The Next White Compromise

Looking for compromises to address our current divisions seems like a good idea until you look at how compromises have functioned throughout our history. 

Our nation was founded on the compromise between the free and slave states to count enslaved people as 3/5th  of a person, so the non-slave states would not control the House of Representatives.  Northern whites, in other words, agreed to a compromise with the slave states for the sake of “unity” and of course, prosperity.

Then we had the Missouri Compromise of 1820: Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. The Northern states intention was to maintain the South’s economy, which was not that hard, since tobacco and cotton exports were central to American prosperity.

Then, the big compromise of 1850.  California was admitted as a free state.  Other territories were not assigned as either slave or free, which placed the previous balance in jeopardy.  To please the slave states, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave whites the right to capture any black person on suspicion that they had escaped from their bondage. That compromise failed to block the forces for the abolition of slavery, and the Southern states sought to form their own nation based on their slave-based prosperity, which brought about the Civil War.

For the first time since the nation’s formation, the free and slave states were not “united” by compromise but separated by war.  At war’s end, a short period of Reconstruction sought to “reconstruct” previous racial structures, which only became possible with the aid of Federal troops to prevent the revenge of white supremacists.

In 1878, white Congressional leaders again made a compromise that resulted in the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South, which left the South to be “redeemed” from a multiethnic democracy to a Jim Crow regime that lasted into the 1950s and 1960’s.  The civil rights movement brought together various trends that effectively abolished this last white compromise until today.

Now, we have a choice.  Will we ignore the role that race played in the defeat of Kamala Harris and pretend that white supremacy is not an issue?

Will progressives abandon the principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to win the favor of naïve white constituents?

Will we form a coalition with those who have been excluded from all of our previous compromises?

Are we looking at the next white compromise, or for the first time, can we move toward a climate of justice?