Romans and Reconstructions

I write a trivia question everyday for the Afternoon Cruise on Jazz88. I read it at 4:30 and I have a nice little crew of maybe 10-25 people who take the time to write in their answers. My favorite trivia to write at this point in my life is “on this day in history.” I enjoy going to the Wikipedia page about whatever calendar day we are in and finding a point of departure for trivia questions. This means that most days I read about some absolutely insane shit that happened during the Roman Empire era: An 8 year old becomes co-emperor of the Empire, an emperor designates the next emperor from his deathbed, an emperor who bought the emperorship on auction from the Praetorian Guard. The Roman Empire is chock full of absolutely wild, unfathomably wild leadership. My modern mind imagines some citizens of the Empire coming up to the capital and saying “this shit looks crazy Didius Julianus. We are going to look wild on wikipedia. It is going to be obvious to everyone reading our history that we are currently heading in the wrong direction.” But nothing of the sort can be done. There is no button to press to stop decline. I think about this as I feel the country moving in a wrong direction for me. I think about large corporations both saying “we are going to make it a priority to have better recruitment and retention of Black leadership” and four years later saying “We aren’t. We aren’t going to make it a priority to have better recruitment and retention of Black leadership.” Saying both things within some non-generational period seems categorically more insane than saying either thing. I am learning that things I thought were lines in the sand for our country were just trends, reasonable and fashionable only at the time. Does it turn your stomach to think of that? I ask this of you even if we stand on a different side of an issue. If you think prioritizing better recruitment for Black leaders does it bug the shit out of you that Target was front and center on that issue for a couple seasons? Does it bother you that it was just a trend, just the wind blowing a certain direction and bringing many corporate policies along with it?

Reconstruction is a heartbreaking and fascinating period of our country’s history. I believe Andrew Johnson is our worst President. He’s our worst President because at a moment when so much was pliable and enforceable with military force, he found a path back to fortifying institutional racism. He never believed in the cause of the Civil War. He didn’t believe in reconstructing our society with a seat at the table for Black people. When he had the opportunity to put his thumb on the scale to favor slaveowners or slaves he chose slaveowners. Garbage. But I hear Reconstruction echoes right now. There is an obsession with undoing the policies of the Biden administration. But this is not an orderly undoing with an eye toward decency. This is an aggressive yanking, stripping and deriding of policies that sought to reconstruct our society with more seats at the table for more people. Are these policies being removed because they worked? Are they being removed because they didn’t work? Around MLK Day I realized for the first time that the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Alabama took place weeks after the “I Have a Dream” speech and the March on Washington. August 1963 for the March for Freedom and September 1963 for the bombing. The Civil Rights era tells a story of resistance. It tells the story of America hearing Dr. King and other leaders and not changing minds but instead buying detonators and dynamite. Will 2020-2024 be looked at as a period of Reconstruction? Will the policies aimed at changing policing policies, renter’s rights, clean energy, diversity and equity commitments be looked at with the shock of how truly radical Reconstruction was? If you spend a lot of time writing trivia you will often hear of a Black person landing an elected position and being recognized as the first Black person to hold said office since the 1870s or 1880s. One at a time these asterisks can be looked at as an outlier. But they are not; the gains that Blacks made in the 15 years after the Civil War were clawed back violently around the country.

Gains are being clawed back right now. A new, indecent, vindictive America is not being born, it is coming of age. 8 year-olds will be Emperors. Money will be printed with our current king on the obverse. I want to walk out and tell the leaders “this isn’t decent, this shit looks crazy Didius Julianus. When they read about this part in the 2070 edition of Wikipedia, they’ll wonder why it wasn’t stopped.” But I don’t have faith it will be stopped. In fact I have faith it won’t be.