Judge Roger Taney, Institutional Racism and the GOP’s Willful Blindness to Historical Truth | Editorial

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If you are looking for the patron saint of institutional racism in the United States, Roger B. Taney is your man.

That a bust of Chief Justice Taney on the U.S. Capitol should be removed, as the House voted last week to do, is beyond reasonable debate. It is the lowest fruit in the efforts of our nations to take its past more honestly into account.

The only wonder is that 120 House Republicans voted against the measure. The question is not what to do about Taney, but what to do about them. And what to do with the Republicans in the Senate who are sure to vote against the measure, too.

They declared their position: against any questioning of the past of our nations which could annoy their most racist supporters during the next Republican primary. And in favor of the perfect metaphor, continuous bleaching.

Chicago knows institutional racism

If you live in Chicago and know the worst in our city’s history, you can only marvel at such willful blindness.

To claim that institutional racism is fiction or that removing the bust of someone like Taney is an erasure of history sounds like a farce for those of us who grew up living in a city where entire neighborhoods once were. bordered by red lines by mortgage companies. Blacks couldn’t live there, where mobile classrooms called Willis wagons were set up to prevent black children from having to be bused to white schools, and where a highway, the Dan Ryan, was strategically located. to create a wall between the black and white quarters.

Listen, we know. There are also a lot of exaggerated revivals going around. There are calls for corrective action, such as removing the Abe Lincoln statues, which ignore historical context and go too far. There is plenty of room all around that is, for a more nuanced debate on the history of our nation and how its failures are manifested to this day.

But Judge Taney? To oppose the removal of her bust from a place of honor on Capitol Hill, for any reason, is to declare that you really don’t care about truth, racial healing, and reconciliation.

Taney is the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, often called the worst court decision in Supreme Court history. The court ruled in 1857 that Scott, as a black man, was not an American citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The court also ruled that legislation restricting slavery in certain territories was unconstitutional.

Taney vilified in his time

To those who argue that Taney was simply a man of his time and should not be judged by today’s standards, we would like to point out that he was insulted by many in his day. Even this bust affair is nothing new.

When an Illinois senator in 1865, shortly after Taney’s death, proposed that a bust of the Chief Justice be displayed on Capitol Hill, he was laughed at.

A senator from New Hampshire said Taney was just a traitor who sought to place the nation forever by judicial authority under the iron rule of the slave masters.

A Massachusetts senator warned Taney’s name should be booed down the page of history. Judgment begins now.

It wasn’t until 1874 that Congress passed a bill to honor Taney with a bust, creating a new monument to white supremacy just as the Reconstruction was dismantled in the South and Jim Crow kicked in. .

Removing Taney’s bust now is not to erase history. It’s about making history well.

Willful blindness

Obviously willful blindness, largely on the part of those who worshiped Donald Trump and those who fear this cult, threatens to destroy our country.

There are people who believe, or pretend to believe, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, that former Vice President Mike Pence had the power to hand the election over to Trump, that COVID-19 vaccines are a threat to freedom, and that left wing activists behind the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.

There are people who believe that the threat of global warming is not real, that Dr.Anthony Fauci plotted to cover up the real origins of the coronavirus, that wind turbines cause cancer, and that Biden is senile and vice -President Kamala Harris secretly pulls the strings.

And there are people who believe that a brushed-up childish version of our nation’s complicated history, in which the Founding Fathers were blameless, slavery was unhappy but its legacy dead and gone, and racism is largely a matter of individual prejudices, not something woven into laws and institutions.

As a person, Taney was a racist. As a lawyer, he was one of the main architects of institutional racism. Her bust must be removed.

That there is a willful blindness to this evidence, as to so many others, should distress us all.

Send letters to [email protected].

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