What's Next In A World Where Donald Trump Can Win?

A few preliminary thoughts on the state of our country:

There are at least three important stories here, and it's hard to sort out how they interact with each other.

1) Donald Trump is a distraction from the real sources of contemporary racial injustice and inequality. The flap over the Ku Klux Klan is a classic case of denouncing the villains of the old order so as to establish one's innocence in the new order. Denouncing the Ku Klux Klan (which we should do of course!) has very little meaning because the Klan is not a key force constituting the contemporary racial order. When we denounce the Klan, we're actually not saying much of anything about our stance toward current racial injustice, any more than early twentieth segregationists who denounced slavery were implying opposition to Jim Crow. On the contrary, shutting the door on the old order helped to consolidate the new. In the same way, the question for Donald Trump and all American politicians is not whether they denounce the Klan--a group that had significant social power in the old racial order but does not have such power now--but whether they denounce the contemporary forces that undergird present-day power relations. The Klan plays a negligible role in contemporary racial injustice, but colorblind ideology is a vital support for present-day White supremacy. In American political life, we denounce the former so as to bolster the latter.

Do you denounce the forces that create and sustain racial injustice now? Do you even know what they are? By that standard, nearly all politicians of both parties fail. 

Denouncing colorblindness, exclusionary zoning, and supreme court school desegregation precedents is much more meaningful and important than denouncing the Klan. Politicians across the spectrum are failing to do this. While we beat up on Trump for being a racist (and he is), there is a danger that we lose sight of the bipartisan investment in racial injustice that shows little sign of abating.

2) On the other hand, sitting quite uncomfortably next to what I have said thus far, there is a real danger that Donald Trump will bring back into the American mainstream a kind of classical racism that we haven't seen in decades. He has already brought an explicit racist populism into the national political sphere in a way we haven't seen since George Wallace. And even Wallace was never this close to winning the Democratic Party nomination. It is hard to quantify the costs of reopening the door to 1960s-style racism, but they surely include these possibilities: an uptick in hate crimes and racial violence, a degrading of our civic fabric, and a heightened sense of fear and alienation among people of color. Indeed, this last possibility is especially concerning. Imagine how it must feel to see a figure like Trump winning state after state in a major party nomination, knowing that there is no room for people who look like you in his vision of national greatness, and discerning, especially, the undercurrent of violence he threatens to unleash. This is very serious.

I'm not sure how to make sense of these two threads together--Trump as distraction from contemporary systemic racism vs Trump as resurrector of classical racism--but I think they're both happening at once and it will take a while to figure out how they relate to one another.

3) The third story is the decline and fall of the Republican Party. I can't escape the conviction that if the GOP had made a sincere effort during the Obama years to be more than a White party, it could have inoculated itself against Trump. As Adam Serwer wrote in an excellent piece months ago, Republicans have been unable to neutralize Trump because all the groups he insults are already outside the party anyway. Republican elites may deplore Trump's demagoguery, but they built a political coalition ready-made for it. Those of us who have been sounding the alarm for years can claim some sort of vindication here, but it's not particularly satisfying, especially since it's not at all clear anti-Trump Republicans will learn the lesson of the last few decades.

The roots of this go deep. At the presidential level, the GOP won the 1960s-1970s battle for southern Whites. People forget now that Democrats went hard for southern Whites too in the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter campaigned with White supremacists while feigning ignorance about it. But the GOP won that battle with the Reagan Revolution and have solidified their hold ever since, extending their reach down to every state legislature, with the key breakthrough coming in 1994 and culminating in 2010-2014. They captured southern White conservatives, but were in the process captured by them. Along the way, party elites have embraced absurd ideas about the nature of the respective partisan coalitions. There was Mitt Romney in 2012, both before and after the election, claiming that Obama won by giving "gifts" to various groups, as if Obama's strategy was different in kind from Mitt's pitch to White retirees. Last year there was the great establishment hope, Jeb Bush, proclaiming that he would not offer "free stuff" to Black voters, while refusing to say the same to the people who most need to hear it. The GOP has constructed an entire mythology of racial innocence that is unmoored from any facts or reason. Will the GOP use the occasion of Trump's rise to seriously grapple with what they've built? Or will they persist in portraying Trump as an inexplicable cancer?

