The Wrong Discussion: The Constitution and the American Way

Tolstoy once said “When man is confronted with the incomprehensible, he often turns to a toy named God”. In the United States, when we are confronted with social situations that raise serious questions about our national character, we almost always turn to the U.S. Constitution for cover and comfort. We love to wrap ourselves in the Constitution, because this compendium of moral ideals, backed by the theoretical force of law, is a calling to our better angels and a repository for our collective sins. It’s as if the Constitution is a confessional for our misdeeds, one that absolves us of all transgressions within a civil society. The Constitution is the place we go to feel better about ourselves, a place where we can find moral redemption wrapped in a reaffirmed image of ourselves as civilized people of laws and principles. It absolves us from responsibility to think critically about who we really are rather than who we would like to be. Wrapping ourselves in the Constitution makes clear that we are not like James von Brunn or Scott Roeder, that they are not us; that they are not a historical legacy seeking to reinvigorate a past that never ended. It is sadly ironic that in “toying” with the Constitution as a means of assuaging our consciences, without a commensurate charge to examine how we actually live, we make it even more difficult to ever achieve the moral character to which we so deeply aspire.

The American rush to make James von Brunn and Scott Roeder out to be something other than products of our culture reflects the learned response of those who refuse to look in the mirror for fear of what they might discover—that there is no fairest of them all. The media has portrayed them as singular figures in the wilderness of hate, surrounded by but disconnected from the ever-growing web of American haters, finally reaping the revenge they had so furtively sown over these many decades. How different that is from how we think about other terrorists, especially those who speak with an foreign accent from under darker skin.

To the media, von Brunn has no history that flows from 400 years of a national ideology of “difference as negative”, abetted by a seemingly intransigent belief in the primacy of power, and a social practice that has left an indelible mark on our moral character. The media would have us also believe that Roeder is merely a zealot gone too far and not a representative of a right-wing cabal (a domestic Al Quaeda, if you will) that has sought to dehumanize those who think and act differently about issues of a woman’s right to privacy and who have consistently used the fear and reality of death as bargaining chips in our national debate. What the media and the general public fail to do is to acknowledge our systemic accommodation and cultural tolerance for white male hate and violence and our collective disregard for all who would become their victims. Even in their heinous deaths, they remain invisible to us and of less regard than the craven capitalist sensationalism of these men’s depravity.

It’s not just that we are all Americans, but that we are all complicit in the creation of our realities and our myths. To look is to realize that von Brunn and Roeder were made by us, that they didn’t just pop up like burnt toast. They were made by us in our schools that fail to teach a full and honest history, in our churches where God is Tolstoy’s toy made in the image of his followers, and in our differentiated cultural enclaves where we seek social distance and supremacy. Von Brunn and Roeder merely thought the way they were taught to think, felt the way they were socialized to feel, and acted the way they were apprenticed to act—all with a social conscience quite similar to that of their more celebrated ancestors. Thomas Jefferson and his role in shaping the Constitution as an affirmative action decree for white men and as a legal foundation for slavery; Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes and their conspiracy to defraud Blacks of their newly won freedom, marginal as it was, and sacrifice their humanity to the whim of southern white male prerogative; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his great compromise of Black American agency in negotiations with southern democrats over passage of the New Deal; and Ronald Reagan who made racism publicly acceptable again, all represent the ground upon which von Brunn and Roeder walked boldly into our lives.
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At a former university, I found myself entrenched in a situation in which a student wearing an armband, according to Tim Wise, for "Blood and Honour"--a British-based neo-Nazi and skinhead-affiliated musical movement, that calls for "white pride" and white power proselytized his prejudices on the campuses main square. Created originally as a magazine by Ian Stuart the Blood and Honour "movement", the symbolism worn by this young man promoted bands that sing about racial cleansing and the deportation, if not extermination, of blacks and Jews. Some on campus demanded that the student be made to cease wearing such offensive clothing, citing institutional policies against displaying offensive messaging in their dorm rooms and windows. Others sought to have the administration act forcefully to reduce their fear of violence and intimidation. Still others wanted the administration to make real the hallowed tenets eloquently displayed in its mission statement that, in effect, morally committed the institution to transform their belief in “the dignity of all human beings” into a progressive practice. There was a call for the university to be more understanding and sensitive toward those who had given this mostly white and Christian campus their trust. What the administration and senior faculty chose to do instead was to stand behind the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech for all, no matter how despicable and hurtful that speech may be. I thought that was interesting given the abundant lack of such moral commitment to free speech in our daily deliberations and interactions. Tenured faculty challenged the institutional and personal power of the President most fervently in the back corridors of gossip. Organized internal political bodies succumbed to their fear of Presidential power in almost all deliberations. In our classrooms, silence was often more audible than speech, especially speech that challenged the intellectual authority of the professor. Throughout the institution, one not unlike most in the United States, the disparities between rhetoric and reality and promise and practice were disparagingly prominent.

