[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]
One of the right’s favorite ways of characterizing the state of
racial relations in recent years has been to proclaim that for the most
part,
racism is a dead letter,
an anachronism, a quaint artifact of dusty history mostly relegated to a
few dark fringish corners. Dinesh D’Souza even wrote a wingnut-welfare
book about it titled
The End of Racism. And then there was the
time Tony Snow proclaimed: "Here’s the unmentionable secret: Racism
isn’t that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody
of importance preaches it. It’s rapidly becoming an ugly memory."
Liberals, of course, have snorted at such nonsense, with good cause:
You only need to have tuned in to any of the past couple years’ worth of
Republican fulminations about immigration to know what a load of crap
that is. Of course, they deny with vigorous red faces that racism has
any part of it, but then we listen to their spokesmen — from
Pat Buchanan to
Douglas Bruce — and it’s not hard to figure out that this is just so much hot air. For that matter, we only need to turn to some of their
dog-whistle fulminations about Obama and their
post-Katrina speculations about black people and in general,
the way they talk about race,
to figure out that the GOP is the main refuge of the lingering racist
element in American society. But then, we’ve known that since the advent
of the Southern Strategy.
But before Democrats start feeling smug about that — and the fact
that one of their two major candidates is African American — they better
take a hard look within their ranks as well. Because, as
Greg Mitchell reports, the election results from Pennsylvania indicate that there’s a problem with race for many Democrats, too:
Long before that, I had suggested that
many understate the number of older Democrats who are (still) racist and
who would tip many contests to Clinton. But I closed yesterday’s post
by saying that if Obama won or came close in Pennsylvania that might put
the issue to rest.
Didn’t happen. And the exit polls show, again, that one in four
Clinton voters claim they would not vote for Obama in November — for
whatever reason. And she got 70% of the white, blue-collar vote in most
regions, including the area of central Pennsylvania where I spent a lot
of time growing up and heard many a racist remark.
Here’s the money quote from a New York Times analysis of the exit
polls: "Sixteen percent of white voters said race mattered in deciding
who they voted for, and just 54 percent of those voters said they would
support Mr. Obama in a general election; 27 percent of them said they
would vote for Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama was the Democratic nominee, and
16 percent said they would not vote at all."
This is largely the same trend
Paul Lukasiak uncovered
when looking at national data and voting trends so far in these races.
Democrats may want to believe, like Republicans, that the racism thing
doesn’t matter anymore, that the post-Civil Rights era has finally
enabled us to move beyond race. But it’s clear that that ain’t so.
A lot of why this trend is manifesting itself has to do with a kind
of willful blindness about race that’s pervaded American society since
the Civil Rights era. The truth is, we’ve let the legislative advances
of that era, and the body of anti-discrimination laws that came out of
it, stand as a kind of proxy for the cultural, economic, and broader
social changes that need to occur alongside — but if we look at them
honestly, they haven’t.
A recent
Atlantic piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates
about Bill Cosby’s conservative approach to race observed that his
concerns were remarkably like those of earlier black reformers:
Cosby’s, and much of black America’s,
conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles
that have characterized black America since its inception … Indeed, a
century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that
Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially
destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same
issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby
claims are recent developments …
In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black
men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with
history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black
men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro
Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier
argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide
for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights
movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family:
The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his
arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his
problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the
similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth?
To which
Russ Douthat responded:
The fact that prior generations of
intellectuals fretted, Cosby-style, about African-American crime rates,
family structure, and so on doesn’t change the fact that those problems
have grown much, much worse in the interim. And the fact that some
moralistic crusades are foolish and misguided doesn’t mean that all of
them are. The anti-jazz crusaders confused the music with the venues
where it played, but that doesn’t mean that they were wrong to inveigh
against alcoholism and gambling, and the fact that fifty years later
jazz has become easy-listening music for the haute-bourgeoisie doesn’t
mean the same thing will happen – or should happen, more importantly –
to
this kind of thing.
But the anti-jazz crusaders weren’t simply opposed to alcoholism and
gambling, though as with the KKK, waving those particular bloody shirts
gave them plenty to rail about regarding their larger objective:
suppression of racial minorities. There was a reason the racists called
it "jungle music," and a reason that
the Nazis tried to outlaw jazz. Because there was a
profoundly racial component
of the anti-jazz crusades, which despite all their diversionary
rhetoric were in fact focused on "defending white culture" — that is,
keeping black culture in check:
[A]t the time, people believed that jazz
was the forerunner of the decline of Western civilization. The
anti-jazz crusade was motivated by an apocalyptic fear. The anxiety that
jazz was "endangering our civilization," as the populist William
Jennings Bryant put it in the New York Times in May 1926, was
the subtext to many of the voices. People felt, in other words, that the
dawn of the Jazz Age heralded the decline of Western Civilization.
