I have spent my life Arms outstretched Looking for truth “and the world Shall be better for this” Artist, author Poet, historian Religious seeker But just when I find myself Close enough to touch it It changes Like water Like mist Like dreams And the Universal Truth I have striven toward Is singular and unique Variations of a tune From player to player Particular, peculiar Not just from person to person But from moment to moment Echoes, echoes Echoes and shadows Ringing laughter From Schrodinger’s ghost Slogging through the fog Of our private universes Intersecting only in theory Perception not reality Perception is reality Verities twinkle Like distant stars That may have imploded An eon ago Nothing is constant It has always been the same. Troy D. Smith, 2016
The essay below –which wasn’t meant to be an essay
–was in response to some specific questions from a (very conservative) student,
as well as a youtube video of conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. I answered
the questions in writing, rather than in class, because the class was about
U.S. history up to 1877, and most of my answer involves post-1877. Spending an
hour of class time doing this would eat up time needed to cover the material of
that class.
Here are the questions I received:
“It is fascinating to
learn about the history of slavery and racism in the United States, especially
given the current times. I saw this video circulation on the internet/social
media and wanted to get your opinion. Republicans are consistently painted as
the racists in the modern day while we have been learning that it was the
democrats who passed Black Codes and died to protect slavery. Where should the
modern intellectual man and mind stand on party lines in respect to supposed
racism in modern 2 party policy? Should the Republicans really be the ones that
are seen as non-promoting of minority issues? Or have we all been misled? These
are questions that I have after seeing the attached video and reading the
latest article from the Washington Post
talking about how 45-65% of modern republicans/Trump supporters do not
considered racial issues a priority etc. I would love to get your thoughts.”
By the way, here is what I think is a balanced
article on, and interview with, D’Souza in Vanity Fair, to get some background on
him: Vanity Fair article
In the event you are not able, or inclined, to watch
the video, I’ll give you a brief recap. D’Souza argues that it is unfair for
Republican policy to be construed as racist, as Democrats have always been the
party of racism; when a historian in the audience asks him about the Southern
Strategy of Nixon, D’Souza claims it was not really a factor, that the mass
movement of blacks from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party happened
in the 1930s under FDR, because they wanted entitlements, and that this had
already happened before the Civil Rights Era. He also claimed that it was only
the non-racist white Southerners who left the Democrats to become Republicans
after the Civil Rights movement.
At this point I should point out that it is a matter
of public record, and common knowledge, that I am the faculty adviser of the
College Democrats (for six years now), which makes my political affiliation
more public than would normally be true for a college instructor. I would also
point out that in six years of student evaluations many students have commented
on my fair treatment of the two parties in class.
Here is my response:
I am going to try to address the points you raised,
and that Dinesh D’Souza asserted in the youtube video you sent me. It took me
awhile because historians don’t give one-paragraph answers; we have to build an
argument, and we have to look at context. I wound up spending several hours
writing this; that’s not a complaint, I feel it is my job to, well, talk about
history. But I do hope, in light of the time and effort, you take the time and
effort to read it closely and think about it.
First of all, there is apparently no question with
D’Souza (and you) that the Republican and Democratic parties “switched places”
on a lot of issues (with D’Souza taking the unconventional stance that this
happened exclusively in the 1930s, not the 1960s/70s.) So we can start with
that shared assumption. This means, of course, that it is extremely misinformed
and disingenuous to make statements (which I’ve seen a lot of conservatives
doing lately) like “Why do people say Republicans are racists, when Republicans
freed the slaves and Democrats supported slavery and the KKK?”
Because you are
talking about the Democrats and Republicans of the 1860s/1870s. We’ll be
spending a lot of time in class discussing the births of both those parties
(and Federalists, and Whigs), but for the sake of simplicity, let’s put it this
way: the Republicans of that time opposed the spread of slavery (while the
radical extremes of the party wanted to end slavery, period), while Democrats
(North and South) wanted to preserve it. In other words, Republicans wanted
extreme social change, and Democrats wanted things to stay the same. Essentially,
Republicans were liberal and Democrats were conservative. So if one insisted on
bringing slavery and racism into the discussion, it would be much more accurate
to say that in the 19th century conservatives supported slavery and
the Ku Klux Klan and liberals opposed both (although the terms liberal and
conservative as we use them are mostly a result of 1950s politics).
To give a thorough explanation I am going to have to
go into things we will be discussing in class, so you’re getting a free
preview.
The early Republicans were ardent believers in “Free
Soil and Free Labor.” They believed that when Free Labor exists –instead of
Slavery –every working man has an equal chance to pull himself up by his
bootstraps and succeed (this is still
a basic part of the Republican Party.) They believed that slavery was bad –not
just because it was immoral –but because it was detrimental to small farmers
and working men. Wages are driven down when it’s possible to just own your
labor force. Thus it would be a catastrophe if new states opened up in the West
allowed slavery: instead of small, independent farmers getting a break by being
able to claim land and start farms –which is eventually what Lincoln guaranteed
with the Homestead Act –rich plantation owners would grab up all the land for
new plantations, worked by slaves, and working men and small farmers out West
would be screwed. The importance of free labor was actually summed up by
Lincoln when he said this:
“Labor is prior to,
and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could
never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of
capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
SO, during Reconstruction, which was very radical
and very liberal, the Republican Party was in favor of the federal government
helping newly freed blacks (AND poor whites) get started in their new lives as
farmers, and established the Freedmen’s Bureau. Democrats (conservatives)
complained about this process, saying that the Republican-dominated federal
government was coddling black people, who were too lazy to go out and make it
on their own, giving them free stuff while they lived a life of ease, paid for
by the taxes of white workers, who were therefore getting the shaft. As
evidenced in this Pennsylvania Democratic campaign ad from 1866:
(The President in question is Democrat Andrew
Johnson of Tennessee, who was very soft on the former Confederate political
leaders of the South. Lincoln had chosen a Democrat as running mate to help him
get re-elected in 1864.)
