By Konstantinos Kolokotronis

We the People of the United States, to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America” (The Constitution of the United States, 2021). Coming chronologically second to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, arguably the most influential document of the Charters of Freedom, can easily come across as quite paradoxical and contradictory with regards to the values and ideals that it is said to represent and its historical context. The so-called “Blessings of Liberty” are said to be exclusively secured to the People of the United States and their “Posterity”. There is a seemingly inexplicable dark connotation to this part of the preamble which can only be fully understood when one asks himself one simple guiding question. “Who are the People of the United States?”

If we regard all citizens of the United States of 1787 be included in the phrase “We the People”, then it is imperative to define US citizenship in the late 18th century. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly states that “any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof” (Immigration History, 2021). Citizenship was therefore racialized and narrowed down to those of white skin color excluding all nonwhites. It is evident that the American colonists firmly believed in the existence of a white race and frankly the concept of race itself. From W. E. B. Du Bois states that “It is impossible to separate the population of the world accurately by race since that is no scientific criterion by which to divide races” (Du Bois, 2018:145) to the modern inter-disciplinary consensus that biological races do not exist (Gannett, 2004) it is clear that the establishment of the concept of human races had no scientific substance but was instead used to rationalize imperial conquest, domination and particularly the institution of slavery (Stepan, 1982:12). For race was invented and its invention can be traced back to the Age of the Enlightenment when François Bernier argued in 1684 that humans could be categorized into four or five types of races (Loomba and Burton, 2001:272). The subjugation of African slaves in the US and by extension slavery itself was rationalized similarly in the context of scientific racism by Samuel George Morton in his pseudo-scientific book, “Crania Americana” (Morton, 1839). Hence, it is no surprise that white Americans had rejected the idea of a non-white American citizen. Pseudo-scientists like Morton had laid the foundations for a “phoney science” that purported to offer an explanation of why certain ethnic groups were treated differently than others and ultimately perpetuate white supremacy (Ruane, 2019).

The Constitution of the United States is undoubtedly a product of its time. White supremacy was institutionalized in American society upon its ratification and the enactment of legislation such as the Naturalization Act of 1790 that codified the perverse racist beliefs of the ruling white social class. Such an explicitly white social contract did not only enable the preservation of the institution of slavery. It also spread an ideology of racism that rooted itself so deep in American society that, even after the abolition of slavery, the amendments that followed (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) (The Constitution of the United States of America, 2017:34-36), the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and social changes that the US underwent, it can still be found today.

 The American white social contract has had tragic implications to the members of its non-white population, most notably to the African American, Latino, Native-American and Asian-American communities of the country. The unthinkably horrible treatment of the African American people, however, that dates to the first arrival of African slaves in the coasts of Virginia in 1619 (Elliot and Hughes, 2019) has served throughout the essay as the most suitable example of the horrors of a white supremacy-infested social convention. In the years following the Emancipation and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment white supremacy has had many faces. Arguably the most notorious ones had been the KKK and the institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow era. The Ku Klux Klan stood fiercely against any kind of politicization and education of former slaves in the South (THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATIVE INVESTIGATING COMMISSION, 1976:6) by employing such appalling violence that its decline has been partially attributed to the gradual alienation of the majority of the white population to the organization’s over-extensive use of violent means to meet its ends (1976:10). The Jim Crow laws in the Old South attempted to undermine the legacy of the Reconstruction and introduced segregation of such magnitude that “what slavery was to the generations after the Civil War, Jim Crow is to the generations following the Civil Rights Movement” (Brown and Stentiford, 2008: xvii). The American record of racial inequality and violence does not, however, stop with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The landmark step was seen in 1984 as a “modest achievement” that forced white supremacy to reinvent itself through “segregated housing patterns and more subtle forms of racism” rather than a definite victory over it (Pear, 1984). Indeed. Rothstein’s “The Colour of Law” (Rothstein, 2017), as well as Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander, 2010), consist of painful reminders that the United States of America is still very much tied to the remnants of its white social contract.

Recent events of social unrest in the US seem to signal that the American society is finally waking up to its heritage of slavery, unspeakable crimes in the name of racial purity and institutionalized racism. The heinous killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have reminded us that white supremacy not only has maintained its tight grip on American society but occasionally shows unapologetically its face. The revelation that the Grand Jury in the case of Breonna Taylor was not provided with the option to present homicide charges against the officers that indiscriminately fired a barrage of thirty-two rounds, six of which hit Breonna Taylor (Wright, 2020) indicates the existence of a system that is not keen on delivering justice when black lives have been afflicted. The case of George Floyd being choked to death by a white police officer (Barker and Kovaleski, 2020) highlights the disproportionate use of violence that white police officers resort to against African-American suspects. Reflecting the popular African-American folk aphorism “When white people say “Justice”, they mean “Just Us”, civil rights attorney Alexis J. Hoag does not hesitate to call out the American criminal legal system for its racial bias against the African-American community. “The level of dehumanization that prosecutors use to refer to black criminal defendants is striking” he argues. “It’s the verbiage used, that the defendant was “circling” and “hunting” the victim. What hunts and circles? Animals. When you can dehumanize an individual […] you can put your knee on somebody’s neck for nine minutes, because you see them as less than human” (Denworth, 2020). Hoag’s chilling admittance of hidden racial biases in the American criminal justice system proves that the spirit of white supremacy survives in modern-day America. So, what can be said to happen when the social contract is white? Alongside the aforementioned, I would like to stress that genocide is a very real possibility. Defining genocide has historically been a matter of interpretation and the Civil Rights Congress’s verdict is clear. “We Charge Genocide” is the fervent proclamation of the “Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People” (Civil Rights Congress, 1951). Pitner’s message to America on that issue is a step towards the recognition of the horrors that the white-American social contract has brought upon the African Americans. “America today must define and confront the Original Sin of slavery, ethnocide, and the cultural destruction it has inflicted upon all Americans, past and present. Otherwise, we will fail to make a better future and will continue our regression” (Pitner, 2020). We come to the harrowing conclusion that the American social contract, perfectly reflected partially on the US Constitution, is indeed the foundational block of white supremacy. An ideology of hatred and exclusion that has marked American history through the 19th and 20th centuries, with its footprint still present nowadays. White social contracts corrupt the fundamental notions of social contract theory, such as consent and manage to rationalize the domination, killing and trivialization of human beings in a frighteningly subtle fashion. While the US, under the Biden administration, attempts once again to come to terms with its dark past and original sin, with events such as the Tulsa race massacre coming back into the spotlight, it is important to remember that while the concept of race itself is indeed mischievous and incorrect, the only way to move towards a post-racial society, is to actively address racism and its manifestations, whenever and wherever they appear. 

In the words of African American poet, Amanda Gorman, the American nation “isn’t broken” but rather “simply unfinished”.