Awakening the Nation

I spent the weekend in Milwaukee giving a paper at UWM's Racial Formation : Racial Blindness Conference. I have some thoughts.

It was a painful disjuncture to spend such a stimulating time among a community of scholars and activists who are exploring how to bring their scholarship to the people to affect change, only to find out yesterday evening that jurors could not agree on a murder charge in the trial of Michael Dunn.

It is painful to spend so many grueling hours researching, meditating, writing, uncovering the roots of our contemporary racial order, only to have people declare that I'm wrong and there's nothing that a little hard work and personal responsibility won't fix. In America, you see, everyone is a racial expert. I move that we extend this principle to a wider field; let's be consistent after all. I'll start tomorrow. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to install plumbing in a house or go to a hospital and perform a knee surgery. No, I don't know anything about these things, but how hard could it be?

My tone of bitter sarcasm feels warranted in this moment, but I can't help but feel it is unchristian. If motivated by grief over the deleterious influence of Americans' ignorant pride, my current sensibility is probably warranted. But if motivated by my own professional pride and annoyance that my limited expertise is not recognized, then I am far from Jesus indeed. But this, too, is covered by his grace.
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The paper I gave is titled "Awakening the Nation: John C. Stennis, Brown v. Board, and the Strategic Defense of White Supremacy." Mississippi senator John C. Stennis is a fascinating figure because in important respects he did not accept the premises of either massive resistance or southern exceptionalism. He brought to the debate over Brown three key assumptions that not only guided his actions but proved to be prophetic. The assumptions were these:

1) White Americans, of whatever region, were much the same. When the stakes became personal and concrete they would value the traditional wages of whiteness more than racial equality.
2) This essential sameness implied that White southerners could actually win in the court of public opinion, if not in the Supreme Court, if they framed their resistance in an appealing way.
3) White supremacy in the United States was sustainable if rendered increasingly localized and unofficial.

My basic argument is that Stennis was right. On all three of these assumptions, he was correct. He faced many setbacks, but in the long-term his assumptions were vindicated. The paper traces his strategies and actions in the years immediately before and after Brown, including his efforts to improve Black schools to shape public opinion and push the enforcement mechanisms of White supremacy down to the county level or lower so they would be less visible and harder to fight. His newfound opposition to federal funding for public schools also dates to these years. Once funding became linked to integration, Stennis shifted to new rhetoric about the sanctity of local control and the primacy of local school boards. I also show how his three core assumptions shaped his delicate balancing act with the Citizens Councils and his work on the Southern Manifesto.

When you look at the mid-1950s through the lens of figures like Stennis, the shift toward nationwide opposition to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s begins to look quite a bit different. Invariably framed in a narrative of "backlash," the emergence of overwhelming White opposition to efforts to promote racial equality in American education was a shock to some elite pundits. It was no surprise to John C. Stennis. It was his vindication. Framing it as a backlash erases the influence of Stennis and the forces he embodied, leaving us only with caricatures of segregationist monsters we can safely consign as relics of the Deep South with no influence on the contemporary United States.

A perusal of the present-day educational landscape puts Stennis’s success in stark relief. In his home county of Kemper, the public schools have become synonymous with Black schools, while Whites embrace private education. Though Whites constitute 35% of the population of Kemper County, they make up only 2% of public school enrollment in the county (Census Bureau; Federal Education Budget Project, New America Foundation). Nationwide, schools are now more segregated than at any time since the late 1960s, a dynamic that appears to have only grown worse since the Supreme Court ruled against local, limited, and voluntary efforts to achieve racial integration in Parents Involved in Community Schools et al. v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al (Dorsey). Three-quarters of Black and Hispanic students now attend schools in which less than half the students are White, and 15% of Black students attend schools that have essentially no White enrollment (Orfield et al). The effects, in the form of inadequate resources and concentrated poverty, are severe. These White supremacist outcomes are often seen as benign features of the landscape, standard facts of American life that are all but invisible to many Whites. Others see school segregation as a troubling but almost mysterious problem that all people of goodwill deplore. In reality, modern-day segregation is a logical outcome of the assumptions John C. Stennis brought to the fight over Brown sixty years ago.

