Hellish Thoughts

I might as well lay this bare for you all to see. Recently, after interacting with an individual at some length, I looked at them in all their brokenness and unlikability and had a sudden, visceral sense deep in my heart that God could not possibly value that person as much as he values me.

I simply couldn't believe it.

These are the thoughts of a soul beating a path to hell. Yet grace has a way of cutting through even my refusal to accept my need for it. It had better, or I am irrevocably lost.

Some Subtle Revisions to the "Southern Strategy" Historiography

As I continue to learn more about the political fallout of the civil rights movement I find that the standard narrative of white racists migrating to the Republican Party needs some subtle adjustment. This corrective is needed not because the popular perception shared by the Republican faithful that theirs is and always was the party of civil rights and racial progressivism has any merit -- it doesn't -- but because casting the story in partisan terms obscures the extent to which white Americans imposed bipartisan constraints on the political possibilities for racial justice.

The sheer incompetence of the modern GOP's efforts to reach out to minorities can obscure the extent to which partisan alignments were in flux for over two decades. The obvious resentment of and indifference to minority concerns of the modern lily-white GOP base makes it easy to overlook that the Democrats made some efforts of their own to capture "The Silent Majority" who wanted their white privilege protected and affirmed.

So, as absurd as the civil rights history is that you tend to get from a Republican partisan, it actually is true that there is a double standard of a sort. How do I know this? I know because if you follow politics you are aware of Nixon's "Southern Strategy," and Reagan's 1980 paean to states rights in the county where three civil rights workers were murdered 16 years before; you know about the Willie Horton ad. But I'm fairly certain you don't know what I'm about to tell you.

Jimmy Carter came out of Georgia. How did a southern Democrat from the deep south make it onto the national stage just a few years after civil rights movement without being tainted by racism, you ask? Well, he didn't. In The South and America Since World War II, James C. Cobb notes that during the campaign Carter appeared onstage with George Wallace (George Wallace!) at a rally in Birmingham and declared, "We southerners believe in work, not welfare." When running for governor, Carter had also stood staunchly against busing to achieve integration.

During the presidential campaign he ran a TV add saying "On November 2, the South is being readmitted to the Union. If that sounds strange, maybe a southerner can understand. Only a southerner can understand what it means to be a political whipping boy. But, then, only a southerner can understand what Jimmy Carter as President can mean."

As I research the career of segregationist Democratic Senator John Stennis, I was surprised to see that as late as 1976, he said this: "Let me just say one thing about this integration. I'm against it, always have been and always will be, but it's a fact. I'm not a fool. It's a fact. It's there." Put more bluntly, he's basically saying he will always believe in white supremacy and only accepts the changes that happened over a decade ago because they're a fait accompli that he cannot roll back. I was more surprised when I found out Stennis said this while at the Biloxi, Mississippi airport to meet Jimmy Carter for a campaign event! Carter said it was "a great honor" to campaign with a "statesman...committed to absolute integrity" like Stennis.

All of these things, the campaign events with segregationists, the racial dog whistles about welfare, would be well-known parts of the Republican Southern Strategy narrative, except...in this case Republicans didn't do them! There is the double standard. Nonetheless, it's not much to get worked up about, for at least two reasons. First, Carter governed differently from how he campaigned. Reagan, by contrast, backed up racial campaign appeals with real policy: savage spending cuts to urban areas, defense of segregated private schools, and only grudgingly renewing the Voting Rights Act under pressure. Second, we know the end of the story. In a sense, relative to the culture in which it resides, the Republican Party in 2013 is more hostile to minorities than it has ever been. At least back in the 1970s there were still factions of the party opposed to becoming an essentially white movement.

But this is no cause for Democratic gloating. Indeed, the rightward turn of the Republican Party can easily blind us to the extent of bipartisan opposition to creating an equal opportunity society. For example, during the height of the busing controversies in the early 1970s, a poll showed 98% of whites opposed to it. You don't like busing? Ok, well what do you suggest? I don't see you recommending that your nice suburban neighborhood with spacious lawns change its zoning laws so some low-income housing can be built.

If you oppose difficult efforts like busing on the one hand, and actual policies that would integrate neighborhoods on the other, you leave no plausible way to integrate schools. In effect you support Plessy v Ferguson. A favorite tactic is to couch opposition to opportunity-creating policies in terms of class and crime instead of race. You can go ahead and do that, but it's not as if it is any less sinful to withhold good from your neighbor because he is poor than because he is black or brown (why yes, that was a deliberate echo of Proverbs 3:27). There is a bipartisan consensus around the idea that the creation and maintenance of these middle-to-high income suburban enclaves has nothing to do with the deprivation of opportunity just a few miles away in a city center. In reality they're opposite sides of the same coin, minted together.

The possession of privilege is not a mark against anyone. It can come to us unbidden. But the attempt to erect barriers of exclusion around that privilege is at once the fundamental feature of American politics and the essence of an unchristian life.

Soul Searching

This is more of a curiosity item than a follow-up to my last post, but it is nonetheless enlightening, I think. In Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything, he quotes the reactions of some southern white Christians to the civil rights upheavals. The first one I'll share is bad, the second is good, but I can see myself in both writers.

A Methodist layperson said, 

Being a Christian is accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior…and just because I don’t want my granddaughter to go to school with a Negro boy, I don’t see what it has got to do with my being a Christian or not.

Meanwhile, a Georgian woman named Harriet Southwell had been a long-time supporter of Senator Richard Russell, the leader of the segregationists in the Senate. But in 1963 she wrote to him and said this:

I truly believe the time is here--(it is late) and that we as Christians--and as true citizens need to acknowledge our wrong and face up to and admit that we have not done to and for  the Negro what we, had our faces been black, would have wanted to be done for us…I have seen in these years of soul-searching many men and women who with great effort and almost heartbreak have changed their views from those of the days when the Negro was slave and servant. Understand that it took soul-rending change for some of these—some who had been bitter and resentful but who were fair minded and who examined their souls and had to change. 

