Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book has been on my
list since just after the last presidential election. In all honestly, it has
proven to be as good of an explanation for what I have seen and heard from
people I know - including relatives. There was a disconcerting vibe soon after
the election of President Obama among many of the white people I knew,
particularly white Evangelicals of a certain age, but I couldn’t really put my
finger on it.
I recall a conversation
with a man from our former church. He was (and presumably is) a basically nice
guy, more reasonable than most, but with redneck roots and a deep commitment to
a certain political party. I recall mentioning something about how Obama (full
disclosure: I didn’t vote for Obama either time - one of my regrets) was a
thoroughly decent person, probably the best human to be president during my
lifetime. I mean, faithful and kind and supportive toward his wife; a loving
and involved father; a man who seemed to genuinely care about others;
thoughtful and informed - the sort you would love to have over for
dinner. (I was born just before Jimmy Carter was elected, so I have no
memory of his time in office, although I would rank him as the best human being
to be president in my lifetime, with Obama in second place.) This brought a chilly
response I didn’t expect. While most white conservatives I know freely grant
that Carter is a good man, even if they dislike his politics, Obama got no such
acceptance.
In contrast, I was
talking with a relative in summer of 2016, and got a totally different sort of
reaction to a different person. I walked out of a conversation after a
different (closer) relative made a pretty nasty and xenophobic statement about
refugees - that could be a whole post in and of itself: the grief I have had as
a result of that discovery has been harrowing. In any event, this relative
tracked me down and talked a bit. I expressed my fears (which totally came to pass) that there was literally no amount of racism and
hate that would be a deal breaker for white Evangelicals. Somewhere in that
conversation, this person expressed that one point in Trump’s favor was that
his kids turned out well.
To say I was
flabbergasted was an understatement. Trump never raised his kids - he has
repeatedly said that childrearing was women’s work. And as far as that goes,
the Trump children may have inherited wealth (which is essentially the only
reason anyone thinks they turned out) and appear to be every bit as racist and
hateful and corrupt and vacuous as their father.
So why did we never hear
about Obama’s kids in the same way?
Hmm. Something to think
about.
[By the way, for me, the
worst thing about the Trump Era has been losing my illusions about my extended family. I really thought - or was it hoped? - that they
were better than this. Apparently not.]
Carol Anderson has a
theory, and, given the many additional things I have seen and heard since the
election, I think she is absolutely spot on. To wit:
After every gain that
non-whites - particularly African Americans - have made, there has been a
backlash of white rage, expressed primarily through the “legal” methods of
power and violence. Through legislation, the courts, and other means (including
open violence), whites have responded to Black ambition with hate and
oppression.
Let me be clear about one
thing regarding this book: Anderson
has done her research. The book is built upon literally hundreds of direct
quotes from primary sources. All of the horrifying and vicious things said and
done happened - there is no question of that - and this process of violent and
nasty reaction against the loss of white privilege continues to today.
The election of Trump is
the most visible, but far from the only evidence of this.
Anderson focuses on five seminal events in
American history which involved African Americans making incremental strides
toward full emancipation and citizenship. She then shows how these gains were
attacked by the white establishment, erasing much (although not quite all) of
the gains made.
These events were, in
historical order: (1) The abolition of slavery following the Civil War, (2) The
“Great Migration” of blacks out of the South during the early 20th Century, (3)
Brown v. Board of Education, (4) The Civil Rights Acts, and (5) The first
black president. In each case, the gains were followed by a paroxysm of white
rage and successful efforts to limit and reverse the gains.
There is way too much in
this book to try to detail here - you really need to read it for yourself. Here
are some highlights.
First, Anderson puts her finger on the key fact:
“The
trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere
presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with
ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full
and equal citizenship. It is a blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to
give up.”
I hear this echoed today
- it’s mostly dog whistles now, but in the era of Trump, it has been more
explicit. “I don’t wish minorities ill - I just don’t want them in my
neighborhood and in my kids’ schools.” It’s the whole “uppity negro” and
“entitled immigrants” thing once again.
In fact, the most
shocking part about the book to me was just how much the exact same arguments -
literally the exact same words - were used in 1865, in 1915, in 1947, in 1966,
and in 2019. Nothing. Has. Changed. We are still racist AS FUCK in this
country.
That’s not to say that
nothing at all has changed. Clearly, progress has been made, although not in a
linear manner. Every “whitelash” has been only partly successful, and anti-racist people of good will have and continue to push
back. With their - our - efforts over the centuries, the arc of the moral
universe may be long but it has been bent toward justice, as Unitarian minister
Theodore Parker said in 1853. (MLK, among others, would borrow this quote in
the decades to come.) Things have changed for the better, and with the efforts
of people of good will today, they can further change for the better.
