Exclusion: The Long-time Enemy of American Stated Ideals
Exclusion is as much a part of American history as liberty – if not more. It is time to acknowledge its importance and the ways it still impacts the United States today.
8 minute read
There can be a tendency for some foundational moments in American history to be viewed through rose-tinted glasses, where liberty and the promise of opportunity often take centre-stage. Key moments of American history are celebrated today when they are not always as glorious as they seem. Exclusion often lurks behind American stated ideals of liberty, equality, democracy and opportunity. The centrality of exclusion to the foundation of the United States needs to be acknowledged as well as its impacts on today’s American society.
Take Thanksgiving; this national holiday was created during the Civil War as a way of reshaping American History. It glorifies the Pilgrims and hides the exclusion and massacres of Native Americans, as well as ignores the fact that the Pilgrims were not the first settlers in the early United States. They arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, 13 years after the creation of the Colony of Virginia, and one year after the first African American slaves were imported, in 1619. The occasion fails to recognise the Native Americans and African Americans whose sacrifices were important in building the United States. The expansion to the West was made at the expense of the native population, and the U.S. became a prominent economic power thanks to slavery.
Additionally, many documents considered foundational to American liberty and equality were written at times when exclusion was a defining part of society.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson owned more than six hundred slaves when he wrote these forever famous words in 1776. Patrick Henry, famous for his words: “Give me Liberty or give me Death” which persuaded many to declare war on Britain for U.S. independence was equally a slave owner. The U.S. constitution, written a few years later in 1789, also contained an exclusion. The Native Americans were not counted in the total number of the population which determined the number of representatives in each state: “excluding Indians not taxed” (Article I and XIV.)
There are specific examples where federal laws were overwritten at the state level that were harmful to minority groups. In 1868, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to former slaves and guaranteed that no States would “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” However, it was circumvented by several state laws known as the Jim Crow Laws which denied some liberties to people of colour and implemented racial segregation. You could read state laws such as: “All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited” (Florida.)
Later, other groups were excluded such as immigrants with the 1924 Immigration Act among other laws which forbade all immigration from Asia and imposed a quota on the Eastern Hemisphere. When some groups were given more liberties – such as women who got the right to vote four years before the Immigration Act – others were denied liberty.
Exclusion has always been present in American history. It brought unity among those that were not excluded and was beneficial financially. Unpaid labour (indentured servants and slaves), cheap workforce (immigrants), unpaid reproductive work (women confined to the domestic sphere) were key to the development of the United States; they were a driving force for the U.S. agrarian economy and manufacturing economy.
Exclusion was as significant to the building of the United States as liberty – if not more, and its impact should not be underestimated. Racial exclusion is still shaping American society. It impacts universal healthcare (or rather its lack), medical care, roads and districts, ultimately impacting education, employment and the wealth gap, among other issues. It has infiltrated American’s everyday lives and is better known today as “systemic racism” – a form of racism that is embedded in society and in its institutions (to see what shape it can take, watch those eight short videos).
Examples of how exclusion still impacts the U.S. today are numerous. As James Baldwin wrote: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.” Even the word “criminal” was impacted by racial exclusion. For thousands of years, African American people were depicted as criminals, Black men especially were pictured as rapists of white women. This mythology of Black criminality was perpetuated by policies targeting mainly minorities. It started with the 13th Amendment. Once again, history can suffer from a pedagogical bias as some parts are remembered and others ignored. The 13th amendment is celebrated as an achievement for liberty as it freed four million slaves, but it also created a loophole that was exploited as soon as the amendment was passed. The amendment forbade to hold a person in slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” This led to a rise in incrimination of African American people. White policy makers invented offenses that were used to target African American people such as seeking an employment without a note from their former slave owner, or simply loitering. The documentary 13TH by Ava DuVernay explains how this loophole was exploited to exclude African American people and what the results are today. There are two statistics that are given in this powerful documentary that perfectly exemplify the issue: the U.S. population represents 5 percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. In the U.S., one white man out of seventeen will end up in prison during his lifetime, when it will be the case for one out of three Black men. From the 1970s, starting with Richard Nixon, and later Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the now famous catch phrases: “war on drugs”, “tough on crime”, and “law and order” have set the tone for tougher policies and longer sentences that were implemented in the following decades. It led to mass incarceration and targeted minorities primarily. There has been a 500 percent increase in the incarceration rate the past forty years and 67 percent of the prisoners are people of colour when they represent only 37 percent of the population. The “war on drugs” heavily punished those in possession of drugs as well as those who sold it, punishing crack cocaine more severely than regular cocaine. Crack is cheaper than cocaine and used more by African American people than whites. This resulted in a huge increase of the African American population in prison. Drug addiction was not dealt with as a health issue; it was dealt with as a criminal issue and for that, prison, the deprivation of liberty, was chosen, once again excluding mainly those who fought for decades to acquire liberty. Today, this is still badly impacting the American society. African American people are still 3.6 times more likely than whites to be arrested for selling drugs and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for possessing drugs, when whites are actually more likely to sell drugs and as likely to consume them.
Exclusion still has a financial interest. In the U.S., some prisons are private which poses a humanitarian issue because the goal of private prisons is not rehabilitation but rather profits. Thus, it is in their interest to have as many people incarcerated as possible, to hold them there longer, and to provide them with the barest necessities. GeoGroup and CoreCivic – the two main companies that own and manage private prisons – made revenues of $2.48 billion and $1.98 billion respectively in 2019. The companies in charge of private prisons are not the only ones to make money out of it. From food to orange jumpsuits, anti-suicide blankets to medical care, or masks to prevent prisoners from spitting, everything is externalized to other companies that line up at the annual American Jail Association conference to make profit out of prisoners. In some prisons or immigration detention centres, prisoners cook and clean for no wages; a way for prisons to make even more profit instead of paying a company to do so. They are also sometimes undernourished and lack basic necessities, which push them into buying products at high costs at the commissary. Exclusion is profitable.
In addition to the mass incarceration and long sentences disproportionately imposed on people of colour, the system does not seem to work as 83 percent of the released prisoners are rearrested within nine years. Not only is it not working, but it destroys generations. A study shows that there would be 20 percent less poverty in the U.S. today if the mass incarceration of the last decades had not happened. Indeed, incarceration has an impact on people’s future employments and earnings, their children, the overall quality of life of the family and confines racial minorities to the lower social classes. It also deprives them of a major liberty: the right to vote, as some states deprive those convicted of suffrage.
American history needs to be acknowledged in all its complexity and to be held accountable. Exclusion was foundational to the U.S. and still has an impact today in the form of systemic racism. History needs to be used as a way to inspire people to do better and to demand that the U.S. live up to the ideals it has stated for so long.
PLUTO 
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