Lincoln once said that “we cannot escape history.” For that reason, I understand the instinct to delve into the imperfections of our Constitution and national past and recognize that our failings are part of our story just as much as our triumphs are. But to focus solely on imperfections is a form of the historical escapism that Lincoln warned against. In recent years, many critics, from Nikole Hannah-Jones to William J. Aceves, have charged the Constitution of the United States with being irredeemably racist.
Much of Princeton appears to subscribe to the historical escapist fad of the moment. On Wednesday, September 14, I attended Princeton’s annual Constitution Day Lecture, which was entitled “Citizenship and Its Discontents in Our Evolving Democratic Republic.” At this federally mandated event to commemorate the Constitution (required of colleges and universities receiving U.S. government funding), the panelists painted our founding document as inherently inequitable – irredeemably so – and made no mention of the qualities that make the Constitution revered by so many.
Moderator and Princeton Professor of Sociology Patricia Fernández-Kelly opened the event with this assertion: “There is a debate in this country as to whether the Constitution should be abolished.” Princeton began its Constitution Day program with the claim that many want to overhaul the document in its entirety. I would have been open to an intellectually honest debate that highlighted both sides of the argument. But that is far from what occurred. The panelists framed a question, and all of them took the same side and ran with it.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies professor at USC, debased the Constitution as “a tool of geopolitical gaslighting,” and political analyst Rich Benjamin charged “the fact and the dogma of the Constitution” with “further[ing] a racial crisis and a democratic crisis.”
I acknowledge that the founders were imperfect, just as we today are imperfect. They were flawed people of their time, just as we are flawed people of ours. The original Constitution was exclusionary in ways reflecting the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment. “We the People” did not (yet) include all the people. As Jefferson aptly wrote, “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Just as the clothing that fits a man as a youth will never suffice as an adult – to paraphrase Jefferson – such has been the case with our Constitution. The 13th and 14th Amendments abolished forever the debasing evil of slavery and gave African Americans citizenship rights, setting the stage for the 19th Amendment codifying women’s suffrage into law.
We have come very far as a country, further than even the Founding Fathers could have imagined in the 18th century. The panelists appeared to believe that the injustices inherent in the founding era preclude anything fruitful from emerging out of our founding document; in other words, the Constitution is an inherently racist document that can produce only further racism. According to Benjamin, the Constitution is not “race-neutral”; many parts of it, including the Second and Fifth Amendments, are “coded as white” or “white-utopian rights.”
What Benjamin and his co-panelists failed to acknowledge is that despite its issues, the American constitutional project was revolutionary for its time. It created a government devoted to ideas of republicanism, federalism, and popular sovereignty; it instituted a unique system of checks and balances to prevent or at least contain the abuses of power that inevitably occur when any institution of person exercises unchecked authority; it laid out procedures to prevent tyranny of the majority and the excesses of passing passions. Its durability three centuries on is testimony to the wisdom of allowing for evolutionary changes within a framework of inviolable principles.
I could go on and on about what makes the Constitution both special and unique, but that is not the point of this piece. What matters is that none of these ideas were referenced, let alone discussed, by the panelists; on Constitution Day, a day meant to promote and deepen understanding of our founding document, Princeton chose to have an event at which not a single voice was included to explain or explore the theory of the Constitution and shed light on the principles it sets forth and the institutions it creates.
At one point, Parreñas lamented to the audience, “It’s just kind of depressing. I don’t think we can get out of this.” To me, that line encapsulates the event well: we live in a country founded upon evil, hence our catastrophic modern condition – a condition that we can never escape. I found that to be a dangerous message to be giving students. Instead of discussing ways to bring our institutions and practices more fully into line with our constitutional ideals and to shore up the republican system of government bequeathed to us by our founders, the three speakers accented only how our society has failed – and, more than that, how the country itself is an irredeemable failure at its very core.
The event also included some staggering partisan accusations. Parreñas said that she “would not put it past Congress – if they became a Republican majority – to appease white nationalists, those who wish to go back to the time when… only whites… could be citizens of this country, and to repeal the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
I was expecting a few jabs at the Dobbs decision and perhaps some sniping at the notion of states’ rights – both of which I certainly got from the panel. What I was not expecting, perhaps naively, was the absurd notion that a good portion of the Republican party is so racist that it yearns to turn back the clock to a time in which only whites could be citizens and would do so if given the chance. In what can be characterized only as a classic case of psychological projection, Benjamin asserted that Republicans want to “disrupt the country for ideological ends” and they maintain “anti-democratic sentiments.”
Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” The panelists, however, seemed to live in a historical vacuum, where the cruelties and injustices of the entire human experience are to be foisted upon the United States and none of her virtues and achievements are to be acknowledged. They see the U.S. not as a great nation where the worst of human impulses have been tempered by a brilliant framework of balance but rather as an experiment in human governance forever marred by its original sins, a scarlet thread of shame permanently woven into its very fabric.
The above is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
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