We have a lot of work to
do, clearly.
Here is a quote from the
Louisiana Constitutional Conference in 1865. Having lost the civil war, those
in power were determined to keep the black population subjugated:
“We
hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for
the exclusive benefit of the white race.”
This was no outlier,
either in place (most of the South adopted similar terms, and the North
enforced de facto Jim Crow) or in time (the obvious ongoing voter suppression laws openly targeting black and other minority
voters.) Or the lovely rhetoric about how “they” (minorities and immigrants)
are taking what belongs to the “real Americans” (white Americans.)
Again, when it comes to attitudes, not much has changed.
The book spends a good
bit of time on education - with good reason. That particular issue has been a sore
point for white rage ever since blacks were first enslaved. First with the
prohibitions on teaching slaves to read. Then, with the opposition to schools for the children of freed slaves. Obviously, the opposition to the desegregation
of schools after Brown. Ever heard of “segregation academies”? Or how about the founding of the Religious Right for the purpose of keeping certain “christian”
colleges segregated? Or the way we continue to use neighborhood de facto segregation to keep our schools mostly segregated now.
This is not an accident.
The ongoing efforts to ensure that whites get a superior education are
intentional and have a specific purpose. As Anderson puts it:
As
in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population
would only upset the political and economic order.
Anderson returns to this
idea later as an explanation for why the United States has such a massive
education gap that puts it below other first world (and some third world)
nations.
Although I was familiar
with some of the history in this book, I was a bit surprised by the details of
the Great Migration - particularly the many laws aimed at preventing blacks
from leaving the South and seeking a better life. They were literally criminalized
for trying to leave. (Hey, there is a good bit of an echo in our own time’s
xenophobic opposition to immigration. Can’t have those uppity folks trying to
better themselves…)
Again, this response was
triggered by black success. Any black person or family who got too “uppity” was
a target for violence. (I recommend Black Boy (American Hunger), The Devil in the Grove, Strange Fruit,
and Remembering Jim Crow for more on this.) Anderson quotes a former sharecropper, Ned
Cobb, as pointing out, “They looked hard, didn’t stop lookin...they didn’t like
to see a nigger with too much; they didn’t like it one bit and it caused ‘em to
throw a slang word about a ‘nigger’ havin all this, that, and the other.
[Whites] hated to see niggers living like people.”
Again, you hear the exact
same thing now - about how “those people” get benefits that white people don’t.
(Personal experience in my legal practice, by the way.)
Then - as now - there was
a huge irony in the fact that those who most loudly boosted “capitalism” were
the same ones who were most panicked about the migration.
City
councils, state legislators, and police forces were determined to punish those,
who, in a capitalist economy, offered African Americans a better employment
opportunity.
Ditto today, with those
most panicked about “socialism” rallying around tariffs and immigration
restrictions to (supposedly) protect the deserving “real Americans” from actual
competition. Again, racism is the common thread.
There is a particularly
harrowing legal case in the chapter on the Great Migration. An educated and
successful African American physician dared to purchase a home in a white
neighborhood in Chicago.
The white citizens came to shoot and burn him out. He and some friends and
relatives stood their ground - and shot back. He was charged with murder (among
other things) for defending his right to stay in his own home.
The case was picked up by
the NAACP, who hired as part of the team, a very familiar lawyer: Clarence
Darrow.
Now, let me be clear
about this. In the Fundie culture I was raised in, Clarence Darrow was
considered the epitome of evil. I mean that literally. The Fundie A Beka
curriculum we used for history tarred him as one of the most evil men of all
time, and an example of all that was wrong with the modern age. If you didn’t
guess why, it was because he was on the “wrong” side of the Scopes trial.
Darrow defended the school teacher who violated state law by teaching
Evolution. Looking back, of course, it is easy to see the case in a very
different light. It has been a long time since I believed in the Young Earth Creationist bullshit, but I also understand better (as a lawyer) what
Darrow’s point was. Simply put, Darrow advocated for the freedom of the teacher
to actually teach science, not religious dogma. Subsequent experience has shown
that the one thing religious Fundamentalism fears more than anything else is
that their cherished dogmas might have competition. And that rational minds,
when given the choice between reality and perceived theological needs (to
borrow from Peter Enns), might choose historical and scientific truth instead of dogma. In
this particular case, Darrow was a serious badass, eventually winning an
acquittal. Suffice it to say that over the course of my nearly twenty years in
legal practice, I have come to appreciate Darrow (and Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Thurgood Marshall) as the giants of jurisprudence that they were.
