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A 2020 Movement toward a Third “Reconstruction”?

Posted on June 13, 2020September 14, 2022 by Michael Vavrus

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Our current historical moment suggests that the awakening of the United States may be moving the nation toward a Third Reconstruction.  The first Reconstruction of the 1870s was intended to “reconstruct” and eliminate the southern White terrorism against African American after the Civil War.  Well, we know how that turned out.

            80 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the original Civil Rights Act unconstitutional, Congress in 1964 passed a Civil Rights Act that has remained on the books.  The protests during that era and gains for racial equity realized have been called the Second Reconstruction.  Those social justice advances were not just aimed at the South in the 1960s but across the entire country.  By the 1980s and 1990s, however, progress in racial equity began to stall as Republicans and centrist Democrats put their energies into creating the highest prison populations per capita in the world, a system that used nearly any means to criminalize bodies of color.

            In 2017 I posted about the need for a Movement Toward a Third Reconstruction while referencing a 2016 chapter I wrote with that title.  In June 2020 sustained protests and shifts in the political climate of the U.S. indicate that the nation could actually be moving toward a Third Reconstruction.  Nothing indicates that this will happen easily or at all.  Nevertheless, there is a window of political opportunity that has opened which will need a constant and noisy vigilance to see progress toward racial and ethnic equity in the U.S.

            A 2020 political and cultural storm has set the stage for our current movement toward Third Reconstruction with the intersections of

·      a health pandemic revealing the disgusting inadequacies of our for-profit health and pharmaceutical industries,

·      a depression-era economy enabled by economic “austerity” legislation that has gutted public services, neglected needed infrastructure repairs, and created a nation of debtors under the thumb of finance capitalism,

·      a video of a Black man vividly and blatantly murdered by a police office, opening the public’s collective eyes in connecting the dots of a long history of slave patrols that re-emerged as “modern” policing, and

·      a president trying to make political advances with displays of fascist politics that dog-whistled his rabid evangelical and White racist supporters.

            Yes, the nation was built on slavery and White supremacy.  No, that foundation has not been overcome.  The myth of “Liberty and Justice for All” remains just that, a myth.  Nevertheless, the national conversation going on now is historically unprecedented.  

            For example, in recognition of the structural violence against populations of color, Angela Davis’ decades-long call for prison abolition has been folded into calls to “defund” and reconceptualize police departments.  Some states have declared that “racism is a public health emergency” that necessitates a political economy solution.  And, a recent college graduate who is African American female was able through an email plea to have the Merriam Webster dictionary change its definition of racism to include “systemic racism” or what is often referred to as “institutional racism” in contrast to individual racists whose definition implies are simply “prejudiced.”

            A movement toward a Third Reconstruction is not simply a slam dunk and the game is over.  Legal and political resistance will not disappear from those with vested political, economic, and cultural interests in maintaining as many vestiges of White Supremacy as possible.  This includes entrenched racialized employment and racialized housing. The attainment of equity in public school opportunities for the poor and those of color remains a distant goal.

            Obviously, a Biden election is not enough. Instead, if Trump is defeated in November, the Democratic Party will need to turn to platforms the mainstream tried to demonize: those of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  With Wall Street interests looming over the Democratic Party, a shift to a progressive political agenda will not be an easy walk in the park.  If Trump is defeated, he is still in office until mid-January 2021 and can do further damage to the wobbly environmental and social justice structures of the U.S.  If Trump wins and stays in office until 2024, the picture is not pretty with an embolden fascistic president with an agenda to plunge the nation into further cruelty rather than furthering equity and justice.

            History does not write itself.  In our current moment and for the remainder of the decade it will take a determined populace willing to stick with the necessity of the long haul of a meaningful movement toward a Third Reconstruction.

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