More than that, will the country, will both parties, use Trump's rise to reflect on the kind of injustice we now tolerate or celebrate all around us? I'm returning now to my first point. It is well to remember that the 1890 Mississippi constitution--the crowning edifice of White supremacy after the turmoil of Reconstruction, the document that set the legal foundation for Black disfranchisement and three generations of Jim Crow oppression--was colorblind! Think of that for a moment. I bet you didn't know that Jim Crow in Mississippi, the prototypical American example of old-time racism, was established on a foundation of colorblindness. And in the decades since the civil rights movement, we have returned to colorblindness with a vengeance. We condemn the segregationists of the 1960s even as we happily live in the world they did so much to create. As the historian Joe Crespino wrote in his book on Mississippi:

In looking back over the half century since the civil rights movement, white Americans have hardly repudiated the vision of social organization advocated by Mississippi segregationists, at least if the measurement is not words but rather the actual composition of American neighborhoods and schools. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that since the 1960s, white Americans--from rural Mississippi to the most cosmopolitan communities in America--have practiced their own form of 'practical segregation.' They have rejected the ugly white supremacy of the Citizens' Council, but implicitly and explicitly they have embraced the quiet protectionism that preserved the racial and class privilege of suburban America. The closed society may have been defeated, but most American suburbs today are a world that hard-line segregationists would have little problem with.

Colorblind Racism

Last night at the University of Missouri someone vandalized the Black Culture Center sign, spray-painting over the word Black.

It's important to think about the nature of this vandalism. There are no epithets or crude expressions here. Instead, there is simply negation of identity. This is vandalism motivated by colorblindness.

For many of us, "colorblindness" conjures inspiring visions of a world where the inherent worth and dignity of all people is affirmed and there is no racial hierarchy or discrimination. I like that vision as much as the next person, but if you think that is how colorblindness has actually been operating in the United States, you haven't been paying attention.

In practice, colorblindness is the dominant form of White racism in the contemporary United States. This is a different colorblindness than the vision sketched above, though it appropriates its language. Proponents of colorblindness fail to recognize their own Whiteness and the White spaces they inhabit. They falsely label these identities and spaces as non-racial. In effect, they demand that others adapt to White norms, values, and practices. Instead of working hard to undo racial hierarchies, they unilaterally declare their irrelevance. The effect is not to dismantle racism, but to hide it. Like the vandal, proponents of colorblindness then take offense when Black people respond to this oppression by seeking to make space for themselves and speak of race in explicit terms.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but you think we should all be quiet about race, you're part of the problem.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but you think your responsibility is simply to be kind in your interpersonal relationships, you're part of the problem.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but you don't support legal and institutional reforms, you're part of the problem.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but you don't understand that White Americans gain specific advantages because of their race, you're part of the problem.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but you insist on forgetting American history, you're part of the problem.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but refuse to let the experiences of others shape your perceptions, you're part of the problem.

If you would never dream of vandalizing a sign, but you're a Christian who thinks your faith teaches you to be colorblind, you're part of the problem.

We must be willing to examine not only the superficial rhetoric of colorblindness that sounds so nice, but the actual purposes for which it is deployed. Colorblindness negates identities, silences protest, and affirms the legitimacy of an unjust society. 

The Folly of Transcending Race In A Society of Racial Inequality

The historian David Roediger wrote a book back in 2008 called How Race Survived US History. At the end he discussed the excitement, confusion, and varied reactions elicited by Barack Obama's 2008 candidacy for president. (That seems like a long time ago now, doesn't it?) On the one hand, the possibilities of a post-racial America were everywhere bandied about. On the other hand, the media endlessly reported on and speculated about how this or that racial group responded to Obama. Surveying the scene, Roediger offered this gem of a sentence:

Such careening representations of the Obama campaign reflect an overwhelming desire to transcend race without transcending racial inequality, as well as the impossibility of doing so.

This might fairly be said not only of the Obama campaign, but of the entire ideological project of colorblindness. It promises to put an end to race without any sacrifice or broader change required. But the promise it seems to hold is ultimately illusory. How can we be colorblind when the inequities that reproduce race remain with us? This is too troubling for American society to face, so we get people performing their racial progressivism by voting for a Black man rather than supporting more substantial changes. Barack Obama may be a two-term president, but something as obvious, moral, and practical as reparations is still not to be mentioned in most polite company. As much as we may want to move beyond race, we're quite attached to racial inequality.

