Ethics That Matters: African, Caribbean, and African American Sources

Chapter 5: The American Constitution

63 Chapter 5 The American Constitution Its Troubling Religious and Ethical Paradox for Blacks .Riggins R. Earl Jr.. for americanS, the u.S. Constitution symbolizes America’s social contract , but for black Americans it has been used paradoxically both to disempower and to empower them individually and collectively.1 The Constitution’s negative and positive references to blacks has produced in them despair on the one hand and hope on the other. By examining the different phases of the historical development of the Constitution, it is possible to see how the white framers and amenders of the document crafted it to speak in troubling exclusionary/inclusionary terms regarding black Americans’ worth. Originally, the white framers of the Constitution produced the three-fifths compromise clause for the purpose of excluding blacks from the political process as their equals. Later, with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, whites sought to amend the Constitution in ways that blacks, at least marginally, could be included in America’s social contract and its promises of justice and equality. Between the clause and the amendments resides the primary source of a troubling ethical and theological paradox for blacks regarding their religious, moral, and political worth, a paradox that has shaped the social and political being of black Americans. 64 riggins r. Earl Jr. Importantly, the Constitution’s contradictory evolutionary history as it relates to blacks exposes the commitment of its framers, interpreters , and amenders to making what Charles Mills calls their “racial contract .”2 Mills’s central argument is that there exists a racial contract that is even more fundamental to Western society than the social contract. This racial contract determines who counts as full moral and political persons, and it therefore sets the parameters of who can “contract in” to the freedom and equality that the social contract promises. White men are full persons according to the racial contract, thus deserving of equality and freedom. Their status as full persons accords them the social, political, and legal power to make contracts as well as to be the subjects of contracts, whereas other persons are denied such privilege and are relegated to the status of objects of contracts. Except for the Bible, the Constitution is for blacks the paramount symbol of authority.The faith of blacks in the authority of the Constitution has prevailed despite unwillingness of whites to “contract them into” its sacred promises of equality and justice for all. A significant example of this faith in the Constitution is the great passion of blacks to prove themselves worthy recipients of America’s social contract by serving in the nation’s military during major wars. Furthermore, blacks have never lost hope in the promissory ideals of equality and justice expressed in such documents as the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Blacks have employed the ideals of equality and justice expressed in these documents as an antidote to the exclusionary ideology of the racial contract symbolized in the Constitution’s three-fifths compromise clause.3 The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation The Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation highlight a religious tension between the belief that freedom and equality are gifts from God and the political belief that the nation bestows these gifts to black Americans. The Preamble to the Declaration asserts divine equality for all men (sic), and the Emancipation The American Constitution 65 Proclamation has been recognized as the nation’s symbolic granting of citizenship rights to blacks.4 With a belief in the natural rights of equality bestowed by God as set forth in the Declaration of Independence as well as the symbolic granting of the rights of citizenship through the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks have rightly taken offense at the Constitution’s reduction of them to less-than-full-human status. Blacks have understood this official form of reductionism as challenging their inherent worthiness for citizenship, and this challenge produces in the black consciousness a religious and ethical paradox. At the heart of this paradox are two presuppositions. The religious presupposition of the white framers, interpreters, and enforcers of the Constitution is that God originally endowed only their racial group with the natural rights of freedom and equality. The ethical presupposition of the white framers, interpreters, and enforcers of the Constitution is that it is their right to decide whether and when blacks are worthy of...