by afampov · February 2, 2021 UNITY WITHOUT ACCOUNTABILITY It is one thing for President Joe Biden to call for unity but it is a much different thing for those who enabled Donald Trump for four of the ugliest and most divisive years in presidential history to call for it as though they have earned it and have the moral authority to demand it. They certainly haven’t earned it and without concrete signs of repentance – such as admitting the obvious truth that Joe Biden won the election fairly and squarely – unity should not be on the table. UNITY WITHOUT ACCOUNTABILITY Black folks know well what unity among White opponents without accountability means since it was not that long ago in our history, after millions of folks were killed in a rebellion started and lost by White Southerners to prolong slavery, that Reconstruction, a program instituted by Abraham Lincoln to uplift and protect freed slaves, was abruptly terminated after less than a dozen years as part of a compromise between Northern Whites and the Southern White rebels, who were forgiven their trespasses and given full citizenship at the expense of Black gains. Dasia Moore described what happened in a Boston Sunday Globe article (January 17, 2009). She wrote: “The consequences of forcing unity under such circumstances fall disproportionately on marginalized communities…For the most threatened by violent ideologies, forgiveness without accountability is “a perpetuation of the original wrong.” As for Reconstruction, she was even more precise, writing: “…the white South wanted “reconciliation” in the form of absolution for their rebellion and a return to power over the region and its Black inhabitants…Federal oversight of the former Confederacy faded away. Rebel generals were granted amnesty. Plantation land was returned to enslavers. Civil rights legislation was struck down or ignored, not to be revived until the 1960s. Sharecropping and vagrancy laws worked in tandem to effectively reinstitute the cruelties and privation of slavery. Black Americans’ political and financial gains were all but wiped out by legal discrimination and unrestrained racist violence….North and South were unified, but under the banner of white supremacy….That trade-off between justice and unity for some Americans at the expense of others allowed racial grievance and white supremacy to persist….” And the racial issues that arose out of that “great compromise” have still not been resolved which is why Black folks are rightfully wary of President Biden’s emphasis on “unity.” The question we have for him is “What precisely, Mr. President, do you mean by “unity?”