Why We Must Call White Supremacy By Its Name

For too long, we've discussed American history in grossly irresponsible terms. We hear about America's "race problem" and the need for better "race relations." What we have been slow to grasp is that these terms are euphemisms for White supremacy. In recent decades historians have become increasingly precise, but there remains much work to do within the profession, and it will be a herculean task to get a more accurate and moral presentation to the public at large. To speak of America's "race problem"--as a recent popular documentary on the history channel did--is a little bit like defining World War Two as a "violence problem." A language of the Second World War without Nazis and concentration camps does not equip us to make sense of our past or present.

Such vagueness applied to World War Two is so obviously inadequate that it is absurd on its face. Yet we have indulged similar levels of absurdity in our perception of the American past, and thus, our present. As I look back over my archives, I know I have indulged this absurdity. We have avoided and found ways to talk around the elemental fact of White supremacy in this country. We continue to do so. When we speak of a "race problem," White supremacy is not necessarily implied. Indeed, because of the peculiar dynamics of racial identity and perception in this country, the culpability can flow in precisely the opposite direction. Because many White Americans have little awareness of their own racial identity, and thus of their own particularity, to speak of race is to automatically call Blackness to mind. African Americans are "raced" in a way that Whites simply are not (I argue this subtly distorts academic histories too). As a result, America's "problem with race" is little more than the colorblind racial order's more polite framing of the prior order's "Negro problem." It diverts attention from the core problem and places it on the population that has borne the brunt of that problem. I don't see how we can talk around White supremacy without falling into an ugly tradition of scapegoating and distortion.

To talk through White supremacy, to name it, to watch it grow and change, to study its defenders and opponents, is to value understanding more than fables. It is not about assigning blame. If you're simply an empiricist, it is about being accurate and precise. If you're a Christian, as I am, it is an integral part of following Jesus. How can I die to myself without calling into question the greatest idol this country has ever produced? If I cannot surrender my investment in Whiteness, I am like the rich young ruler who left in despair when he heard the demands Jesus placed on him.

Our ability to discuss White supremacy cuts to the very heart of whether we are willing to know ourselves and our heritage. Yet the contemporary racial order of colorblindness has clouded our minds and made honest conversations in many circles extremely difficult. Colorblindness posits that a vast distance separates our racial past from our racial present. It takes in the centuries-long White supremacist project and seems to see only a sustained run of coincidences. This myopia is sustained, in part, by vague language that elides how power and oppression have operated in American history. We must think more about how our everyday language can unintentionally support colorblindness rather than challenging it.

My intent here is not to document the reality of White supremacy. That is an important discussion, but skeptics have to genuinely want to learn before that conversation can be useful. Rather, I simply want to emphasize that our racial language shapes our racial reality, and we need to be more attentive to it. Moreover, if more of us named White supremacy as a matter of course, perhaps fewer of us would be mired in myth and ignorance. Consistently naming White supremacy instead of talking in general terms about racial problems will be an important part of overthrowing our sinful contemporary racial order.

White Pastors in the Age of "Black Lives Matter"

I worry that in some quarters the White evangelical response to Ferguson is being reduced to a barest possible minimum. We must listen. We must try to understand how African Americans are feeling. We must bear each others' burdens. We must weep with those who weep. All this is true, but when presented to a White congregation that has fundamentally false and unchristian assumptions about America and about Christianity, it doesn't upset those assumptions at all. In fact, it reinforces them.

When we reduce our job to listening and trying to understand the hurt of others, we're left in a position of superiority. It allows White evangelicals to stand back in our supposed objectivity and maturity and feel good about ourselves for deigning to listen to the overly emotional feelings of others. When we refuse to talk about injustice and White supremacy in our churches, White congregations are left to conclude that even though African Americans should be over these things by now, we should be the bigger people and patiently listen to their concerns.

It allows White congregations to continue in our unconfessed sin, all the while thinking that we are patiently bearing with the sins of others. If pastors can't bring themselves to use words like injustice and oppression in connection to recent events, I think it may be better for them to not bring these issues up at all. (I witnessed one pastor of a White congregation discuss Ferguson on a Sunday morning in a way that reinforced the prejudices of his audience).

That said, I don't envy pastors at this or any time! It's an incredibly difficult job. How do you preach about and expose the most fundamental things ordering your congregants' lives (Whiteness, materialism, individualism, etc) in a way that will draw them to Jesus rather than pushing them out of the church? On the other hand, a church that doesn't expose these things might not be worth being inside in the first place. We need to pray for our church leaders, because identifying the problems in our congregations is much easier than leading us out of them.

