“Property” is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon. Some human had to invent the notion. More importantly, others had to agree to it.
Countless other civilizations got along fine with entirely different relationships to the material world . It is not an inevitable feature of reality but a construct, same as all human ideas, in this case a binary frame: “mine and thine.”
Which brings us to Roman law, habeas corpus, casus belli, etc. the basis for Western legal theory. You might think, as a more younger, more innocent me once did, that the law was about truth and justice.
You moron. You fucking imbecile.
Our laws were not based on highfalutin ideas like “fairness” and “equality.” No, the Roman law from which our legal system evolved is entirely premised on property. Not just any property. Human chattel. Slaves. The reason Romans based their laws on property was to protect the interests of slaveowners, to whom people were property, a pattern that would repeat in America thousands of years later.
“The main distinction in the law of persons,” said the 2nd-century jurist Gaius, “is that all men are either free or slaves.”
This notion was then recycled into European legal tradition in the 17th and 18th centuries, most notably by John Locke who conceived property as one of his Natural Rights, his philosophy directly influencing the American Revolution, the establishment of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, and modern liberalism.
Thus a mercantilist ideology replaced feudalism as the societal shield between the owners and the owned and what’s more, conflated the idea of freedom to pursue one’s own destiny with ownership of peoples’ bodies, particularly women.
Hence, the United States, for its first 200 years, denied full rights to citizenry entirely on basis of them being born Black, a woman, an immigrant, or poor.
In 1920, (White) women won the right to suffrage. Black Americans did the same in 1968. Roe v. Wade codified a woman’s right to an abortion in 1973. Barack Obama won two terms as the first Black president of the U.S. All these things are seen by the white supremacist project as mortal threats.
The 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade and racist obsessions with nonsense like Great Replacement Theory are simply the latest iterations of the white supremacist project’s delusional quest for a white Christofascist ethno-state that would put The Handmaid’s Tale to shame.
TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part III: The White Supremacist Project
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