Original Sins and Other Things
Slavery, and the racism that flowed with it, is now routinely dubbed America’s original sin. But does the use of the term move the US any closer to justice?
In America, despite its current Catholic president, the dominant religious voice has been Protestant, and the phrase “original sin” is a sign of its enduring echo. Setting aside the risky business of translating an ancient text accurately, the Eden story has arguably done more harm than good over the centuries. It has certainly deeply damaged the status of women (and serpents for that matter). With very little evidence and several strong reasons for doubt, it has made the “apple” into an unlikely symbol of temptation. And at its broadest, it rooted many strands of Protestantism in a harsh view of human character, that is the antithesis to Western law. In the latter, the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty; in the former, he is damned until he is saved.
It was H.L. Mencken who defined puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. Man was inclined by his nature to take pleasure in sin, and while sin can be used as a synonym for evil, it’s such a capacious term that it doesn’t always reflect the gravity of the offence. For the puritanical, most festivities can appear just an excuse for sinning. Thus, I am not convinced that calling the systematic mistreatment of fellow human beings for generations a sin really works.
When the sin in question is paralleled to Adam’s fall, things get even more confused. As passed down, the story seems to have been written by Adam’s defence counsel. The accused is, at worst, an accessory. Eve is the most directly involved human, and the serpent is the brains behind the operation. The “sin” seems less about eating fruit than about a Promethean-style theft of knowledge from the God(s). And Jehovah comes across as the angry jealous god of the Old Testament rather than the loving god of the New. Disobedience is punished by pain and suffering in this life with the further prospect of eternal torment in the next. This begs the question: does the punishment really fit the crime?
Crucially, calling slavery America’s original sin is not about finding a phrase to convey the awfulness of the evil done. It is primarily and overwhelmingly about white America being saved rather than damned. “Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. They embrace them,” declared Joe Biden, as he signed the legislation making Juneteenth, a federal holiday. Again, one can applaud the sentiment, but question the accuracy. Britain, whose current government would enthusiastically insist that it is restoring greatness to the nation, has certainly no such day and only tentative and contested plans to embrace its painful past. The new American holiday will after all commemorate a moment when African Americans heard about the Emancipation Proclamation rather than celebrating the moment (and it would not be an easy one to pinpoint) when they were truly free.
The Republican response to the “1619 Project,” which rooted US historical development in the first arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia shows that many Americans, including many devout Bible readers, fear what they would characterise as a “penitential” national history. As with all national histories, starting dates are contentious. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages of 1492 predictably saw many accounts of the dreadful consequences of European colonisation for indigenous peoples and indeed, the biosphere; seemingly, there were original sins before the original sin. As for 1776, Frederick Douglass said it all when he declared: What to the slave is the Fourth of July? And it would be a brave man who felt that the final ratification of the Constitution on June 21, 1788 was a creation date to be embraced by all Americans. In important ways, European countries that speak of specific republics (for example, France became the 5th Republic in 1958) are more transparent about their successive creations. Contemporary America might just want to consider a new birth of freedom.
Certainly, if Americans want to speak of “original sin,” they might be better off considering Martin Luther King’s admonition about the evils that flow once you start treating people as things. This “thingification,” as he called it, underpins racism, militarism and materialism. He could have used the term “reification,” but he preferred to keep an ugly word for an ugly practice. It was the essence of chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples, and let’s face it, our world is still full of it; with the family one of the most common sites of coerced labour and unpunished abuse. It’s not an exclusively American practice by any means but the abundance and sense of innate superiority that “thingification” implies is part of the American dream that has mesmerised the world. And as Dr. King’s triad of evils suggests, we don’t need to focus on past or primordial sins when every day we perpetuate them. So if you want to confront original sin, stop treating living things as objects placed here for your pleasure and convenience (p.s. it will hard and you may have to change almost everything you do).
