BY FELICITY JONES
The First Reconstruction set us free.
Have courage.
The Second Reconstruction was meant to let us be.
Hope is not lost.
The Third Reconstruction is ours to seize.
This is your country too.
Dear Students of the Third Reconstruction:
Changes are happening quickly in federal and state governments across the United States. Executive orders and proposed actions by President Trump and the executive branch almost certainly violate the US Constitution either because President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority or trampling rights without constitutionally mandated due process. These actions include:
1) Attempting to terminate birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. This amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott decision and ensured that the formerly enslaved—whose parents were born slaves and whose children were born slaves—would come into the world as nothing less than citizens.
2) Engaging in inhumane mass deportations that probably violate due process (also guaranteed by the US Constitution).
3) Labeling classes of marginalized groups as undesirable, disposable, or active enemies of the nation by enforcing two sexes and two genders or blaming deadly accidents on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and those who are not “psychologically superior.” Such commentary scapegoats vulnerable groups, thereby jeopardizing their rights and safety.
History repeats itself. After the law recognizes new rights, there is always retrenchment. Following the Civil War (1861–65), the First Reconstruction (1865–77) saw the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These Reconstruction Amendments were ratified by Republicans looking to enshrine the radical concept that Black people are humans entitled to the same liberty that white people enjoy. Backlash followed. The Civil Rights Movement (1940s–60s), often referred to as the Second Reconstruction, led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and many other reforms that we take for granted today. More recent strides of the LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo movements continued the Second Reconstruction. We have just begun to taste the freedom of this progress, including the cultural changes that are vital to educational equality, economic opportunity, and physical safety for everyone.
But now, another period of retrenchment. Retrenchment looks like dismantling access to knowledge that can challenge the status quo, losing access to ideas that inspire us to imagine what could be, and destroying a vision of the United States as a place where the people are empowered, brilliant, resilient, and diverse.
To be ready for what is coming, you must be well-rested, well-nourished, and ready to care equally for others and yourself. Remember what it is to support one another. Get to know your classmates, neighbors, and members of your community. Despite threats that ignore the tradition of recognizing houses of worship as places of sanctuary, learn which still plan to operate as such.
You may not agree with your fellow students’ stances on immigration, gender, abortion, or gun regulations, but you can still recognize their need for human support: for example, providing course notes for an absent classmate, walking someone’s dog, sharing a meal, or just engaging in a random act of kindness. Support can also include contacting your representatives on whatever issues you care about or an issue your classmate or friend cares about, especially if it is not an issue that will specifically affect you. Be honest if you don’t want to or cannot be that person for any reason. Do what you can, where you can.
I understand if you’re afraid, confused, overworked, and overwhelmed. We are out of practice fighting for what we deserve. Sometimes demanding more can feel selfish. In an intensely critical world, we make harsh judgements and worry that others will judge us. Practice humility and give grace where it deserves to be given.
Do not forget that you have rights by virtue of your very existence that must be recognized and given equal protection under the law. Do not fear claims that what you’re asking for is silly, stupid, ridiculous, or naïve. Have some conviction and be ready to defend what you believe in.
Those who resist equality end up looking ridiculous or vicious in the “court of history.” For instance, the nation’s first civil rights act guaranteed equal treatment to all at the same standard “enjoyed by white citizens.” This act was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson as a form of reverse discrimination. The Supreme Court called Black people the “special favorite of the law” a mere eighteen years after emancipation from slavery. After the Supreme Court ruled in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that states could not segregate schools based on race, former Confederate states engaged in massive resistance—calling civil rights activists propagandists and outside agitators while claiming that the court’s decision created “hatred and suspicion” between the races, as opposed to the “friendship and understanding” that existed before.
As an outspoken untenured professor in a state that is altering the status of tenure, investigating educators, or naming and endangering them for what they teach, I too worry about my professional stability, economic security, and physical safety. While I exceed the standards of good scholarship, teaching, and service to the academic community and the public, I am still a Black woman who teaches concepts considered “divisive” because I—like many others—have the audacity to dream for something better.
