SOME THOUGHTS POSTED BY MY SON, PROFESSOR TOBIAS BARRINGTON WOLFF, ON HIS FACEBOOK PAGE

During the period of American history when the institution of chattel slavery defined much of the country's daily life, subjecting millions of people to torture, rape, kidnapping and murder on a regular basis and shaping most of our national politics, there was an important strain of abolitionist advocacy that focused on the corruption of the moral status of White Americans that resulted from these evil practices. One might think of this as the non-liberationist strain of abolitionist thought. The concern was not the human rights of Black people. Some proponents of the idea may also have cared about human rights and Black lives, but that was not the focus of their argument, and many in fact did not care. The concern, rather, was the degradation of the spirit and the moral integrity of White people that came from these evil practices. To put the argument in the most unvarnished terms, some White people were worried about what they were doing to themselves by participating in slavery practices or propping up that system. They were concerned about impacts on labor and the treatment of White workers, impacts on family and the way that White men would treat their wives, as a consequence of the relentless inhumanity that the practice of slavery required. That school of thought continued through the Civil War and played a role in the crafting and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and the formal disestablishment of the chattel slavery system.

In the great betrayal that was Reconstruction and its aftermath -- the failure or refusal to follow through with any kind of meaningful reparations, to establish and permit enduring Black political power, or to promote civil and social equality -- the idea of concern about White moral integrity was warped and perverted. White Supremacy survived Reconstruction undiminished, and the concern for the moral status of White people propping up or participating in practices of torture and oppression was largely forgotten in favor of a renewed commitment among many White Americans to insist on their social and cultural superiority. Whatever redemptive potential the concern about corruption of White morals might have had during the abolitionist movement, it was mostly abandoned and lost.

Strains of that same argument can be found in the advocacy of great Black leaders of the early to mid twentieth century like James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells and, later, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, stressing the unavoidable connectedness of Black Americans and their White countrymen and the need, as Johnson put it, to fight for the survival of Black America's body and White America's soul. But the periods of time when this way of thinking became ascendant, either among Black leaders and the communities they worked with or among White Americans who joined with them in common cause, were limited and episodic.

I have been thinking a lot about this history since our present crisis began, and particularly since this administration started deliberately brutalizing children and families in concentration camps at the southern border of the United States. The human rights of those brutalized people -- their lives and their physical and psychic integrity -- are the most urgently important priority, as was true of the lives and human rights of Black Americans when the institution of slavery reigned. But the corrosive impact on the soul of White America is also part of this crisis. The gleeful, aggressive inhumanity that I see so many of my fellow Americans embracing -- the cheering, insistent, yawping eagerness that so many exhibit when they are given license to indulge their sadistic impulses -- that is a moral cancer that is colonizing our body politic, establishing beachheads throughout the corpus of our nation, metastasizing. If we do not find a way to beat back that progression, then I fear we will be lost.