Racist exploitation and super-exploitation, oppression, and ideology is a constant and defining feature of U.S. historical development from nearly the moment of arrival of colonizing settlers to what would become North American shores in the 17th century. Indeed, it is fair to say that every aspect of the country’s historical process has been deeply and indelibly marked by racism, which is more than a prejudice toward people based on their skin color.

But while racism and racial inequality have been essential cornerstones to the country’s development as well as the guarantor of the hegemony of its white ruling elites, the racialized structures and institutions, legitimizing language and symbols, and the terrain and trajectory of racist and anti-racist struggle have changed over time. In this sense slavery is not as much the “original sin” of our country as the first racial (or racist) order, albeit the most searing, brutal, and hyper exploitive one that co-evolved with contemporaneos racial orders during its long duree.

Fundamental to slavery and its descendant racial orders was not only the denial of rights, but also the extraction of enormous amounts of coerced unpaid or underpaid labor, land dispossession, forced migration, and segregation and confinement of people of color to particular living spaces — the plantation, ghetto, barrio, reservation as well as particular zip codes, towns, and cities.

While slavery met its Waterloo in the course of a sanguinary Civil War, “the chains of slavery,” to use Frederick Douglass’s phrase, invaded and wrapped themselves around the social orders that followed up to the present day in countless ways at the ideological and practical level.

Efforts, therefore, to connect the present with the past is anything but an academic exercise. Its elucidation is necessary if we hope to fully understand contemporary racism and the righteous struggles that we are witnessing today against it.

The provocative actions of extremist groups on the far right and the left symbiotically combine with aggressive policing in Minneapolis and around the country in an attempt to recast the meaning of the non-violent, protest actions that are occurring now. No one would be happier than Trump and Barr if they are successful in burying the legitimate and longstanding demands of the protesters. But I don’t think they will. The political tides of justice and equality are cresting and widening and won’t easily be turned around.

In the antiwar movement of the sixties we saw the same kind of disruptive convergence, but it wasn’t successful.

The largely non-violent marches of tens of thousands of mainly young people are being crowded out in the public mind by images of violent confrontations with police and burning police cars and a glossing over of aggressive police tactics. This distortion of reality is the handiwork of the media, which runs to these confrontations like flies do to sh-t.

No one is happier with this media misrepresentation than Trump, Barr, and all. Feeling increasingly on the defensive, they would like nothing better than to change the national conversation from the legitimate, just, and accumulating grievances over racist policing as well as their gross mishandling of the pandemic sweeping the country and striking communities of color with particular ferocity to law and order and public safety.

We have seen this movie before, but I don’t think it will work this time.

I like Harold Meyerson’s analysis here, but I do have one complaint. He tends to frame it too narrowly at times. It’s true that a second Trump term would be for disaster to what he calls vulnerable communities. But it’s also the case that nearly everyone would be negatively impacted and the democratic ground on which to contest Trump and Trumpism would be narrow indeed for all of us.

As we crossed the 100,000 death marker yesterday, Trump was noticeably and not surprisingly silent. He has no moral compass or sense of empathy. As John Prine would sing, “Some humans ain’t human, some humans ain’t kind” Trump is one of them. Biden, on the other hand, made remarks appropriate for this somber moment.