Black-Red View by John Alan
April 2001

Taking Ashcroft's Measure

While nothing can legitimize the presidency of George W. Bush even as the protests have died down, we have to focus on his administration's plans to deal with the historical and vital issue of African-American civil rights. Bush told the nation that his theory of governing is "to work with every Cabinet member to set goals for each area of our government...I hope the American people realize that a good executive is one that understands how to recruit people and how to delegate."

Bush selected the ultra-conservative Senator John Ashcroft to serve as the U.S. Attorney General in this collective team-like version of his administration. When he was the attorney general of Missouri, in the late '70s and early '80s, he waged a bitter legal battle against court-ordered desegregation of public schools for St. Louis and Kansas City. Later, when he ran for Governor of Missouri, he attacked his opponent for not being hostile enough to desegregation. And when he became governor, he vetoed laws designed to promote voter registration in predominantly African-American St. Louis. Hence, Bush will "work and set goals" with a cabinet member who has a terrible public record on race.

Ashcroft recently met with the Congressional Black Caucus. He told the Black lawmakers that he wouldn't oppose any African American Bush chose to appoint to the Supreme Court or federal district courts and that he hopes the Congress would pass legislation to address the problem of racial profiling by the police. If Congress fails to act, he would draft his own recommendations because he does "believe that racial profiling is unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution."

Ashcroft was not a repentant racist when he spoke to Black lawmakers, he was just complying with Bush's concept of a "compassionate conservative." The limit of that "compassion" was revealed when Rep. Charles Rangel of New York asked him to reopen the Justice Department investigation into the death of Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed by New York City policemen as he was preparing to enter his own apartment. According to the Black lawmakers, Ashcroft told them that he was not inclined to reopen the case because he "didn't want to go back and try to second-guess the former Attorney General."

Ashcroft expressed an historical inconsistency in American politics, which projects the ideal of American equality and justice for all regardless of race or class, yet is incapable of concretizing it in political and social practices because of the underlying racist character of American civilization. More than 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson was bothered by that same inconsistency when he wrote that slavery "would divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."

Jefferson was absolutely right that the issue of slavery would divide this country and produce convulsions. However, he was totally wrong about the "extermination of one or the other race." He had no concept that the idea of freedom, embodied in the rebellious slave, could be a pole of attraction across race lines. He didn't live to see this happen, but he would have recognized it in the birth of the Abolitionist Movement, having its origin in runaway slaves. It sounded the death knell of his slave-based society.

I recall this not for history's sake, but to remember that the original foundation of American civilization was built on African-American slave labor and not the Jeffersonian idealism that "all men are created equal." For several centuries African Americans have organized and revolted against the legacy of that contradiction and its perversion of the notion of freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. thought that the Civil Rights Movement would uproot that legacy. In his famous "Letter From Birmingham Jail" he wrote "we will reach the goal of freedom because the goal of America is freedom."

Political freedom for African Americans is still in a racially divided society with extreme inequities. This is the very substance upon which American politi cs feeds. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have played the race card by manipulating the fear and tension between races. At the same time Bush's African-American cabinet appointees are mere window dressing to hide the actual policies he wants to implement.

Ashcroft's ideological battle is also on the terrain of history. He thinks that the Confederacy should not be criticized, that Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis should not be denigrated because they stood up for a principle, states' rights. But the right of states to supersede federal laws has consistently been a threat to the civil rights of African Americans. The Civil War was initiated by the Southern states to uphold their "right" to impose slavery, and during the Civil Rights Movement African Americans have depended on federal laws to enforce their rights.

In spite of all of the reaction we are facing today, a new form of struggle will emerge fighting for freedom. As it always has that struggle will likely have a Black dimension out in front. Our challenge is to be prepared to meet this movement by articulating now the way its irrepressible idea of freedom is such a universal pole of attraction.

Black-Red View by John Alan April 2001

Taking Ashcroft's Measure

Black-Red View by John Alan
April 2001