Welcome to the Third Reconstruction
I am a Black man. A Harvard and Princeton educated Black man. One who has rubbed shoulders with the corporate elite for decades, pioneered as a venture capitalist for even longer and discussed the intricacies of national fiscal policy at the highest levels as a director of one of our nation’s leading Federal Reserve Banks.
And yet, in George Floyd I see myself. By the mere change of attire — a hooded sweat shirt, a pair of jeans, a baseball cap — and in the right place at the wrong time, I am transformed into JABM, Just Another Black Man. More to the point, a Black man whose life may not matter, will not be respected and cannot be saved.
I see me, and imagine my own difficulty breathing. And for a moment I imagine my death, all too soon, all too pointless, all too unjust. Although it was actually George Floyd who died, some part of me died with him. His breath denied was my own denied.
The 400-year journey of Black folks in the lands that became America has been a saga of our struggle to breathe freely. To breathe deeply the oxygen of equality, without suffering the asphyxiation of white supremacy. To breathe in the ideals upon which America was founded as if they are our own, without fear of suffocation. To breathe out with our voices the words that cut to the heart of our national hypocrisy, “We matter as much as you,” without retribution.
In America today we are in the midst of our Third Reconstruction, another pivotal point in our history where the truth of our nation is revealed to be so disturbing that it can not be ignored. A period during which we will once again decide how freely we will let Black folks breathe and who we, as a nation, actually will be for the next generation or two to come. And as powerfully disruptive as it is certain to become, our Third Reconstruction holds the promise of truth telling: it will set us free to be people we are not yet, but claim we want to be.
As with our earlier two periods of Reconstruction, the Third Reconstruction will not be driven by one issue, one face, one age, but many. For some, the driver will be righteous indignation. Others will see it as an opportunity to accelerate and tighten the bend in the arc of the moral universe. Still others will use it as an opportunity to redress past wrongs. I believe enlightened citizens of all identities will come to see it as our urgent and deeply patriotic effort to save ourselves from ourselves.
First Reconstruction
Our First Reconstruction attempted to accomplish just that. Started long before our Civil War, I have come to see it as our national response to our first pandemic: the deleterious contagion of white supremacy, the DNA embodied in the inhuman expansion of slavery. A disease spread from Europe, incubated by our founding fathers, embedded by them in our Constitution, then spread itself into our laws and norms as a nation. A disease that attacks the moral fiber of its victims and, in the worst cases, unleashes the propensity of white men specifically to not just subjugate people of color in general, but Black men in particular, preferably by taking their breath away by any means available, including lynching. A disease so powerful that it leads those most seriously afflicted to be completely blind to whatever moral compass they might otherwise have consulted, it ignited war between brothers in the interest of greed, and it spurred the brutal sacrifice over 600,000 lives to avoid arresting the advance of the disease that consumed them.
Though the nation was nearly destroyed by our Civil War, it narrowly survived and the First Reconstruction nearly succeeded. With slavery abolished and the virus of white supremacy in remission, our convalescent nation produced an extraordinary period — however brief — during which America became the best it had ever been. The truth-telling of Frederick Douglass and countless other abolitionists, along with the critical military and political acts of the reluctant, martyred Lincoln, the political blunders of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, and the political ascension of Radical Republicans, collectively gave rise to fundamental systemic change. In 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 confirmed former slaves’ protection under the law. In 1868, the 14th Amendment established the 4 million Blacks born in the US as citizens and gave them due process under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed the right of Blacks to vote and ushered in a period during which Black participation in our political process briefly flourished: 16 Blacks served in Congress, 600 were elected to state legislatures and hundreds more held local office. This large-scale experiment in interracial democracy worked better than in any contemporary society in the world.
Until it didn’t. As federal troops withdrew from the South, the successes of the First Reconstruction were systematically reversed to institutionalize Black folks as permanent second class citizens, subjugated and disenfranchised. White supremacy surged in the forms of the Ku Klux Klan and other avowed white terrorist groups; Black Codes relegating Blacks to dehumanizing conditions little different from slavery; and Jim Crow Laws legalizing racial segregation throughout the nation. The reemergent disease, left unchecked by a nation weary of its efforts to become a more perfect Union, rapidly reached pandemic proportions once again, weakening the moral sinew of our institutions, defining racism as an acceptable if not preferable norm and ushering in an era of racial terror lynching claiming the lives of over 4,000 Black men and boys. The virus of white supremacy also evolved, recasting itself as a congenital Black infirmity, rather than a virulent white plague. Thus it became invisible to the eye that had no interest in seeing it or connecting it to the systematic suffocation of Black folks. Perfected in its deadly effectiveness to deny life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by folks of color, the disease raged essentially unchecked for nearly another century.