So, it was not surprising to experience the leadership of the university calling for strict adherence to the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech. What was troubling was that they had never done that before. Not when Black and Latino voices were silenced by the government and Asian Americans were made invisible to our concerns for social justice. Never did these Constitutional adherents freely voice their outrage at the police killings of young Black men, especially in a city where eleven Black men had either been killed or seriously injured while in police custody. Nor did they express a public awareness of the effect of their historical silence, the fact that the only hate groups in the U.S. that are allowed to organize, recruit and act on their hatred are those made up exclusively of white men. That certainly would have been important, if not foundational, to those who profess a belief in the Constitution, equality and social justice. More importantly, it would have been ideologically and morally foundational to a higher education institution that recently adopted a theme of internationalization.

In the U.S., we have no Hispanic/Latino/a militiamen groups; no Asian American KKK; no Black Neo-Nazis; no hate filled voices collectively protected by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. As with the Brown v. Board of Education aftermath where we find ourselves more educationally segregated today than before 1954, real American culture made the law and its applications irrelevant. To wrap ourselves uncritically in the Constitution as a guarantor of civil liberties in a social context in which all but the privileged have been eliminated is as hypocritical as Thomas Jefferson and the boys were in 1887. They used the adoption of the Constitution to make slavery—the soul of our capitalist system—legal and to imprint on the American psyche the belief that white men of means were supreme within the law and in our daily interactions.
That was made explicitly clear to us at this institution as well.

By ignoring the interests of the hundreds of university faithful targeted by Neo-Nazi hatred, the university violated its social contract with all who make up the cultural community. Their only issue of concern was the protection of rights under the Constitution and not their moral obligation to provide equitable value to all. In the matter of the Neo-Nazi’s violation of the “human dignity” of “Others”, the university was immorally silent. Martin Luther King once said that “There comes a time when silence is betrayal”. In this case, betrayal of the human spirit—the worst kind. The institution made the Neo-Nazi human, even in his transgressions, while lumping those who protested his presence into a category of dissidents, not fully human inside their political designation of difference. As such, the Neo-Nazi became an individual, the essential character in our Constitutional drama.

This is one of those times for us as a nation as we try to understand the von Brunn phenomenon. Our unwillingness to grapple with his disproportionate and inequitable attention by the American public belies the social context in which his actions exist. Asians don’t pulblicly and with impunity announce their hatred for others, just as Blacks don’t individually or with companions travel to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and kill White Supremacists within militia-oriented hate groups. As a nation, we would not tolerate that. To assume that Blacks and Asians aren’t as filled with anger, frustration and hate as white men is just another form of silence that betrays. That Asian and Black men don’t act in the same way as white men around their hate is a call for us to look beyond the immediacy of the actions of hateful white men to the root causes of their actions and our complicity in them. Von Brunn didn’t act alone anymore than thousands of judges across the United States throughout our history who turned a blind eye to injustice when confronted with a Black defendant and a white victim. He, like them, acted with the full consent of the American people. In essence, he was our emissary.

It is time to stop allowing our willful ignorance to be the measure of our expertise and the catalyst for our silence. It is time to own who we are and to embrace von Brunn, hopefully in disgust, but as one of us. A controversial so-called Black leader responding to pervasive American fear of angry, young Black men, suggested that we look on their backs where it reads “Made in America”. I think that might well be applied to von Brunn.