecome” what we are.
Critics of the 1619 Project have argued that, in grounding racism and white supremacy in the DNA of America, the project makes it hard to see a way forward to a better version of this country. If my DNA is rotten, then there is nothing that can be done. If whiteness, racism, and white supremacy are ineradicable part of the nature of this country—if they are bound up in the founding documents and the whole system of law—then we are bound not to reform or redeem but to tear down and replace. If something is evil by nature, then the only response is to eliminate it.
The advantage of both these descriptions is they present the deep challenge of racism and white supremacy. They both reject a kind of glib “Pelagianism” that thinks that racism has been overcome, systems of oppression dismantled, and Confederate symbols just friendly reminders of regional differences. And yet, of the two genealogies to a flawed founding, I think we should turn to the language of original sin. I think this because of its better explanatory force of the past and its superior vision of the future.
We can see this when we look to our history. Theologically speaking, Original sin does not obliterate the goodness of human nature and so it remains possible to perform good works. In this, the United States’ history of resistance to the dual evils of fascism and communism, its rich multicultural life, its commitment to liberty and self-governance are not discounted but made complex by its corresponding destruction of the Indigenous people, enslavement of Africans, and institution of Jim Crow. How could a country so noble at the same time be so malignant? The metaphor of original sin helps account for it. We can see this on the microcosmic scale as well. Without Jefferson, it is hard to see how Lincoln or King could have articulated their vision of enacting the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. But Jefferson was also a slave master and colonizer. This country is exceptional for its grandeur and its depravity. In this, it is all too human.
The language of original sin also marks a more robust path forward. Martin Luther King, Jr. took up Augustine’s language of how we must look at the sinner. For King, we must "love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does.” We do this because the person we encounter is fundamentally good even though the sin is real and the sinner responsible for it. When we hate the sin, we want the sin in the person to cease. However, we do not want the person to cease being who and what they are.
Looking at the United States, King saw the deep-down sin of racism and yet he claimed that we are not corrupt by nature. Rather, we must go back to the founding to carry out the vision of that founding. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We shouldn’t stop being what we are; rather, we should actually start living the founding promise. King, like Lincoln, insisted on fidelity to the true founding of the United States, in particular the Declaration of Independence. For Lincoln, the response to slavery was to stand by the founding by enacting the founding truly. “If that Declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute-book in which we find it and tear it out. Who is so bold as to do it? If it is not true, let us tear it out: Let us stick to it, then; let us stand firmly by it, then.” They believed reform was possible by means of the founding even though it was so marked by the sin of racism and slavery. Reform is possible for a being whose nature is good but corrupted. It is impossible for a being whose nature is itself corrupt. The metaphor of original sin speaks to the possibility of reform according to the principles of this country.
Ultimately, it may be that looking at the founding of the United States will require not just thoughtful history and theological reflection. Genealogists of American racism will not find a definite answer about our true founding and how it marks us. Rather, we may ultimately have to choose between metaphors. In Christian discourse, the language of original sin is ultimately the language of hope. This hope navigates between presumption that excuses or ignores sin, or despair that thinks our being is sinful and so reform is impossible. Importantly, this hope depends on a confidence in a God who redeems, a confidence that leavened the work of both King and Lincoln. There is a genealogy of justice that God writes, one that is deeper than the genealogies of sin which we compose.
King and Lincoln saw the founding of the United States as a reason to hope even amidst the sin. This hope means that we can look back and recognize many foundings. We are a deeply sinful nation. The depth of our nation’s sin goes back to 1619, and deeper to 1492, and pervades our history. But we can also see other foundings, 1776, 1863, 1964. These are all our origins of our nation. Each is marked by the original Original Sin, and yet in them hope in a deeper genealogy can be found. By acknowledging all of them, we can recommit ourselves to the work of advancing our better founding as we work to overcome our sinful foundings. Seeing our sin, we know it is not our nature, and so we can work and hope for our redemption.
