I live in a village with three stop lights, one of which blinks when school is out of session. I am a white college professor on a mostly white campus within a white religious tradition. The smoke, shattered glass, and pepper spray now etched into too many urban landscapes are alien, but so is having a knee on my neck until I can’t draw breath. I have never been arrested, much less unjustly violated by an officer.

I have never felt the sting or bite of racism, so my understanding of it is mostly intellectual. While in graduate school, I focused on American politics, with a specialization in the South. It was there that I started to piece together the galling process that whittled away at the bloody advances of the Civil War. After Reconstruction, America’s institutions roundly failed to protect our fledgling citizens. It was not only a problem of southern governors, white-hooded riders, or even lynchers. It was a failure of Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, and the voters that empowered them. The very structures of the system, like seniority-based authority in the legislature, the filibuster, and federalism, that cedes so many key questions to state and local governments, were corrupted to re-subjugate a race of our brothers and sisters.

I’ve taught hundreds of college students in the South and thousands in the North. When these topics are broached, they are attacked often in the former and greeted with smug superiority in the latter. That air is deflated when I speak of segregated ghettos in northern urban centers, race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, and the elements of inequality endemic to many systems of justice across the nation.

We, the People, failed.

Things improved. Only those in the grievance industry, or those ignorant of our history, could claim otherwise. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were monumental and successful, but only those with their heads in the sand believe our past has passed.

During times of strife, like the past week, I fear that racial division is simply baked into the American pie. I don’t believe our nation was founded to perpetuate racism, nor to defend it, but our forefathers both accommodated slavery and undermined it.

Thomas Jefferson, the American Sphinx, as Ellis branded him, is the embodiment of this seemingly contradictory affair. A slave owner, who did not free his slaves upon death, Jefferson also wrote the words that ended the institution.

“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, as Tocqueville, Lincoln, King, and many others made clear, is the American creed. We were not born to aristocracy and we firmly rebutted monarchy, and though our founders did not venerate democracy (technically defined), they believed the reservoir of power issued from The People, and those people, of all stripes, were equal before God and the state because of their common status as created beings. This creed stood in judgment of slavery and Jim Crow, just as it stands in judgment of Derek Chauvin.

Yes, I know this is old fashioned. Yes, I know this is contested everywhere. Frankly, that is why our cities are broken and burning. I don’t think the officer who callously knelt on George Floyd’s neck was consciously rejecting Lockean ontology, but he prostrated himself before the gods of power, force, and superiority. Equality, like Jehovah, can bear no competition. Either you embrace it or you don’t. There are no half-measures.

We have rejected the American creed. If we had not rejected it, we would be spitting mad at our justice systems and our politicians, on both sides of the aisle, who don’t care enough to do much about it. We do not believe in equality before the law, or we would make sure that justice stayed blind-folded in all times and all places, regardless of race, religion, age, power, wealth, influence, or partisan affiliation. Justice demands equal treatment even when your neighbor’s ox is gored.

We have lost that creed because we are no longer a nation of law. Instead, we are a nation of naked politics. Power drives our choices. We are either unwilling or unable to admit the value of a transcendent standard that holds all sides accountable. The Constitution, our fundamental law, is for too many merely putty, pliable in hot, partisan hands.

If we believed in equality, we would treat one another with respect and decency. What else can you do when you meet an equal? Instead, our respect and decency extends only so far as our tribal boundaries. Whites may be equal, perhaps, but not others. Republicans may be equal, but not Democrats. Progressives might be equal, but not troglodyte Conservatives. The poor may be equal, but surely not the rich. Christians might be equal, but not pagans. MAGA might be equal, but not snowflakes. The media? They are the enemy of the public. White men? They are the perpetrators and perpetuators of injustice.

We have lost the American creed. There is no longer a tie that binds our hearts and minds together as citizens. Perhaps there never was, I sometimes worry, but societies that cannot manage division eventually fail and fragment. Their strength slips away, and they flounder. I don’t want a front row seat to the end of America.

I teach politics not just for a living, but as a calling. I believe, though many of my students might disagree, that God put me on earth to teach. I don’t know what I can do to remedy what is happening in Minneapolis, or elsewhere, right now, but I am responsible for my little corner of the world.

I can be sure to preach the gospel of equality, the glories of due process, and the necessity of the rule of law. I can teach and model the humility and respect that flow from equality. I can demand blind justice for the poor and the weak and for the rich and the powerful. I can lament the pain that spills out of a broken system. I don’t know what else I can do.