Dred Scott and the legacy that Virginia and the United States can’t ignore

It’s one of America’s many inconvenient truths: certain human beings were at one time considered nothing more than property to be bought and sold. I’m referring, of course, to individuals of African-American descent.

And while the American historical narrative still largely glosses over the issue of slavery, there are notable examples, like the case of Dred Scott, that allow most Americans to obtain some semblance of how prejudice and discriminatory practices were woven tightly into the fabric of American life from its very inception until only a few generations ago.

So it is with some sense of “we’ve come one step closer to facing and overcoming our past” that the Virginia Department of Historic Resources recently announced that it would be dedicating a “historical marker” to Dred Scott in Capron, Virginia.

It was in 1857 that the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision that Dred Scott was mere “property, not a citizen,” and therefore had no legal right to challenge his condition as a slave.

This case and its subsequent decision has been marked by scholars of U.S. history as one of the final nails in the coffin that eventually led to the U.S. Civil War.

All too often in our own time, Virginians, and Americans more generally, act as if the prejudice and discriminatory behavior that allowed slavery to take place in this country were merely a thing of the past, a phenomenon that has absolutely no resonance in the present.

And while prejudice and discrimination on the same scale of the 1950s and before is gone, there still remains a subtle yet powerful residue of the prejudices that were once ingrained so deeply in American culture.

Today, we can see it in how individuals of African-American descent are subtly herded into particular neighborhoods, particular professions like Basketball, and particular images that in some ways deny their equality with other groups of American citizens. These phenomena are so subtle and ingrained into our culture, in fact, that we don’t even perceive them the vast majority of the time.

The sign of a strong culture, of a vibrant nation, is not glossing over or ignoring its past. A strong culture, like an individual willing to look deeply into his or her ‘character flaws’, stares straight into its past, seeing the good just as much as the bad and learning from both.

We, as a country, have not done this. We have framed our past largely on ideals and myths that stand up to scrutiny no more than a tripod stands up to the currents of an ocean. And in this manner of aversion, we lose the opportunity to overcome the scars of the past to become a stronger nation. Just as an individual who constantly runs from his or her fears cannot grow as an individual, so also can a nation not grow until it has embraced its past fully and learned to deal with the mistakes that were made.