How Black Leaders, White Allies, and the Melting Pot Can Confront Racism: A Call to Action
In a movie entitled, “I Am Not Your Negro,” Harlem Renaissance author, James Baldwin, said, “Until Americans understand that African-American History IS American History, we will be unable to solve many of the problems we face.”
I decided to write a series of articles about institutional racism that is both hopeful and useful. Growing up in New York City I lived in the ghetto — the euphemism, “Inner City,” was still in America’s future when I joined the followers of Brother Martin. Dr. Martin Luther King stood for nonviolent resistance, but Brother Malcolm saw white people as the enemy and advocated any means possible to end poor treatment of Blacks. (Brother Malcolm, now known as Malik Shabazz, repented of his hatred after his Pilgrimage to Mecca and was likely killed for it by the Nation of Islam.)
I came of age in a hopeful time; because of my male privilege and smart-guy privilege, most of the direct racism I have ever endured was of the positive nature: “You speak so well,” “Man you got that groove happening;” “Wow I love your Afro. Can I touch it?” — statements the “woke” among us know as microaggressions. I was given scholarships to elite private schools, invited to my new friends’ country houses and Park Avenue apartments, even as the dogs and fire hoses of Bull Connor’s stand against civil rights played on the evening news at my house. Of course, I grew up on a block with twelve kids, seven of whom were dead by the time I turned twenty-one. Since then I have often played the role of Black America’s Ambassador to White People.
Much of our political discourse concerns the problems our society faces; in future essays I hope to concentrate solutions. Many of the problems we face stem from solutions to earlier problems, so perhaps our most important task, if we wish to solve racism without unintended consequences, is to understand our own implicit biases (Hidden Brain, Podcast, March 9, 2018) lest we create new problems. I don’t believe anyone reading this article is racist, but I do believe that all of us harbor unexamined bias that we can only get past by dragging it out of the cognitive recesses it hides in. Let’s start with a brief history…
The United States was founded on three principles that today’s Progressives find troubling; 1) Native American Genocide, 2) Chattel Slavery, mostly of Black People, and 3) White Male Landowner Privilege. Although we have made progress in combating the effects of each of these harms, arguably we have made the least progress concerning racism directed at African-American males.
The institution we now know as Chattel Slavery began in the early 17th Century when two men, one black and one white, each escaped from a plantation where they had been indentured servants. When recaptured, the white man was punished by having his indenture lengthened by two years; the black man was punished with a life sentence as a slave. By 1640, legislatures and courts began enacting and upholding so-called Slave Codes, and the institution became a legal reality.
The first time that African-Americans were given “freedom” or “equality under the law” was at the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Most of you have heard about Reconstruction, but few of you have heard that as soon as the 13th Amendment was passed, its loophole allowing servitude by criminals allowed southern municipalities to arrest thousands of Blacks for trespassing, vagrancy, and other nuisance crimes, putting them to work on chain gangs. Many of you learned from “To Kill a Mockingbird” that when a powerful white man committed a serious crime, it was necessary for a Negro to be executed — or lynched.
We all know that the end of Reconstruction, with Andrew Johnson’s failure to uphold civil rights for Negroes, and tolerance of the Black Codes, eventually led to the Jim Crow Era — terrorism so pervasive that it sent millions of Black refugees to urban centers in the north and west — Chicago, Detroit, New York and many others. Most Americans don’t really understand how appropriate the terms; “terrorism” and “refugee” are to illuminate the nature of the Great Migration. (See “Lynching Postcards.”)
Similarly, many of us think that the Civil Rights Movement began with Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat for a white bus rider, culminating with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In future essays, I will illuminate many other signature moments in civil rights history, but for today, I want to show how the Republican Party became a safe place for the worst bigots.
Segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace, a Democrat, received 10 million votes for president in 1968. One of Richard Nixon’s first actions as president in 1969 was to reach out to disgruntled Wallace voters. As John Erlichman said in a 1994 interview published in Harper’s:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… [B]y getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin…we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
But, Ronald Reagan took what we now know to be the New Jim Crow much further than Nixon. His advisor, Lee Atwater, made the following remark in 1981, off the record:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, [n-word, n-word, n-word]. By 1968 you can’t say [n-word] — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [n-word, n-word]”
In future essays, I will show how the interaction between our implicit biases and covertly racist strategies, implemented by Republican Administrations, is at the root of everything from our frayed social safety net, to the rise in college tuition, from the stagnant minimum wage to the rise in health insurance premiums — all of these policies and issues, and many more, were influenced by politicians using images of nonwhite “cheaters” to diminish public enthusiasm for government programs.
And just in case you thought Democrats were going to get a pass, I’ll be talking about how Black Democrats’ support of racist drug laws in the 80s and Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform in the 90s have had similar — or worse — effects as Republican policies.