My outspokenness can lead to the assumption that I cannot be fair in the classroom—that students will be compelled to adopt whatever beliefs I have. This is untrue. I think highly of my students as independent thinkers. I have awarded excellent grades to students who have done good work and whose views on a variety of hot-button issues differ from my own. As Dr. Seuss wrote in Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself wherever you choose.” Students are neither puppets nor parrots.
My status as a professor gives me a large degree of privilege. However, my status as an untenured professor leaves me with a larger degree of vulnerability. But if I wait another year for tenure, if I don’t speak using as much influence as I can muster, I may not have another chance. You may not either.
You have the power to continue the work of the multiracial, multicaste, multiclass, multigender coalitions that came before. Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Ida B. Wells, Pauli Murray, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many others look like giants to us today. But they were people just like you and me, scorned by many who tried to shut them up. And many, both known and unknown, helped secure the freedoms we know today.
There is no one coming to save us, and we cannot rely on one or two brave souls to effectuate the change we want to see. We must save us. And the easiest way to start is to support our collective well-being in any way we can. The difficulty of the task at hand is incidental. As T. S. Elliot wrote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Many of us are not used to fighting for what we deserve or engaging in “good trouble.” In this way, we are all students of the Third Reconstruction.
Felicity Jones is the pseudonym of a constitutional law professor and attorney in the United States, writing anonymously because of the current political climate. For her, liberation is a group project that requires each and every one of us—especially those with great privilege—to take calculated risks to further liberty and justice for all.
This is one of the most encouraging and well written essays I have seen in decades. I predict it will become a classic.
It’s incredible to me that you continue to march along as though the model of university and college academic employment, this institutional inheritance of ours, is something natural. Higher education institutions are not higher education. How academics earn from contribution to the social good is a convention, an open question – though you’d never know it in an academe where academics post with anonymity.
I’ve no need of anonymity because I don’t stand to lose my position in one of these conventions that, without need or justification, are the only gainful means by which one can contribute to the service and stewardship of higher education. I can trash the AAUP or one its union chapter presidents, because the academe can do nothing to me (and free speech is an official darling). This reality should give you pause, especially as a black female academic, in an untenured faculty position, in a system that forces you to earn as an employee. What would attorneys and physicians say if tomorrow they were subjected to the same sort of restriction on their right the earn a living? And this question has nothing to do with a public-private divide.
“rights by virtue of your very existence”
On my blog, I have argued that the right to earn a living and the right to tuition-free higher education (UN GA 2200A (XXI) Art 13.2(c)), are better supported using a professional convention. As for support of (academic) freedom of expression/speech, a professional higher education model crushes the absurd complex of shared governance, academic freedom, tenure, and the rest. It is simple: If academics can tell institutional employers to piss off and then open independent academic practices in their respective fields, what power does a university or college employer have over academics and students, over the academe? What power does government have over such an academe? We don’t know and we should know.
“Do not fear claims that what you’re asking for is silly, stupid…defend what you believe in.”
I do not have such fears, in part because I am a philosopher, and in part because I am confident that some version of a professional model can work. As to its superiority over the assumed, unchallenged inheritance, that’s an open question. The odd thing is, the academe seems disinterested in an alternative, even in the possibility of one. This from academics who are also public employees. None seem inclined to force me to defend my claim that universities and colleges are unnecessary, harmful, and inferior, as are unions for academic labour, and much more that is crap about the inheritance I disclaim. Also, none seem interested in supporting my claims either.
“concepts considered “divisive”
Among conceptual pairings that invite divisiveness, employer-employee, has got to be up there. Tell me, whoever you are, who is divided in the monopolistic institutional employer-employee model and who is divided in a professional model of independent practice? What would divisiveness look like in a system of professionally licensed, supported and disciplined academic practitioners? Pause on this possible reality, and that no one knows the answer.
“But if I wait another year for tenure, if I don’t speak using as much influence as I can muster, I may not have another chance. You may not either.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, and I have been saying it for thirty years now, with all the influence and commitment that I can muster. Care to join me?