Colorblindness in the Classroom

I don't know how to deal with race and the ideology of colorblindness in the classroom. My sense is that it would be easier in a sociology class. Sociology is naturally present-minded and inevitably political. I could assign Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and no one would think twice about it. But as a historian, I have a responsibility to the past that constrains me in important ways and shapes my behavior in the classroom. How can I historicize race and colorblindness? How can I compel them to think in a way they haven't before (this is the whole point of college, right?) without telling them what to think?

It is a strange feeling to stand before a room of students and "teach" them when the only certainty I have is that in five years or ten--or one---I will look back on it and feel sorry for having done it so ineptly.

The class I'm talking about is called American Revolutions, and it has three sections: Puritanism; Indian Removal, and slavery and emancipation. Puritanism is hard because students, even religious ones, have trouble understanding the intense religiosity of the Puritans. Indian Removal is difficult because some students bring deeply engrained stereotypes to the classroom and seem impervious to new information. These days, though, their papers are more likely to portray the Indians before European contact as peaceful and at one with nature than as violent savages. The point is that the benign myth is equally dehumanizing.

Now we're moving into slavery and emancipation, and it is going to be the most difficult and enjoyable part of the course for me. Judging from the conversation in class yesterday, most of my students reflexively hold to some form of colorblind ideology. As a historian, it's not my job to convince them that they are wrong. Yet their ideology is in fact an impediment to historical thinking. So it is my job, I think, to show them that their unexamined "truth" about the world, its givenness and obviousness, is in fact a historically constructed discourse about the world. They inherited it. It is not obvious or inevitable or natural. That doesn't make it wrong. But it does make it historical, and that alone is often earth-shattering for us.

It is ironic that the dominant racial ideology of our time is named after a condition that makes it hard to see certain realities about the world. After all, the main feature of actual colorblindness is that its owner is unable to see clearly. Colorblindness changes the perception of its owner, not the reality of what is being perceived. People who proudly claim to be racially colorblind are admitting more than they realize.

The popular conceit seems to be that the next generation will rescue us from any racial problems we may have. I admit up front that I am deeply pessimistic about this. Anecdotally, I see abject confusion about race among people of my generation and the next one coming up. Moreover, the data indicates that around half to an outright majority of White millennials believe discrimination against Whites is as big a problem as discrimination against Blacks.

Consider the bundle of beliefs that often coexist in the minds of students.

Race is a real physical thing.
Race is unimportant.
Everyone should be treated equally.
Whites are as likely to be discriminated against as others.
We should all just see each other as Americans.

This constellation of beliefs is  unequipped to answer basic questions.

Why have racial definitions and classifications changed over time?
When did race become unimportant?
What does it mean to be White?
Does the past influence the present?
Why is there racial inequality?

The answer to that last question often invokes culture. But that raises more troubling questions. How can advocates of colorblindness speak of racially distinct cultures without attacking their own suppositions? What does culture mean? From where did it come? This, too, must be historicized. Those who claim that culture is at the root of racial inequality must explain why they have taken up a historically created discourse that was used by segregationists decades before we were even born. At what point did this discourse change from a defense of White supremacy to a correct description of American society?

My sense is that many students believe that race is a fixed category rooted in biological realities. And it's no wonder. We routinely hear, even from the census bureau itself, that we're on our way to being a minority-majority nation by mid-century, as if anyone really knows how racial identity will develop in the next forty years. This week USA Today did a giant project on America's changing demographics, and the entire story implicitly treated race as a biological reality rather than a social construct. If the United States does become majority-minority, it will probably indicate a more level playing field. The more likely outcome, I think, is that Whiteness will continue its three century-long expansion by growing to encompass most Asians and many Hispanics. By 2050, the White majority might be just as large as it is now. We just don't know. It is ironic that the very people insisting race should not matter are often the ones treating it as a fixed, real, physical identity.

Colorblindness, the refusal to "see" race, often coexists awkwardly with a view that makes race real in a way that harkens back to heyday of scientific racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. People who don't want to see race in the present tend to be reluctant to look at its construction in history. But when we take race out of history we're left with contemporary phenomena we cannot explain. Most White young people are growing up in households that do not discuss race beyond a few brittle admonitions: it should not matter; treat everyone equally. How are these young people to make sense of the world, then, when they come to Temple University? They see the poor, Black neighborhoods all around the campus. They sit in predominantly White classrooms. They read the Temple safety alerts that almost invariably describe Black male suspects. They hear the pervasive discourse about which neighborhoods to enjoy and which to avoid. The nearly exact overlap between avoidance and racial minorities is there to be seen, but it must not be stated. The ideology they've been given does not match their experience of the world, but admitting as much is extremely troubling.

