It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational.
In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon.
Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. This article is adapted from Coates’s forthcoming book.
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