The majority of white southern Christians were unwilling to make this simple calculus. As plain as it was, it could indeed be soul-rending to try to be a Christian first and a white southerner second. The challenge for us is to think about what we believe "has got nothing to do with being a Christian" when in fact we just don't really want to be Christians. It would be foolish to assume we will look better to history than these folks did.

Seeing Against Our Self-Interest

As I noted here Saturday, the existence of retrospectively obvious injustice does not mean it is discernible to people at the time, even to those who participated in it. That's how you get white people in the deep south in the 1960s expressing genuine puzzlement about why blacks would be protesting. After all, they said, blacks had it better than whites did. Many people were that blind to what was actually occurring. It was in their interest to be blind.

It is important for us to face the fact that it is in our interest as well, yours and mine, to be blind. One of the great stumbling blocks for readers is the sense that, if ongoing inequality and discrimination were as bad as what this blog describes, you would know about it. If reality was as I describe and as the statistics show, you would be hearing about it from more sources and would be seeing it with your own eyes.

But why must that be so? I raise the opinions of white southerners in the 1960s not to claim a false symmetry between then and now, but only to show that it is possible to believe people are getting a fair shake even in a society whose entire structure is designed to ensure that is precisely what does not happen. It is all the more understandable that we believe it now, after so many improvements have been made.

Polling shows that the majority of whites believe that the remaining work to be done primarily involves minorities fixing their cultures and getting to work.  Whites who cling to this view do not have much in the way of statistics or social science research to back them up. They just have, like southern whites in the 1960s, a strong sense that it ought to be so.

Think of it this way. Let's say you are, like most of my readers, white and middle class, and were probably born into a family that fit the same profile. What do you possibly have to gain by admitting that you're privileged? From a typical American perspective you really don't have anything to gain, and may have much to lose. That is one the reasons the realities of an unequal and unjust society often make so little impression on us. If we let reality intrude, we find that responsibility is not far behind.

For Christians this is all the more true. From the proverbs of the Old Testament to the letters of Paul, the Bible consistently calls us to recognize our privilege and treat all we have as a gift to be poured out for others who have been less fortunate. This is the ethic we are called to live by across spiritual, social, and material dimensions. The common sense American attitude that we have worked for what we have and are entitled to it is considered sinful in Christian thought. Yet we frequently function as Americans first and Christians second.

I know enough of the culture of evangelicalism to understand that the preceding paragraph might be confusing to some readers, because many pastors do not preach in ways that challenge their parishioners' most deeply held Americanized beliefs. We're not accustomed to thinking in this way. But I challenge you to read the Bible for yourself. You'll find that the ideas above are basic Christian theology.

Book Review: There Goes My Everything

Jason Sokol. There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975. New York: Knopf, 2006.

The civil rights movement is more than just the story of the black freedom struggle. It is also the story of how southern whites variously resisted, accommodated, or embraced the world that was shifting under their feet. As Jason Sokol argues, while blacks drove change during the era, ordinary whites in thousands of locales and in a multitude of varied responses played a crucial role in determining the extent of that change. Yet until recent years little scholarship was focused on white reaction. Moreover, much of what was written focused on white elites and extremists, the Ross Barnett’s and Bull Connor’s of the South. In these accounts the quiet struggle of millions of ordinary white southerners to come to terms with the changes sweeping their life are often lost from view. Sokol aims to recover their voices and gain insight into what the civil rights movement was like for average white southerners.

Using letters to newspapers and letters constituents sent to their representatives, Sokol shows that the set-piece events that define traditional civil rights narratives – Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Selma – were not necessarily representative of ordinary white southerners’ experience. Rather, for many white southerners the civil rights movement was an intensely localized and personal experience. Bloody Sunday might have been a distant and impersonal event filtered through media, while the first time addressing a black man as “Mr.” could linger in memory as a major shift. Likewise, white southerners who gave little thought to legislation passed in far-off Washington D.C. could not forget the year the first blacks were elected to the local school board. Though the movement is generally seen as reaching a peak in 1964 and 1965, for many white southerners it was was defined by when it arrived in their town.

For some southern whites the most wrenching changes happened deep into the 1970s, long after the cameras had gone away and the history of the movement was already being written. Historians would try to fit the responses of white political leaders into various categories of resistance or moderation, but most white southerners were not radical in either direction. They were happy with southern customs and they wanted life to get back to normal. After learning about the civil rights movement a little boy asked one white southerner, “Which were you in – the Klan or the FBI?” The man replied, “I was just in Georgia” (13). For these southerners, the movement was an unwelcome and confusing intrusion, but it was not something to violently resist, much less join. Sokol shows that many white southerners disliked violence and upheaval far more than they sympathized with black goals. Acquiescing to the changes the civil rights movement had wrought was sometimes the quickest way to restore stability and move on in the hope that life could continue as before.

There Goes My Everything is an equivocal book. At a glance this may seem to be a weakness, but it is the necessary result of Sokol’s main argument. The responses of ordinary white southerners were localized, varied, and defiant of simple generalizations. It is an equivocal book because the legacy of the civil rights movement is itself ambiguous, and the voices of ordinary white southerners are so difficult to recover. Many whites, having deeply drunk of a paternalistic ethos, were shocked that “our good Negroes” were participating in the movement at all. Smaller numbers rapidly embraced the changes or else bitterly resisted long after the movement was over. Collectively, their responses helped to determine the boundaries of the second reconstruction.