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Black Lives Matter, the three-fifths compromise, identity donation

In 2024, we are as far removed from the onset of COVID as Hurricane Katrina was from 9/11. These two time spans are quantifiably identical, four short years give or take a couple weeks, but qualitatively, they feel incomparable. No doubt my perception of them is influenced by age. The older I get, the closer the past feels.

When my family was displaced by the failure of the federal levee system that followed Hurricane Katrina, I was 12 - going on 13, which was very important to me then - and 2001 felt as distant to me as 2008 does now, at 31.

In my early 20s, I joked that the news coverage of the storm’s aftermath saved New Orleans in the long-term. People around the world watched President Bush look down at the drowning city from his private plane. Surely, we’d be spared when the homeland is, inevitably, sieged, the American empire laid to waste by some foreign adversary (of whom we have not few). Surely, they know that They don’t care about us either. New Orleans is no Dresden, no Hiroshima, no Hué.

New Orleans - when it didn’t matter - was just a port, a hole that it is profitable to come in and out of, and the people who live along it, an entertaining-enough but wholly unnecessary side show.

I’m here to update my assessment.

I used to feel safe in predominantly-black public spaces. Worst case scenario, one gets caught in crossfire. Which as common as it is, remains rare enough to not stop us from gathering together. But now that black lives matter…

Let me pause here because I anticipate that some readers may think, in response, that black lives still don’t matter. I’ll speak to them directly: if by that, you mean that life, in general, as in the human will toward continuity, to make it to another day, is culturally, socially, and politically devalued and discouraged in service to systems of control, I absolutely agree. But that’s the problem with the rhetoric of “black lives matter,” and by extension, the “all lives matter” rebuttal - that it can only be a quantitative (“lives”) means of determining political power, in much the same way as the Three-Fifths Compromise was.

The singular Life, on the other hand, no matter how true we all know the argument that it has inherent value to be, is too much of an abstraction to win a political argument, as we see in the ongoing abortion debate over when it really begins.

This historical misconception troubles me, that people lament the three-fifths compromise - a U.S. constitutional amendment passed in 1787 - as evidence that our enslaved ancestors were dehumanized, considered, as they say, ‘3/5 of a human being’. This dangerously inaccurate and quite popular analysis points out key contemporary issues in how we define humanity and the conflict that this definition creates between the freedoms we claim to want and our demand to have our value recognized by the State.

The Three-Fifths Compromise mandated that the slave population be factored into the calculation of slave-holding states’ congressional representation numbers. Every state gets two seats in the Senate and a number of seats in the House of Representatives proportionate to their population.

For example, pre-Three-Fifths, if there were in, say, Georgia 5,000 frees (of any race) and 5,000 slaves, the state would have a number of representatives in the House proportionate to, solely, the free population of 5,000 (including free Blacks, considered 5/5 but still disallowed the vote). After its ratification, the representation became proportionate to 8,000. It increased the power of southern states to advocate against the abolition of slavery, in direct opposition to the power of the enslaved themselves.

If enslaved people had been considered five-fifths of a tally toward slave-state representational power, it would have increased the planter class’ congressional power even more. I think it is safe to argue that, without the Three-Fifths Compromise, slavery in the United States could have been abolished earlier and without a war (which is precisely why the planters and, lest we forget, the northern merchants who financed them lobbied for it).

Anyway, I’m just here to get this joke off.

Now that black lives matter, new safety concerns come with proximity to other blacks. Patrise Cullors, one of the women credited with having founded the Black Lives Matter movement, said so much when she moved to Malibu.

Take, for instance, public transportation - which, in New Orleans and, probably, most southern cities, is primarily the domain of the negro. Now that black lives matter, I have to profile other passengers when they get on the bus. Like, is this man just unkempt because of his heroin addiction? Or is his disregard for presentation a political statement of anti-statism?

Let me be clear: I know I don’t matter to the State, not as a person, not as an individual. But black lives, quantifiably, do. So if something happens to a group of us, something that can cast as an act of anti-black violence and be blamed on another group of people whom it is politically convenient for the neoliberal establishment to take action against in order to affirm their own power, it would trend internationally.

And for any anti-statist group, knowing that black lives now matter, to decrease black “lives” becomes an act of political resistance and a public relations campaign. Like dumping tea in the Boston Harbor.

Here’s what I propose, cause I’ve got to live without full control over the actions of those around me but my death - god forbid it come a second too soon (said in the voice of a 75-year old black Baptist) - will be mine. Just as we have an organ donor option on the back of our drivers license? I think we need an identity donor option. If I’m the victim of a crime, I do not consent to the public use of my identity. My identity dies with me.

I’m fine with the media using my name. Lydia Nichols doesn’t give much away. Unless hate crimes against those whose names suggest that we might be the reincarnation of a Jane Austen character becomes a thing (who knows how the lines of identity will be redrawn in the coming years?)

No, I take that back. For the sake of my comrades whose names would reveal their identities, I’d say to shield names, too. Any other approach would be, quite frankly, nameist.

I’d allow my age to be shared. My height. Perhaps my seasonal color match, too.

“Amongst the alleged victims is a warm autumn 31-year-old, 4’11”, remembered by her community [no, they can’t use the word “community” either, cause only the oppressed have those] remembered by friends and family for a Substack that they didn’t read.”