Celebration of segregation’s demise has been incorporated into the nation’s political culture and Americans’ sense of themselves as a freedom loving people. This is made easier by emphasizing the pathetic end of vanquished demagogues. But figures like Stennis upset these simple narratives. The esteem in which he was held by his Senate colleagues, the power he accumulated, the astonishing breadth of his career—all these factors defy facile attempts to brush Stennis aside as a fringe figure of the Deep South. Just as surely as the worst excesses of massive resistance were overcome, the influence of White supremacist politics in more moderate and malleable forms lingered on.
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Dana N. Thompson Dorsey, "Segregation 2.0: The New Generation of School Segregation in the 21st Century," Education and Urban Policy 45 (2013): 533-547 

Gary Orfield, John Kucsera, and Genevieve Siegel Hawley, “E Pluribus…Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students,” September 2012, The Civil Rights Project, The University of California. http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu.

John Stennis's America

I am in Mississippi this week doing research for my thesis. It is a fascinating experience. A lot of drudgery is involved, but I’ve also happened upon a few goldmines. One of the things that I can say with a great deal of confidence is that John Stennis never substantially changed his views on civil rights policy during his six decades in public life. The archives are pretty clear on this. But that presents a huge problem for American memory of the civil rights movement. Precisely because Stennis was so powerful and widely respected, he has to be either forgotten, remembered selectively, or be granted a story of redemption and change that is not true to the historical record. In the editorials and eulogies that poured out at his death, we see all three approaches.

The reaction to Stennis reveals an America that is extremely uncomfortable with a realistic memory of the civil rights era. Bigoted demagogues are happily recalled, because they fit comfortably in the national narrative of progress. Remembering a man who was powerful and admired—even loved—while remaining a white supremacist confuses this narrative. Thus the dominant reaction to Stennis and what he represents is forgetting, collective amnesia. He is written out of the record. Segregationists were bad, they were vanquished. They can’t have survived.

But when he retired at the end of 1988 and died in 1995, for a brief moment politicians and the press were forced to grapple with his legacy. The way they did so was revealing. Some just completely ignored his civil rights record. Most acknowledged it in a disapproving tone, only to create an arc of redemption by noting his vote in favor of renewing the Voting Rights Act in 1982. But Stennis’s personal papers reveal that vote as a craven political calculation, divorced from his actual views on the subject.

The lesson is that Americans in the mid-1990s, when faced with a respected segregationist whose life did not offer a story of redemption, would create one anyway. It was surely not a conscious decision taken by hundreds of individual editorialists. It was rather a collective expression of America’s unease with its racial progress. Americans wanted to believe that they lived in a country the civil rights movement created—full stop. But they also lived in the America of the countermovement, the America of John Stennis. To admit that fact would imply the need for more to be done to fulfill the promise of equality and justice for all. That was a step a critical mass of white Americans were unwilling to take.

Equality, Rights, Privileges

Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his critique of President Obama's way of speaking to black audiences:

I would argue that the current black predicament did not arise because black people lacked sufficient moral will. I would argue that we recognize this in other communities and their own predicaments. It would not be productive for the president to go before a white working-class Appalachian audience and say, "We know that economic unfairness exists, and has long existed, but government programs won't keep your kids off meth and painkillers." The fact that meth and painkiller addiction is higher in those communities, that one in ten kids born in Appalachia was born addicted to drugs, would not be seen as relevant to, say, a jobs program.

Nor would it be productive or wise for the president to go before a primarily Hispanic audience and say "We know that the DREAM Act is the right thing to do, but what you really need to do is keep your babies from having more babies." The fact that the Hispanic community has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country would not be seen as relevant to, say, immigration reform.

And it would not be productive or wise for the president to go before an audience of Native Americans and say, "Yes, this country stole your land and prosecuted a ruthless war against you, but what would really help now is if you stopped your kids from drinking so much." The high rate of alcoholism among Native Americans would not be seen as relevant. And as I've said, it would not be wise for the president to go to Newtown and point to the absence of active fatherhood in the life of Adam Lanza.

But for some reason all of these kinds of statements are appropriate in the black community. Not because of higher rates of anything, and it not even because the president is black. They're seen as appropriate because there a deep belief -- even among black people -- that morality lies at the seat of our troubles...

I can (and have) marshaled numerous statistics to show that morality is not the real issue here, but the trouble is that statistics are subject to varying interpretations. Whether you believe the problems of black Americans are rooted primarily within or without, in black culture or in external discrimination, is less a question of evidence than of a priori assumptions.

Part of examining those basic assumptions involves stepping back, as Coates does here, and asking why this discussion so often seems particular to black people. All groups have unique problems, but in the case of African Americans there is a tendency to say that external conditions reveal the essential nature of a supposed black "morality" or "culture."

