feature: the return of reconstruction and the search for a place in-between

A schizophrenic remembrance of Reconstruction has almost paralyzed our national discourse on race, but now it’s time we address its legacy on invasive police surveillance of brown communities and a seemingly unsolvable immigration crisis. The ghost of Reconstruction reminds us that brown citizenship has always been tied to economics, with little regard or consideration of humanity; we are valuable enough to exploit, but not protect. This essay series seeks to lay the foundation to better interrogate how Reconstruction complicated our collective understanding of what citizenship means for brown people in the United States.

By Jessica Torres, AFROPUNK Contributor 

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“Despite a national gospel that deified freedom and independence, the exclusion of black liberty was coded into the American DNA” Theodore R. Johnson

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A seventh-grade version of myself sits earnestly at my desk, thumbing through the few pages my Social Studies textbook devoted to American Reconstruction. Short paragraphs adorned with photos of Black bodies with bulging eyes swinging in the trees, sharecroppers looking off into the dusty distance, and long lines of Black folk waiting in lines at the Freedmen’s Bureau. I was taught that the South was a terrible place that needed to be fixed, reprimanded, and somehow welcomed back into the Union despite differences that were impossible to settle just a few months before the war ended. In other words, I was led to believe, as an American twelve year old, that the Civil War was about ending slavery. I was also led to believe, by the absence of Latino images throughout this period, that my people suddenly arrived in the United States after the Alamo, or after American intervention in the Caribbean –as if we had no stake in the conversation around slavery. We were either ancient Aztecs or Mayans, or Nuyoricans. What could slavery have to do with us?

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Implicitly, I was being taught that brown bodies were worth fighting wars over not because their freedom was some sort of inevitable and righteous cause but because we were valuable enough to exploit, but not to protect. We were allowed to participate in the economy as workers, but never would we be seen as viable citizens who could enjoy unhampered access to equality, good schools, and fair housing. We were never to be at the center of discussions about the wars purported as missions to save us and unite the nations whom we confused by existing.

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Photo Credit: Gordon Parks

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Modern day black codes, like stop-and-frisk, voter ID laws, terrible public housing systems, and an endless debate about securing the Mexican-US border suggests that we never addressed the brown citizenship question appropriately when we had our first chance to do so. That is to say, what kind of language did Reconstruction provide to discuss brown citizenship? What exactly does it mean to be a brown citizen in a nation that never sought to protect you because of your humanity, and only regards your citizenship as impossibly tied to your economic worth? Somehow, the Fourteenth Amendment morphed into a political warfare tool. And somehow, we still haven’t figured out what citizenship for all actually means.

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Citizenship: membership in a political or national community where individuals are expected to protect and honor the state in exchange for privileges and rights, guaranteed by the law.

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Reconstruction, the period of US history from the end of the Civil War until about 1877, was about integrating, sometimes protecting, but certainly influencing any and all legislation to come down the pipeline regarding civil rights. While some debate whether or not slavery was at the heart of the US Civil War, there is no question that its most obvious opportunity and consequence was what to do with all these newly freed Blacks. Were they citizens? Displaced persons? More than three-fifths of a human?  

The Freedmen’s Bureau — whose funding was cut by President Andrew Johnson in 1866 — was arguably the nation’s first welfare system for disenfranchised people. Under General Oliver Otis Howard, for whom Howard University was named, the Bureau helped set up schools, supplied food, and assisted newly freed blacks in finding jobs, and negotiating labor contracts.

But it was the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in July of 1868, which directly challenged and overturned the infamous Dred Scott decision, established an Equal Protection clause, and sought to legalize black citizenship — a uniquely complicated idea for many US whites who believed Blacks were no more than cogs in King Cotton’s machine. ‘Why give them citizenship?’ was an all too common question that even modern Americans are struggling with today.