I've come to believe that modern forms of prejudice grow up and our reproduced in this space between the brittle tenets of colorblind ideology and the reality of young peoples' lived experiences. In these spaces lurk the silences and inconsistencies and unconscious beliefs that are creating the next iteration of racial inequality and White supremacy. It will not be the "New Jim Crow" or neo-segregation. It will be its own phenomenon, historically conditioned but formed in its own time. Colorblindness cannot see this. In an ironic way, colorblindness depends on essentializing race, turning it into more than it is. If race is real, then we can ignore history. But if race is constructed, it immediately raises at least the possibility that our ignorance is very destructive indeed.

I'm still thinking through this. There's something about the way I led the class yesterday that made me feel that I was reproducing White supremacy rather than challenging it. When students don't yet understand historical thinking, can't the simple act of discussing White supremacy in history reinscribe it in the present? We never need to have discussions about whether White people are inferior. I'm just scratching the surface. At least I'll never run out of questions.

Why Affirmative Action is Morally Right

[While writing this post the Supreme Court released its ruling on the case. It looks as though they did a narrow ruling that dodged most of the issues involved. A much better outcome than what I feared.]

For some background on the Supreme Court's likely ruling on affirmative action this week, I encourage you to read Propublica's insightful reporting. The plaintiff at the center of the case, Abigail Fisher, has alleged that she was denied admission to the University of Texas because she is white:

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"
It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.
Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.
In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.
If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.
Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.
Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher. 

But let's go deeper. What if it it had? Would that be a problem? Doesn't the entire premise of affirmative action imply that, even if Abigail Fisher in this specific incident is incorrect in her allegation, there will inevitably be many Abigail Fisher's? Are we okay with that? Many Americans, especially whites, are not. Perhaps you oppose affirmative action too.

I would like to convince you that you're wrong.

Your view of affirmative action is heavily influenced by your understanding of what American society is like. As soon as you acknowledge the exhaustively documented extent of inequality and discrimination that favors whites and disadvantages minorities, affirmative action looks fairly reasonable even if you disagree with it. If you're in denial about the way our society systemically privileges white skins, there's little left to argue about. You need something like a spiritual conversion.

Twenty years ago Cheryl Harris wrote a classic article in the Harvard Law Review called "Whiteness as Property." She argued that whiteness itself has taken on the characteristics of property and many whites and social and governmental systems unconsciously expect privileges to accrue to them because of their whiteness.

In questions of affirmative action, the baseline is thereby distorted beyond any reasonable standard of justice. When considering whether affirmative action cost them a specific job, whites claim to ask, "Would I have got the job if race was not a factor?" In asking this question, they elide the fact that the society of which they are a part is discriminatory and unequal in ways that favor them. Had they been born with a different skin color they would have been statistically less likely to have the opportunity to apply for the job in the first place. Having arrived at the specific circumstance of the job or college application on the strength of an uneven playing field, they now insist that the playing field be equal. In this way they enshrine their white privilege as normative.

It is a bit mind-numbing if you've never thought about it this way before, and probably more so due to the inadequacies of my explanation. But this gets at the deeper changes the lawyers working on Fisher's behalf are trying to bring about:

So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the 14th Amendment itself. At issue is whether the Constitution's equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation's legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

The true crux of the suit is not Fisher's failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

"An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color," Blum said. "What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan."

Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race. 

It is difficult to immerse myself in the strategies and rhetoric of segregationists defending Jim Crow, and then when I come up for a breather I find their spiritual descendants are respectable figures arguing cases before the Supreme Court. I have a rather unlimited degree of contempt for Mr. Blum and his ilk. They're using the same old playbook. As soon as the Supreme Court essentially told whites they weren't allowed to officially write white supremacy in law, whites turned around and said, "oh okay, well you know, the constitution is colorblind. We can't acknowledge race in government policy." The motivation is clear. In a society that is systemically discriminatory against blacks, a strictly neutral government validates such racial inequality as a baseline status quo. The culture acts affirmatively against blacks, while conservatives seek to prevent the government and other socially responsible institutions from stepping in to act affirmatively in blacks' favor.

Take a step back and realize that there are respectable people in the United States today who are fighting for the rights and privileges of white people, as such, even if they do not admit it in precisely those words. As a Christian who believes in the words of Jesus and the reality of a final judgment, that is a truly scary place for a person to be in. At the end of our lives when we tell Jesus what we were all about, I don't think fighting on behalf of the most privileged group in our society will have done us any favors.

