Happy Independence Day everyone! I’m not sure how meaningful the Glorious Fourth is to anyone anymore, except for kids to explode fireworks, but maybe we should take a minute to ponder what actually happened on July 4, 1776.
That was the date our fledgling Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence. As a founding document, it’s probably less important than the Constitution, which followed it 13 years later (March 4, 1789). But the Declaration makes for stirring reading, especially this sentence, probably its most famous, and contentious to this day:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This statement has confounded thinkers for more than 230 years. We’re still arguing about it today. What does “self-evident” mean—evident to whom? Who or what is this mysterious “Creator”? What are those “unalienable Rights”? Why did the Founders guarantee the “pursuit” of happiness and not its attainment? And, most problematic of all, what does “equal” mean, when you consider that in 1789, women couldn’t vote, African-Americans were slaves, and American settlers were slaughtering Indigenous peoples left and right?
Well, this isn’t the place to tackle those questions. You all will have your own thoughts. What I’d like to do today is muse a little on the word “equal” and its cousins, “equality” and “equity.” Sometimes you can infer a lot about an English word by investigating its etymology, but in this case, we can’t: All three words are based on the Latin word for “equal,” and we don’t really know how the ancient Romans defined “equal” beyond the irony that they were really one of the most unequal societies on earth.
Maybe that explains why we’re still arguing, as a country, over the meanings of those words today. Progressives who are concerned with racial issues think that the promises of the Founding Fathers (all men) are baloney, given the realities of 1776. They say that America has a long way to go to live up to the ideals of equality; moreover, they claim, groups that were disenfranchised in the late 18th century must be extra-compensated today—given extra help—to make up for the cumulative harm done to them over the centuries.
This belief makes a certain amount of sense. If America has indeed harmed entire groups of humans, it may be correct to award them reparations of some kind. While it’s true that no one alive today has ever been enslaved, if the patterns of slavery and the Jim Crow that followed have caused irreparable harm to the descendants of those slaves, then in the name of fairness, we might be obligated to figure out some way to make up for it.
The problems in this way of thinking are manifold. Who decides what the reparation should be? Ought it to be financial, or something else? It’s true we have California state, county and city governments studying this, but will anything they come up with satisfy everyone? Not a chance. Whatever they recommend is going to be as bitterly divisive an issue as any that exists, and the last thing we need is to be further divided.
Then too, which Black people should be entitled to the reparation? Should a West African immigrant who makes $300,000 a year in high tech be included? (West African-Americans are substantially wealthier than native Black Americans.) If you say that only legitimate descendants of slaves are entitled to reparations, how do you propose to determine that? Few Black Americans are likely to have paperwork proving that their ancestors were slaves. This is a potential can of worms, and presents another huge source of controversy. Again it’s unlikely that any proposed settlement will appeal to everyone.
What the correct thing to do is, I don’t know. But when we think about America’s founding, we must not forget the cases of women, Blacks and Indigenous peoples. To this list, I might add gay people (yes, they existed in 1789, as they always have). How do we compensate gay people for the discrimination and violence they have suffered at the hands of their fellow Americans?
Sometimes, I think the best thing with these contentious issues is for government to stay out of it. We can’t look to government to solve all our problems. Very often when government decides to “solve” a problem, it only makes things worse (as we’ve seen in Oakland). Elected politicians should resist the impulse to put their fingers on the scale, because all that does is unfairly give an advantage to the groups those politicians favor, which is discriminatory to everyone else.
We’ll probably still be arguing about the meaning of “equal” centuries from now (assuming there are still Americans), and that’s okay: it’s good for us to have conversations.
Steve Heimoff