This Strange & Bitter Fruit
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?…To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy…””
In the summer of 1787, a group of white, landowning men gathered in the sweltering Pennsylvania State House to discuss the structure and tenor of the new nation they had been tasked with bringing into being. They had only eleven years previously penned and signed a monumental document. It was a text with words that vibrated with the highest of the Enlightenment values and ideals. The reverberations of this document were felt across the globe. Now, these same men sat together, attempting to frame a nation that lived up to the ideals they said they’re fighting for.
They failed to frame a nation that lived up to the ideals, for many reasons. As they sat together, the southern colonies who relied so much on slavery for their economic existence, refused to abolish the system that brought them the enormous wealth in which the new nation’s GDP was reliant upon. The northern colonies, though perhaps disdainful of the system, were also tied up in the wealth of enslavement through investments in the industries that utilized and most benefited from slavery. This was complicated by the fact that at the time of the convention, the enslaved made up one-fifth of the nation’s population and ninety percent of them lived in the Southern Colonies. This was compounded by the fact that other than New England, slavery was allowed in the majority of the 13 colonies and territories.
And so, while on the surface, they assented to the ideals of the document they penned, in reality, there were values present in that room that they were not as readily able to admit were present. This type of situation results from what Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler calls the dichotomy between “ideal values” and “shadow values”. In her book, Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself from Conflict at Work, Home, and in Life, she writes that “Ideal values are the things we’re proud to say we care about. Shadow Values are the things that are hard for us to admit we care about. Because we’re in denial about them, we’re often unaware that they are leading us” to make decisions. The framers had their ideal values stated, but not their shadow ones. The ideal ones are the ones we memorize: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The shadow ones, not so much: comfort, control, and the pursuit of material accumulation.
The choices they made that day were not informed by their ideal values. Instead, they planted seeds that grew into trees that bore to the world strange and bitter fruit. This fruit is what we have been forced to eat to this day, even as it makes us all collectively sick.
As we sit here, in the present moment, it can be easy to look back with derision and judgment on the United States framer’s choices and how they operated from the shadow and not their ideal values. This way of viewing the framers is justified, given the consequences of these decisions. And yet, the danger here is if we miss what this moment is able to teach us.
A year ago, many of us wrote or were part of organizations that released statements that laid out personal or organizational ideal values around anti-racism. And yet, as we sit here, a year later, many of us are facing real choices around how we will create personal practices and company policies that embody the values we stated only one year ago. We sit at tables every day where decisions are made of varying levels of importance and impact, just as they did 230 years ago.
The lesson of history for us here is as much about the past and the decisions of those that came before us as it is about the future and the consequences of the decisions we make today. Having this awareness of the relationship between our values and our choices in the present moment and that our conscious choosing matters immensely, allows us to make decisions that are in alignment with the people we want to be and the world we want to be active participants in creating for our children and our children’s children.