The Shortfalls of Colorblind Policy

Sometimes I just need to shamelessly share another person's work without adding any value at all. This is one of the those times. Commenting on the shortfalls of "colorblind" public policy in the Affordable Care Act, Ta-Nehisi Coates is marvelously succinct:

This is one reason why color-blind -- "lift all boats" -- policy so often falls short. When you have a country grappling with the deep vestiges of bigoted policy, you do not need "colored only" signs to get "colored mostly" effects.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I heard a conservative on the Diane Rehm show this morning literally refuse to answer a question about how Republican policies help women because he wanted to focus on what helps all Americans rather than dividing us into groups. The problem is that we are, as a factual matter, divided into groups! We do not all have the same interests, and the fact is that group identities such as race and gender provide rough approximation for very real differences in needs and life circumstances.

Refusing to acknowledge that when crafting public policy is not the noble gesture conservatives think it is.  Colorblind policy purports to be for all, but it is actually a front for policies that disproportionally help the white, rich, and male. The main reason people are uncomfortable with being "divided into groups" is because of all that it implies in terms of privilege and redistributive economic policies.

As we saw in the last election campaign, when Mitt Romney ran on a platform obviously tilted to most benefit the wealthy, retirees, whites, and business owners, he and his supporters denied he was doing any such thing. Yet when the Obama campaign did its own outreach to certain groups of voters, it was accused of dividing Americans. Colorblindness is not about trying to unite Americans. It is about denying the divisions that exist so that those on the privileged side of those divisions can go on profiting from them.

How Whites Pretended to be Opposed to Busing

One of the things I really appreciate about Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty is that he deftly shows how the civil rights movement was defeated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after most whites had already transitioned to public rhetoric and belief claims that espoused equality and opportunity. The great problem was that what white people said in newspaper columns and told pollsters was quite different from what they actually did. In practice, they remained opposed to anything beyond token integration.

Nowhere was this more clear than in the battles over school desegregation that became nationalized in the early 1970s. The attempt to bus students to achieve more diversity in schools met implacable white opposition across the country. The important thing to realize is that whites won. From the height of desegregation efforts in the early 1970s there has been a slow retreat as federal courts have become increasingly reluctant to mandate changes that would force school districts to align with the clear reasoning of Brown v Board: segregated education is inherently unequal education. As such, by most measures our schools are now more segregated than they were forty years ago.

It is important to understand that racial conflict has declined not because we have done away with segregated and unequal schooling, but because as a society we have agreed to accept it. In the early 1970s whites fought to maintain superior schooling for themselves at the expense of minorities. They won. If the federal government actually made a frontal assault on segregated education now, you would rather suddenly see how little progress we've made, because white people would be up in arms once again.

Further, it is not commonly understood that the opposition to busing on the part of whites was opportunistic rather than principled. Sugrue does a good job of bringing this out. Opposition to busing was expressed in colorblind language and appeals to neighborhood schools and the nostalgic image of children walking a couple blocks to their nearby school. But as Julian Bond succinctly summarized what whites really had a problem with, "It's not the bus, it's us." Sugrue points out that by 1970 half of American school children rode the bus to school, over 96% for reasons having nothing to do with integration.

Some of my thesis research so far bears this out as well. The image the anti-busing folks then and now present is of a child forced to take an absurdly long bus ride to a completely different neighborhood on the other side of the city. It might be uncomfortable, dangerous, and it's all to satisfy the social engineering demands of some bureaucrats in a far off place. But as the New York Times reported on May 24, 1970, busing for racial purposes was extremely widespread before integration efforts, and it provoked no response.

In the South, busing children away from the home neighborhood to maintain segregation was customary before integration orders began to follow in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation in 1954...

Southern educators felt busing was so essential that numerous counties in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia transported almost all their pupils, white buses taking white children to white schools and Negro buses meeting them on the streets while taking black pupils to Negro schools.

About 90 percent of 300 desegregation plans approved by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for southern school districts last year decreased total busing [emphasis added].

In the North it was more complex because residential segregation was worse, but nonetheless these sorts of inconvenient facts expose the lies white people tell themselves. I'm quite sure that even in those districts where kids had shorter bus rides as a result of integration orders many white parents managed to tell themselves they were longer. It is human nature that people will tell themselves whatever they have to in order to preserve their privileges with as little cognitive dissonance as possible.