Second Reconstruction
The Second Reconstruction began emerging in the 1950s, as another desperate intervention to save the country from itself. Just as the First Reconstruction sought to reconcile the nation to its cherished Constitution, the Second Reconstruction sought to reconcile the nation to its amended Constitution. We call it the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, but it was much more than that. Starting off as a redress of the unraveled and heavily trampled advances of the First Reconstruction, it became a national intervention to release the grip of white supremacy on white folks and the institutions they controlled. Bitter struggles with the infected populace to end segregation commanded the headlines, but the Second Reconstruction necessarily probed advanced morbidities of the disease process in all aspects of American life, and especially Black American life. It exposed the processes by which the virus of white supremacy not only led the afflicted to believe that relegating Black folks to the back of a bus or a theater was an acceptable, lawful norm, but also connected these beliefs to others, such as the desirability of denying Black folks access to equal education, jobs, housing, and capital. It documented in every available medium the worst afflicted patients’ febrile fascination with keeping a knee on the necks of Black folks. The Second Reconstruction revealed the extent to which the nation continued to be consumed by a uniquely American form of Apartheid antithetical to its beloved Constitution, and offered a cure.
The treatment took the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin; and prohibiting unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment and public accommodations, such as retail stores, restaurants and hotels. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil rights Act of 1968 was also passed into law to further strengthen past laws. Included in it, the Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing. To understand these laws in the scale of human lifetimes, my adult children are members of the first generation to be legally equal from birth.
The cure came at a profound cost in mental anguish, broken Black and white bodies and deaths known and unknown. Unfortunately, before the Second Reconstruction could address the deepest lesions from white supremacy, treatment was abandoned. Once again the nation grew weary of perfecting itself, decided it had done enough, and the Second Reconstruction fell short of its aspirations. Laws were passed, but the virulent infection of white supremacy remained to keep Black and brown citizens economically strangled, thereby constraining their power and resolve to pursue change, and maintaining an economic system so inequitable that individual successes in this realm were genuinely viewed, outside of communities of color, as unintended and unexpected aberrations.
So once again a cure was kicked down the road for another day, another century.
Third Reconstruction
A collective national gasp of horror at a 21st century lynching has finally precipitated the Third Reconstruction that has been brewing for years. Suddenly we feel its power, galvanized by three convergent antagonists: 1) an unrestrained president mustering the power of a compliant federal government to divide us rather than unite us; 2) the emergence of COVID-19 that inequitably kills Black folks unprotected by our healthcare system, many of whom are already dying of poverty; both of which are exacerbated by 3) late stage white supremacy in institutions desperate to preserve the racist hierarchy of our forefathers. Who would have predicted that these forces would come together in such a compressed span of weeks to inspire another national intervention. Yet here we are, bound together as a nation in crisis, freshly horrified at our illness and wondering whether it is too much to hope for healing.
As I embrace the truth of our nation’s history, and I imagine the America in which I want my children and their children to thrive, the answer to me is clear. Not only do we desperately need to finish America’s rehabilitation that stuttered through our First and Second Reconstructions, but we have all the diagnostic and treatment tools at our disposal to do so.
We can finally eradicate the affliction of white supremacy in our institutions and public life, and we can at long last live up to our Constitutional commitment to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” for all Americans, Black folks included.
Today, we can join together to treat the disease that threatens the welfare of our nation. In undertaking the Third Reconstruction we will need to enact new laws, strengthen existing laws, and make other advancements, but we cannot stop there. We must not stop until we can measure our successes by how fully we close the economic chasm between Black folks and white folks, the extent to which we enable Black Americans to be economically self-sufficient and build generational wealth, and the degree to which we empower Black Americans to build the economic well-being of our nation once again, not by the scars on their backs, but by the ingenuity of their minds.
If our generation can at last see this Third Reconstruction through to completion, we will be rejuvenated as a nation that is economically and socially vital because it finally, truly believes that all of its people are created equal and all are entitled to breathe freely without fear.
I’ve chosen to take an active role in the Third Reconstruction. Drawing on the instruments of finance at my disposal, I’ve chosen to work with others to address the disease where it impedes the flow of capital to Black businesses and the economic benefit of Black people. I have launched Reinventure Capital, a venture capital fund specifically investing in companies positioned to be the economic engines of the Third Reconstruction. Hundreds of other finance processionals are leading similarly vivifying investment practices, or channeling capital through beneficial procurement, partnership, or crowd platforms.
Join us. Together we can heal. We can breathe. We can thrive.
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