Once again, this issue of
intimidation of African Americans for daring to live in white neighborhoods is
still with us. Obviously, the phenomenon of “white flight” continues to be a
thing. I know a lot of people who have left California to move to whiter states - often
intentionally. I have heard a lot lately about “everybody wants to leave California” and “California’s
traditional middle class has left.” Nice bit of coding for what has really happened:
California
has become “majority minority”: there are more non-whites here than whites,
because of non-white immigration and white flight. I personally like it here. I
mean, we have a huge issue with housing affordability (the legacy of Prop 13
and restrictive zoning), but the diversity is wonderful.
How about another issue
which has been in the news, but is absolutely nothing new? “School vouchers”
have been a big thing in homeschooling and Fundie circles for a few decades.
The basic idea is that students would get vouchers to spend on private (and
religious) schools, rather than public schools. In practice, there are huge
problems with this idea, among them the way that whites tend to locate said
private religious schools in places that lower income people (and minorities)
can’t easily get to.
But I was rather
surprised to find that the idea itself goes back to...wait for it....the South
in the aftermath of Brown v. Board
of Education. Faced with a
mandate to integrate schools, Southern states literally shuttered their public
schools and provided white families with vouchers to segregated private
schools.
Say what?
Yes, this actually
happened. Rather than share with non-whites, they chose to end public
education.
Needless to say, this was
a bit eye-opening. I mean, I understood the racist impulse behind the push for
vouchers, having grown up in a minority-dominated neighborhood and having heard
far too much about how the “wrong sort of kids” were in public schools. But to
see it in black and white - the obvious straight line between Jim Crow and
Betsy DeVos - it made my blood run cold. It is becoming increasingly impossible
to deny that the Religious Right is truly the latest iteration of the Klan.
And another link is in
tactics. In the wake of Brown, one strategy that the Southern states took was
to pass clearly unconstitutional laws, over and over and over, in order to tie
up the resources of civil rights groups fighting them. This was (and is) a
complete abuse of the legal system and process. But doesn’t it sound familiar?
Yes. Yes it does.
Because the EXACT SAME
TACTICS are used by the anti-abortion industrial complex. And you know, it is
the same people too. Not much has changed.
Anderson makes an intriguing point when it
comes to the aftermath of Brown. Since that decision, a tremendous amount of
energy and effort and emotion has been poured into keeping schools segregated.
And, naturally, to ensure that African Americans and other minorities are not given
full and equal education. What has been the result?
Well, there remains a
HUGE racial education gap in the United States. That’s not good. But
also, the United States
fell behind other countries in education.
The
refusal to implement Brown throughout the South even in the face of Sputnik
-- not only as the law or as simple humanity might have dictated but also as
demanded by national interest and patriotism -- compromised and undermined
American strength.
Once, 40% of the world’s
scientists and engineers resided in the US, it is down to below 15%. And,
it is safe to say, our current anti-immigrant policies and vicious hatred are
likely to push future intellectuals to less bigoted countries. We have and are
continuing to commit intellectual suicide to preserve our racism.
Now, of course, we deny
any such racism. (Even as it becomes more and more obvious in the age of
Trump.) Anderson
spends a number of pages detailing how after the Civil Rights acts were passed,
the rhetoric shifted from obvious racism to dog whistles. Basically, nobody
wanted to admit being in the Klan (although that has shifted since Trump), so
code words were used to preserve systemic racism. I can think of so many code
words I inadvertently heard - and used myself (sorry!) in my teens and
twenties. “Thug.” “Urban.” “Slum dweller.” “Strapping young buck.” Damn, that’s
embarrassing. As is hearing the same whistles from my extended family and
members of my former faith tradition. It is one thing to kind of live in those
polluted waters, and another to see the actual history behind the terms - and
the way that the same rhetoric has just been masked to avoid the obvious
racism. Only to return in full force once Trump “made racism great again.”
I want to end with a
final bit on voter suppression. One of the things that really changed my mind
on politics was the obvious attempts by certain Republican dominated states to
disenfranchise black voters. And I mean literally studying how groups voted and
targeting changes to the law to make it harder for blacks to vote.
Anderson gives a good history of the Voting
Rights Act (of 1965), and exactly what it accomplished. Prior to the passage of
the act, a mere 6.7 percent of adult African Americans were registered to vote.
A mere three years later, due to the changes brought by the act, that number
rose to 59.4 percent.