An
assessment in the New York Times pronounced: "The consensus of
opinion of leading medical and other scientific authorities, [is that
jazz] is harmful and degrading to the civilized races as it always has
been among the savages from whom we borrowed it."
Besides papering over historical reality, all of these observers —
Cosby, Coates, and Douthat alike (not to mention Steve Sailer, who waded
into Douthat’s thread to explain that this is all because of
genetically wired-in cultural traits regarding fatherhood in Africa) —
similarly refuse to confront the persistent reality: While segregation
and Jim Crow have been outlawed, and residential and employment
discrimination officially banned, the underlying causes of the
century-ago black activists’ angst have not substantially diminished,
especially residential segregation, continuing job discrimination, and
general equality of opportunity.
Sure, we passed anti-segregation laws, but that doesn’t mean we’ve
achieved actual desegregation. We talk high-mindedly about
color-blindness, but stereotypes and broad prejudices about racial
characteristics persist at all levels of society. If we want to talk
about the festering persistence of crime and poverty among blacks, this
is where we need to begin looking. But we never do.
In his book
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,
James Loewen explored the broad economic and cultural ramifications of
the history of towns across America, most of them outside the South,
that outlawed the presence of black people after sundown. There were
literally thousands of them, most in the Midwest and West but in fact in
every corner of the country. And the legacy of residential segregation
they created — and which Americans have never come close to confronting —
persists well into this century:
[T]he talk in sundown towns brims with
amazing stereotypes about African Americans, put forth confidently with
nary an African American in their lives. The ideology intrinsic to
sundown towns — that African Americans … are the problem — prompts their
residents to believe and pass on all kinds of negative generalizations
as fact. They are the problem because they choose segregation — even
though "they" don’t, as we have seen. Or they are the problem owing to
their criminality — confirmed by the stereotype — misbehavior that "we"
avoid by excluding or moving away from them.
Of course, such stereotypes are hardly limited to sundown towns.
Summarizing a nationwide 1991 poll, Lynne Duke found that a majority of
whites believed that "blacks and Hispanics are likely to prefer welfare
to hard work and tend to be lazier than whites, more prone to violence,
less intelligent, and less patriotic." Even worse, in sundown towns and
suburbs, statements such as these usually evoke no open disagreement at
all.
Because most listeners in sundown towns have never lived near
African Americans, they have no experiential foundation from which to
question the negative generalities that they hear voiced. So the
stereotypes usually go unchallenged: blacks are less intelligent,
lazier, and lack drive, and that’s why they haven’t built successful
careers. [pp. 320-321]
Sundown towns and their continuing legacy have also had a profound
psychological impact on blacks, including the internalization of low
expectations, and the exclusion of blacks from cultural capital [pp.
353-355]:
Confining most African Americans to the
opposite of sundown suburbs — majority black, inner-city neighborhoods —
also restricts their access to what Patterson calls cultural capital:
"those learned patterns of mutual trust, insider knowledge about how
things really work, encounter rituals, and social sensibilities that
constitute the language of power and success." …
Making the suburbs unreachable for nonwhites similarly restricts them
from making the social connections that are critical to forming
networks that help us find work and move ahead in the workforce. Loewen
notes that "the trouble is, these networks are segregated, so important
information never reaches black America. … Sundown suburbanites know
only whites, by definition, except perhaps a few work contacts. Thus
sundown suburbs contribute to economic inequality by race."
As I
observed earlier:
Most often, we like to overemphasize the
progress that has been made racially since the Civil Rights era — while
the reality is that the majority of our accomplishment has been more in
the legal arena than in the larger societal one, and the bulk of it has
been a result of a small handful of laws passed over a brief period in
the 1960s: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Subsequent efforts to create a
color-blind society, such as affirmative action and busing, have been
muted in the years following by efforts to do away with them.
At the same time, very little has been done to tackle the larger
problem of structuralized, institutional racism, created by decades of
prejudice that created a segregated society divided into largely white
suburbs and rural areas, while nonwhites remain clustered in inner
cities, and the resulting segregation by class and power, economic and
political.
Indeed, we seem to remain obdurately ignorant of the nature of these
issues. What happens more often than not is that we reflexively fall
back to old attitudes: The "problem," as we see it, must be with those
nonwhites themselves. After all, the thinking goes, slavery ended in
1865, and we did away with Jim Crow and officially sanctioned prejudice
in the 1960s. If blacks still fail to advance, it must be something
wrong with them. If they fail to move up and into the suburbs, it must
be their fault.
Too many white voters, especially in rural and suburban precincts, on
both sides of the partisan aisle have absorbed these attitudes. Too
many of them continue to believe that a black man, no matter how well
educated, will ever have "the stuff" it takes to be president. And
that’s why we’ve seen the racial voting trends in Democratic primaries
that we have.
It’s not an insurmountable problem for Democrats, should Obama indeed
be their nominee. But neither is it one they can hope to paper over and
still win in November.