One of the reasons I'm so skeptical of these moralizing and cultural arguments is that the pattern we see across civilizations and throughout time is of dominant social groups attributing the behavior of disadvantaged groups to their essential nature. Thus Aristotle looked at slaves and instead of concluding that their degradation resulted from being enslaved, he got it backwards and said that some people are natural slaves. Thus the English poor of the 17th century were not desperate landless peasants amid rising demographic pressures and unjust economic systems, they were natural thieves.

The American context ought to make this all the more clear. For most of our history, to put it in blunt and simple terms, the white elite has been carrying on this conversation around the question, "What is wrong with black people?" The basic contours of the answer to that query have remained remarkably stable, because the question mostly answers itself. To ask it is to implicitly absolve the dominant society of any wrongdoing or responsibility.

During the height of slavery, the question was answered with the assumption that blacks were biologically inferior. By the middle of the twentieth century, even among many segregationists this scientific racism shaded into arguments that were more cultural and civilizational. Someone like John Stennis might be agnostic on the question of biological inferiority, while claiming that black culture was degraded.

This is part of the reason why the civil rights laws were so offensive to many whites. Civil rights inscribed equality in law that, in the view of segregationists, had not been earned. Black civilization was not equal, they said, and to treat it as such invited harm to white civilization. By relentlessly focusing on the state of black behavior, whites obscured their complicity in the creation of an oppressed class.

Much of segregationist rhetoric took on an Orwellian double-speak character because it started from these presuppositions of black cultural inferiority. Many whites could say with a straight face that blacks were not being discriminated against when their schools were funded at a fourth of white funding levels, because they were being provided with education adequate to their level of cultural development. Equal treatment is wasted on groups that are not equal. This was the segregationist mind, but it also bleeds into the broader white American mindset both then and now.

By merely asking what is wrong with black people, we play into a narrative that elides what is wrong with America. This is a country in which black people have had to earn what whites possess as a right. And when they do set out to claim those rights, they're seen as seeking after special privileges. As TNC sums it up:

The neighborhoods where black people shoot at each other are the work of racist social engineering. We know this. But we do not say it, because there is almost no political upside. Instead we hand-wave at racism and pretend that individual black morality might overcome many centuries of wrong.

What Does History Teach Us About Ourselves?

The biggest thing I've learned from studying history is that good and evil are rooted in the mundane stuff of life. Even the most barbaric atrocities can become, and indeed are often marked by, their routine banality in the hands of their perpetrators. There are not many monsters or saints. Most of us never get the chance to rise to the most momentous occasion or descend to the depths. But we need not face the intense pressures of war or starvation to find out a little about ourselves. If I'm the sort of person who curses a driver in traffic, or lies to get ahead, I'm probably the sort of person who would participate in genocide. If I think I could never kill, I'm probably quite dangerous.

We ought to think on those things for a minute.

There are two great mistakes people that are often considered by their societies to be "good" make. The very ubiquity of these mistakes can hide their destructive power. They become just another part of the landscape, what we expect of ourselves. In some respects they are mirror images of each other, yet they both produce hatred, war, slavery and genocide.

The first mistake that good people make is exemplified by the object of my thesis study, John Stennis. A segregationist senator from Mississippi, he appeared to be nearly universally loved and respected by those who knew him personally. But John Stennis wasted his life. He spent half a century fighting for white supremacy, with all the violence and suffering that entailed. He didn't do it because he was bad. He did it because the boundaries of his empathy were small. His circle of moral concern excluded millions of people with no good cause. Somehow, the man who was held up as a paragon of virtue and integrity, "the conscience of the Senate," has to be reconciled with the man who refused to even answer the letters of his black constituents for a quarter of a century. That makes people uncomfortable.

We have to come to grips with the fact that people of high personal moral character, whose word is reliable, who are faithful to their families, who are humble and hardworking, can at the same time promote death and destruction for millions of other people. They care about people even as they destroy society.

The second mistake is that of the idealist who cares about society but can't be faithful to the people right in front of him. In trying to change society, the individual becomes unimportant. This is part of the reason communism should be held in the same opprobrium as Nazism. Besides the fact that it has caused many millions more deaths than Nazism did, it is important to realize that those deaths were not innocent mistakes. They were acknowledged by communist leaders at the time, not as a bug but as a feature! They would pave the way to the utopia.

It doesn't really matter how much good I do in the world if I'm a distant father. Nor does it matter how good a father I am if my empathy for those unlike me is shallow. Genocide grows up in the soils of indifference and othering. It doesn't require any monsters to do its work.