Holy shit.
And this was mirrored
throughout the South. The Voting Rights Act made a world-changing difference.
And it has also been
followed by a concerted effort to roll back the protections, naturally. This
gained momentum after the election of Barack Obama. That election revealed an
inconvenient truth: the voting populace was becoming less white - and younger.
And the non-white and younger voters were NOT voting for Republicans.
While
that reality could have -- or more to the point should have --
signaled an opportunity for the GOP to reexamine its platform, the sclerotic
hardening of the “conservative” notions that moved the Republican Party from
centrist right to right-wing made it increasingly difficult if not impossible
to adapt the GOP’s policies to address the overriding concerns of this wave of
newly engaged voters.
So, being unable to adapt
to changing times without pissing off the old, white, bigoted, Evangelical
base, the GOP had to resort to voter suppression. (Which at minimum flipped the
Georgia Senate race.) With a demographic apocalypse at hand, the only
thing left for the GOP is open and flagrant vote suppression. That’s all they
have. As the Boomers die off, and the country continues to shift to younger and
browner citizens, the GOP has nothing left to offer. It has gone so far to the
right during my lifetime as to lose my vote. A mere 17% of young Californians
are registered Republican. (Thanks in large part to the debacle of Prop 187. It
is easy for non-Californians to forget that California was a Republican-leaning purple
state for most of my life. In the aftermath of Prop 187, even white voters fled
the GOP.) Most likely, the GOP has 20 years to continue its voter suppression
efforts or it will have to change or die. Unfortunately, it has successfully
packed the Supreme Court, and the forces of racism will, as they did at various
points in our history, be able to sustain racist policies. (These sad episodes
are detailed in the book. Plessey
v. Ferguson is just one in a line
of shameful decisions.)
There is insufficient
room in this post to really get into the details, but the careful targeting of
voter laws is so obviously about keeping the “wrong” people from voting.
Namely, minorities and impoverished people. But mostly minorities. It is
flagrantly obvious. Seriously, get the book for this part alone.
In the end, this book
left me with some conflicted feelings. On the one hand, it is depressing to see
the sordid history. The United
States is so very fucked up, and has been
since the beginning. Our national sin is racism, and we continue to return to
our vomit, as the good book has it. Furthermore, given the GOP packing of the
courts, the return to open racism under Trump, and the lessons of history, it
is obvious that we are in for a rough stretch. And by “we,” I probably should
mean “non-whites.” We are in the middle of a paroxysm of white rage right now,
a whitelash against Obama and demographic change a changing America. “Make
America Great Again” is nothing more than a call to return to a time when women
and n----rs knew their place, a cry of rage by whites at the very idea that
they might have to make room at the table.
On the plus side, though,
progress has continued despite white rage. The good people of the world have
continued to push for positive change, and it has come, incrementally. I hope I
live long enough to see another era, when the damage from this one has been
undone and we can move forward again. There are positive signs. In the previous
iterations of white rage, racist bigots were the majority. I am not sure that
is the case anymore. Trump is the second president in the last three to win
without a majority of votes - and that despite the suppression of black votes.
White Evangelicalism, the biggest incubator of racist hatred, is on the decline
- this is, in my view, their last gasp of rage before their decline into
cultural and political irrelevance. When the Boomers stop writing checks, we
will see mass bankruptcy among churches and para-church hate groups. Yes, this
will likely take a few decades - I will be an old man - but we can do it.
As I noted above, this
book is thoroughly researched and footnoted. Prepare to have your idols thrown
to the ground, from Lincoln to Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt to Eisenhower to
your favorite modern conservative politicians. White Supremacy is endemic to
our nation, and inescapable in our history. Until we truly confront that
reality - and repent - we will continue to suffer the devastating effects of
that poison.
I am putting this book on
my list of suggestions for those who, like myself, are working to detox from a
lifetime of immersion in toxic politics and theology.
***
If you haven’t read it,
the Washington Post article which sparked the book is fantastic.
***
Just a reminder: Roy Moore, that darling of white Evangelicals, in an address to a religious conference, that the Voting Rights Act (and the Civil Rights Act) were America's biggest mistake. And people wonder why I left that cesspit? Or why Evangelicals are viewed with contempt by those outside the bubble? Take a look in the mirror...
***
Just a reminder: Roy Moore, that darling of white Evangelicals, in an address to a religious conference, that the Voting Rights Act (and the Civil Rights Act) were America's biggest mistake. And people wonder why I left that cesspit? Or why Evangelicals are viewed with contempt by those outside the bubble? Take a look in the mirror...