This is emblematic of the unequal political playing field efforts for equality continue to face. A government policy, if it supports the status quo of white privilege, is seen as just the natural way things are. It's not even viewed as a government policy. But as soon as that same policy is turned to try to advance equal opportunity instead of white supremacy, whites suddenly notice it and pretend that a heavy handed government is engaging in social engineering.

From Indifference To Responsibility

On Monday I quoted a chunk from Martin Luther King's last Sunday sermon but I'm sure it was far too large for most people to have read it, and I didn't comment on it. So here are some important excerpts that absolutely destroy any notion that King bought into the individualized frames of colorblindness. When King talked about the dream of being judged by character rather than color, he was laying out an inspiring goal, not a policy prescription for how to get there.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

 

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt...

 

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism...

There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

 

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years...

 

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

 

In contrast, the narratives of colorblindness go something like this:

 

"I'm not racist."

"There is equal opportunity in America."

"I treat everyone the same. What more can be asked of me?"

"I wasn't alive during slavery; I had nothing to do with it, so no claim can be made on me."

"My ancestors weren't even in the country during the time of slavery."

"Black people can work hard and find success in America just like other groups have."

 

To all of these evasions and denials, we hear Dr. King saying, "Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions." The bit about having nothing to do with slavery is probably one of the most common and most stupid refrains we white people make. I've heard it too many times to count. I used to espouse it myself. But think about it for a minute. It's a claim that implies the 150 years after slavery are irrelevant, despite the fact that black people were denied the rights and privileges of citizenship for the next 100 years. It assumes, too, that the amply documented current discrimination ongoing during our lifetimes is irrelevant. It implies that we as individuals somehow have the power to be completely distinct from a discriminatory society without taking proactive and painful steps to go against the grain.

 

More than that, it is false to our own experience and basic demographic statistics. The fact that I was born into a family identified as "white" meant that before I ever did anything, before my character was formed or I ever did a day's hard work, I was statistically less likely to have to attend a poor school or face violent crime or be denied a job offer because of my color. I was statistically more likely to have greater wealth, more social connections with rich people, and better educational opportunities.

 

These statistical realities are all undeniably a product of slavery and discrimination. How thoughtless and inhumane it is for me, then, whose life has been so dramatically altered by our history, whose successes have been directly tied to evils I oppose, to pretend that I can cut myself off from it and bear no responsibility for taking positive action to tear down these privileges and turn them into opportunities all can enjoy. As foreign and perverse as this sounds to so many white people, until we start thinking this way I truly believe we're part of the problem.

MLK Day Thoughts

It is Martin Luther King Day, and that means it is time for all Americans to join together and appropriate King's legacy for our own ends, regardless of whether our ideas are antithetical to his. We mythologize all our great figures -- Lincoln is the Emancipator, never the complicated man who clung doggedly to his plan to send black Americans to Africa -- but the urge to do so is particularly strong with Dr. King because of the relative nearness of his life and the extraordinary esteem with which most Americans regard him.

We see this appropriation in buffoonish ways quite regularly, as when the Gun Appreciation Day founder said last week that Dr. King would support him were he alive today. In these laughable incidents we see the mythologizing urge taken to its logical extreme: historical truth is entirely beside the point; the goal is simply to endorse one's views with a great moral figure. The gun appreciation day guy might just as well have claimed to know that Buddha and Jesus support the second amendment.

But the mythologizing and caricaturing of Dr. King happen all the time in much more mainstream ways that many people find less obviously problematic. The thousands of Americans today who will quote one line from one speech (content of character/color of skin) without knowing much of anything else King said or believed are participating in this mythologizing. Those who try to fit him into our modern political categories, especially those who claim he was a conservative, are using him. They have no desire to know what King actually stood for. Many liberals, in turn, pay lip service to King's goals, but precious few politicians today truly prioritize the kind of pro-equality, pro-poor politics of Dr. King.

Many conservatives opposed the move in the 1980s to create the Martin Luther King holiday. There was a widespread sense that King was either a communist or their stooge, a view shared by President Reagan, who never really appeared to question an unequal America with whites on top. But when it became clear that King was passing into national hero status whether conservatives liked it or not, a new strategy was called for. In a process that was probably not entirely conscious, conservatives went from criticizing Dr. King's legacy to claiming it as their own.

