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“The greatest threats are more subtle. They cut deeper. And their terrible impact endures long after the headlines have faded and obvious, ignorant expressions of hatred have been marginalized.”
-Attorney General Eric Holder at Morgan State University Commencement
What did you achieve this graduation season? I attended two graduations in the past week, both at privileged institutions of learning, and heard graduation speeches about the importance of character, making good decisions and keeping the tight support network which carried the students this far around them in the future to guarantee those good decisions. If you went to a school where graduation was an assumption and not an accomplishment, these kinds of platitudes are routine. We are ready to take our college lifestyle into the future, living securely on a middle-class salary with a family and assets.
We all knew it was going to happen. Did you ever question it?
At the same time, we worry about students who will not graduate high school or college and feel better when we talk about volunteering or working on behalf of these students. We talk about the achievement gap, and how the less fortunate can take the promise of American society through toughness, good role models and the efforts of reformers. We have The Help-colored justice glasses. Just write a book about it, like Skeeter did. Give voice to the voiceless. Give money to charity.
These “solutions” to inequality are necessary, but they are not sufficient. I’ve blogged before about how we need a new progressive approach to education and social reform. We need to rely less on blaming the victims of inequality and more about designing programs which create jobs for which people are trained and dignifies social assistance. But even economic and social reform is not enough. Why? We need a perspective shift. If you can answer the question below, then you don’t need to keep reading.
What do Donald Sterling and Atlanta’s ‘revitalization’ have in common?
White Memory of the Racial Equality Struggle
The answer to the above question is white ambivalence. For most of us, Donald Sterling must be an exception, not a rule. He can make racist comments, but somehow claim that he himself is not racist, because whites have the luxury of dissociating race from their personality. We don’t have to feel implicated. We can ‘slip up’ and say racist things without being racist. We can hope for the “revitalization” of the central city, when really we mean displacing minority residents to make it a sanitized tourist haven. Edgewood Avenue is three blocks from my apartment, and I have seen the physical evidence of the displacement of low-income African-American residents.
White Americans fail to connect issues like Donald Sterling and gentrification to the civil rights movement and the black freedom struggle. The narrative Americans still have about the Civil Rights Movement was that it was a dignified civic struggle for voting rights and equal access to services. Freedom Riders, The March on Washington, sit-ins, bus boycotts and more are a neat package which poses no threat to the order which keeps the privileged on top. However, the lost message of the civil rights movement is how it challenged institutions through organized dissension. In other words:
- I can weep at MLK Jr’s assassination without supporting the striking union workers he had come to Memphis to champion.
- I can support Rosa Parks without supporting her previous life’s work protecting black women from To Kill A Mockingbird-style crimes in the sexual caste system of Jim Crow.
- I can support Barack Obama without supporting his pastor Jeremiah Wright because Pastor Wright challenges American morality.
- I can support the legal mission of the NAACP without supporting the militant Black Power roots of its former director Ben Chavis.
- I can revere Nelson Mandela while forgetting he firmly advocated for the armed overthrow of apartheid before imprisonment.
The heart of post-civil rights racial attitudes is that privileged America has used its collective memory through educational curriculum, paternalistic attitudes and to turn the enemy of racial and socioeconomic injustice into a hidden system to forget what civil rights was ever about. Everything you learned about the civil rights movement in school comes through your The Help-colored glasses. I strongly recommend reading the memoir and history in Blood Done Sign My Name, by Dr. Timothy Tyson for a chance to put on your critical lenses instead.
White Reactions to the Civil Rights Movement
Dr. Tyson uses the small town of Oxford, North Carolina where he spent part of his childhood to illustrate differing American attitudes to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, when a white landlord killed a black Vietnam veteran over comments allegedly made to his daughter-in-law, the town of Oxford exploded into race riots not unlike those that swept the country to devastating effect after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968. The whites of the town had several different types of reactions to the killing, release of the killers and race riots that followed:
- The Neutral: This is the most common category which enables the other more virulent categories of reaction. Most whites in Oxford took the logical response to black anger about the killing: to not have to think about it. Why wade into the mess of justifications for racial inequality when you benefit from them? Why be forced to remember the history of interracial cooperation and black prosperity before 1900 when it’s easier to accept the order and legacy of Jim Crow? As Robert Putnam notes in Bowling Alone, “Americans are more tolerant of one another than were previous generations, they trust one another less.” We can feel good about tolerating different races but not break down the privileged walls to accept them.
- The Enforcers: In the gap left by the retreating neutrals who are happy to look the other way and not be embarrassed are the enforcers: the Ku Klux Klan and the Bull Connors of the world. A few whites, such as Morris Dees are willing to go toe-to-toe with these enforcers. The enforcers carry out the dirty work of white supremacy, willing to carry out scare tactics to preserve their economic position. Enforcers are like Gerald Teel, the indicted man in the Oxford murder, who often came from hardscrabble roots and are willing to fight for their position as much as the crooked lines of the justice system or anonymity will allow them.
- The Sponsors: Behind the enforcers are a handful wealthier whites willing to put up a little money and resources to preserve status while saving face. In Oxford, Tyson noted that certain members of the “country-club crowd” came to put up money for Gerald Teel’s bond. While these sponsors were the first to go when press coverage came, they were also willing to operate behind the scenes to support the dirty work being done on the ground level. Perhaps the sponsors are something like the role taken by bag men in college football today in the South.
- The Dissenters: Understanding the racial politics of the South does not come naturally to whites, while the reality is painfully obvious to blacks and other underprivileged groups. However, putting on critical lenses does not reject the love for the place and the people which constitute the white South. Tyson mentions figures such as Thad Stem in Oxford who marched with black protesters, as well as his straight-shooting Methodist minister forebears who believed in the redemptive love necessary to embrace people of all backgrounds and worked alongside those fighting for freedom.
Be Careful What You Say?
Tim Tyson talked about going back to Oxford in the 1990s to research the murder, there upsetting locals about his interest. A police van tailed him out of town, and the pages of his master’s thesis which explained the murder were torn out of the public records in Oxford. There is always a price for speaking out, but I am convinced that in addition to smart policy we need to challenge how people understand themselves in America based on race and class. This change depends on explaining and understanding culture and history properly.
We should not measure our comments just because we are afraid of offending someone, or because we might be told we are being disloyal to our heritage. I am confident to my core that I am deeply loyal to the identity and place of the American South. I will proudly tell you the story of Confederate victory at New Market, Virginia, because my great-great-grandfather fought on the field for the Virginia Military Institute. I love the South, and because I love it I want to see it become greater with my critical lenses instead of my The Help-tinged glasses. Christian writer G.K. Chesterton described criticism best in his book, Orthodoxy:
“The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic.”
Image may be NSFW.
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