The Fight for Fugitive Humanity
Our nation is at a tipping point: a confrontation between those looking to live in a country that truly values human rights and human life ... & those who value maintaining a White patriarchal society
Guest Contributor | Rann Miller
In Dr. Jarvis Givens’ book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, he explains that Black people educating themselves is an act of fugitivity.
At one time, were Black teachers, in particular, caught teaching a non-Eurocentric version of history - or one slaying anti-Blackness by way of debunking white supremacy - they faced the threat of being fired, losing their teaching license, and possible physical violence [that threat is gradually being resurrected today in Critical Race Theory debates being unleashed across school districts].
Their lives were under the threat of capture like the lives of Frederick Douglass, Ona Judge and Harriet Tubman; criminals under the law.
However, laws are contractual in nature.
Laws have authority because the people living under them grant them legitimacy. An example is traffic laws. Drivers obey them because they want order and safety. When those laws fail to offer a benefit to all parties, they become illegitimate.
This was the case for fugitivity from enslavement and later, enslavement itself.
When Chief “Justice” Roger Taney handed down his decision in Scott v. Sanford, it further exacerbated the nation’s ambiguity, and controversy, concerning enslavement in newly admitted states. This culminated in the secession of southern states and a war to decide the fate of the peculiar institution because enslavement, as law, was no longer legitimate enough to be negotiated by the federal government.
Maybe “Justice” Taney calculated that Americans and their government would obey his interpretation of the law simply because he said it. It’s certainly plausible. Maybe, that was the thought of his progeny on the high court in 2021 as they “decided” Whole Women’s Health v Jackson.
The high court said that injunctive relief couldn’t be provided for women from the enforcement of Texas’ abortion law because it’s unclear if the law can actually be enforced in a way that warrants relief from the court. However, in her dissent, Justice Sotomayor said:
Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents.
As the enslaved person, who is a human being, has the “right” to do with their life as they so choose, so too does a woman, who is also a human being. Laws are only as powerful as legitimacy granted to them. For 50 years, Roe v. Wade has lived, with legitimacy, as law of the land.
But this ruling foreshadowed the confrontation over the humanity of women earlier this month, just as the Dred Scott ruling led to a confrontation over the humanity of Black people. Frederick Douglass said of Taney’s opinion:
The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience.... [But] my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies.
Scott v. Sanford unearthed the belief that Black people have no rights that a White man is bound to respect. The Whole Women’s Health ruling simply took race out and put gender in its place. That’s true particularly for Black women, Latinas, and Indigenous women, especially the poor among them.
The outcome of Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization may certainly solidify the inevitable – that “rights” in the constitution is an afterthought. The “rights” don’t enter the equation until after the foundation of our social structure is established.
Our “rights” are amended in, and that stinks. Justice Sotomayor smells the stench, and she asked the court …
…. [W]ill this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don't see how it is possible.
Neither do I.
Is it because the U.S. Constitution is a document to protect the rights of property? What property? White maleness or white patriarchy. Whiteness is certainly property. However, who has property rights? Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times shared that if Roe is overturned via Dobbs “… this will be my first experience, as a White woman, of losing rights.”
The thing is, Michelle, “rights” were never meant for you. But the proximity of a White woman to a White man is such that White women can take it upon themselves to feel secure, whereas “rights” for Black people are nothing more than a series of negotiated concessions that are slowly expiring.
Voting rights had an expiration date (see Shelby v. Holder). Affirmative action had an expiration date (see Grutter v. Bollinger). This iteration of the high court seems to suggest that the “rights” of White women have an expiration date, too.
While Goldberg is in grief and despair over her daughter’s future with expired-ness, she need not worry too much. Such expired-ness will come with all deliberate speed, whereas for Black folk, it comes without the bureaucratic red tape.
Our nation is at a tipping point: a confrontation between those looking to live in a country that truly values human rights and human life …. and those who value maintaining a white patriarchal society. The latter society makes fugitives out of women as they did Black folk de jure and continue de facto.
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton University has shared that it is long overdue to end the [Supreme] Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society. But, the White settler project that is the United States of America was undemocratic at its genesis.
And it’ll be undemocratic upon its revelation.