Colorblindness, a racial ideology espoused most fervently by white conservatives, appeared to have Dr. King on record supporting it, in his most famous speech no less. What a coup! Nevermind that in its actual functioning colorblindness appeared to do a better job perpetuating white privilege than eradicating racism; Dr. King was a colorblind conservative! He didn't play identity politics like the current generation of black leaders who have betrayed his legacy! Nevermind that this represented an extreme misreading of the Dream speech, and that one speech does not summarize the totality of King's thought.

But if King was not the communist of the right-wing imagination, nor the colorblind conservative a later generation of conservatives would make up, what exactly was he? He was, I believe, a man with a moral center that stretched beyond the social and political boundaries of the American imagination. As such, he could appear both radical and moderate, as the occasion warranted, and was able to speak truth to all the compromised systems and values of the United States, whether of the left or the right. He expressed reservations about both communism and capitalism.

For a better sense of what King stood for, let's get away from his Dream speech and look, for example, at some excerpts from his last Sunday sermon, delivered less than a week before he died:

[W]e are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism.

 

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt...

 

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

 

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."

 

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

 

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.

 

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.

 

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

 

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor...

 

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

 

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and the world of poverty...

 

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions—no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair." She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn’t worth sixty dollars." Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.

 

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

 

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

 

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

 

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.

 

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

 

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

 

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action...

 

And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference.

 

Yes, it will be a Poor People’s Campaign. This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.

 

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That’s the question facing America today.

 

Agree with him or disagree, this is who Dr. King was. And much of this text is anathema to modern conservatism. Heck, even modern liberalism doesn't want to hear this. Grapple with the real man.

Moving Forward On A Colorblindness Thesis

As I consider what I am going to do for my master's thesis I'm thinking about the related themes of continuity and colorblindness in American racial conflict. I'm interested in the ways white supremacy has been created, formed, changed, perpetuated, and protected over time, such that right down to the present day being "white" carries some very specific meanings and privileges. I'm also interested in how Americans identified as "white" have viewed themselves, the minorities in their midst, and the opportunities offered by American society.

My basic thoughts are utterly pedestrian in academia, but remain controversial among the broader public. My challenge is that I don't want to just write a serviceable thesis that corrects popular misconceptions while covering ground that has already been more competently explored by other scholars. I want to find a niche in the historiography where I can really contribute, while still speaking to the broader public (not that a thesis is for the broader public; I guess I'm speaking more of long term goals here).

It is far from original to point out that colorblindness -- a highly individualized sense of which is the dominant frame most Americans have for understanding race today -- is not the sharp break from our past that many assume but is rather the latest in a series of racial ideologies that have significant commonalities with one another. For example, though racial oppression has greatly decreased over time, all the dominant racial frames of American history, including colorblindness, serve the interests of the white majority better than minority interests. As such, colorblindness, far from being a frontal attack on our segregationist past, in fact naturally grew out of it. Rather than being a self-evidently good way of eradicating racism, it actually has at least as much potential to perpetuate white privilege.

This is boilerplate in dozens of books. But much of the public still finds it rather shocking. Similarly, the popular perception is of an enormous disjunction between pre- and post-civil rights America (or, even worse, between pre- and post-slavery America) in which the bad old racist America was defeated and we've arrived in the sunlit lands of racial egalitarianism. Americans, especially those hillbilly southerners, used to be racists, but suddenly around 1964 or so we set things right; the past is now dead and buried. Almost no one, of course, thinks quite this simplistically, but I believe this gets close to the assumptions many people have.

I argue that such a view is so simplistic and unbalanced that it is basically false. There is much that ties the America of the 1950s and before with the America of 2013. Indeed, it is not out of the question that future historians may periodize the civil rights era as extending right into the present day. How meaningful is it, for example, for North Lawndale and Garfield Park on the West Side of Chicago, to make a big distinction between a 1960s civil rights era and a 21st century post-civil rights era? In many ways, so little has changed that the distinction feels absurd. The remaining inequalities and discrimination are such that, after all, there may be more movements ahead.

I see colorblindness as a useful way of exploring this theme of continuity. I argue that during the time of a given dominant racial ideology we can discern the vestiges of the previous frame and locate the seeds of the next one. What does it mean for American society that the ideology of white supremacy gave way to the ideology of colorblindness? How, precisely, did this change occur, and over what period of time? Do we see hints of colorblindness in the 19th century (yes, I believe we do) and white supremacy in the 21st? (yes). What are the implications?

These are extremely broad themes. Moving forward, I will need to find a vehicle to employ them. A place, an event, a limited time period, a particular kind of source. Any thoughts or suggestions?