But Republicans believed in Free Labor. They
believed that, if everyone had a fair shot, anyone could succeed. Therefore, by
stepping in and helping freed blacks get a fair shot, Republicans believed that
within a few years you would see a lot of successful black entrepeneurs in the South. But that did not happen, for two
reasons: groups like the KKK were terrorizing blacks who seemed like they could
be successful (and their white Republican, mostly Northern allies), and –number
two –these freed slaves had just come out from under centuries of bondage and
had no idea how to get started and compete, it would take more than just a few
years to undo that.
So as the years went by and blacks in the South
weren’t showing the sort of rapid progress Republican leaders had predicted,
Republican voters lost patience (and interest) with them, and eventually
Reconstruction had little political support among northern Republicans, who
turned more of their attention toward business in the mid-1870s. Republican
president Rutherford B. Hayes, winner of the closely-contested 1876 election,
had campaigned on the promise of ending Reconstruction. This was really the
beginning of the shift in the Republican Party, as they were more and more
concerned with promoting business interests rather than racial issues.
This resulted in The Gilded Age, the age of the
“robber barons,” when vast fortunes were made while workers and farmers felt
more and more put-upon. This is why bank robbers like Jesse James or the Dalton
Gang were treated as heroes by average Americans in that period –they were
sticking it to the man (and why bank robbers, such as Dillinger and Bonnie and
Clyde, would again be glamorized during the Depression.) This would lead to
labor actions and eventually the Populist movement of the 1890s, followed by
the Progressive Era (1900-1920). During this period the Democratic Party
welcomed immigrants and lobbied very hard for their votes, as well as for that
of factory workers.
The Progressive Era –absolutely a reaction against
the Gilded Age and its excesses –lasted twenty years and the administrations of
three presidents: Teddy Roosevelt (Republican), William Howard Taft (Republican),
and Woodrow Wilson (Democrat.) All three were Progressives. Progressivism
entailed an activist federal government, willing to step in and regulate
businesses and particularly opposed to monopolies. Progressivism also was
marked by a heavy reliance on “experts”. Teddy was famous for his
business-regulating and trust-busting (trust of course = monopoly). Taft
followed his example, busting up some big companies, but Teddy felt Taft was
too soft on big business so he came back to run against him in 1912 as a third
party candidate (he called his new party the Progressive Party.) Wilson was the
Democratic candidate. Socialist candidate Eugene Debs got a respectable
percentage of the votes, as well. So there were four candidates in the 1912
election: Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, and Debs. ALL of them were left of center;
of the four, Wilson was probably the closest to conservative (maybe tied with
Taft). He won, of course- he most assuredly was not looking for the black vote;
a Southerner, he was also the most racist of the four.
Wilson pushed through a lot of Progressive
legislation. (He can’t take credit for the 16th Amendment enacting
the federal income tax, Teddy proposed it first and Taft endorsed it, but all
four 1912 candidates were for it.) However, once the U.S. got involved in WWI,
the Wilson administration displayed the worst aspects of Progressivism
(government activism- or perhaps it could better be called over-reactivism –and
an extreme emphasis of the group over the individual.) The federal government’s
mass violations of citizens’ basic civil rights –basically for questioning the
government in any way during war-time –was on par with the similar excesses of
Lincoln during the Civil War and John Adams in 1798. Conscientious objectors
from non-mainstream religions like Mennonites and Jehovah’s Witnesses were
imprisoned, as were writers, artists, labor organizers, or anyone who
criticized the government or questioned U.S. involvement in the war.
This was exacerbated by the Russian Revolution of 1917,
in which radical leftists toppled a major European power and created a new
–communist –government. The Department of Justice cracked down on labor
activists –and immigrants from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe- in the
first Red Scare (young J. Edgar Hoover, future FBI director, came to national
prominence at this time.) Even people who were afraid of communism, though,
started to question the government’s campaign of mass arrests without specific
charges or evidence.
I think it was a combination of the Wilson
administration’s overreaches regarding civil rights and the increasing fear of
communism (the ultimate and most extreme expression of the left) that led to
the Democrats’ shellacking in 1920. Pro-business –and very conservative
–Republicans swept into the White House and Congress, and started undoing the
regulations of the Progressive Era, particularly where banks and Wall Street
were concerned. (Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”) The
1920s would be one of the most conservative decades of the 20th
century. In fact, fear of communism and the left led to the rise of fascists in
Italy, Germany, and Japan (fascism = the ultimate and most extreme expression
of the right.) That didn’t happen in the U.S… what did happen was a lax oversight
of banking and investment that led to a very big bubble-burst in 1929, aka The
Great Depression.
1920
Shellacking of Democrats:
Herbert Hoover did not believe in an activist
government. He did not believe in government safety net programs. People who
were unemployed and starving felt differently. Hoover’s Treasury Secretary
Andrew Mellon created a huge stink when he echoed the Gilded Age “social
Darwinism” language, saying that Americans needed to stop whining and tighten
their belts, and stop being so lazy. Besides, he said, depressions were a good
way to weed out lazy and incompetent people. This did not go over well with
people who were out of work and homeless through no fault of their own.
And here we have FDR sweeping into office. His
Democratic Party was not the same one of Wilson –or even of 1920, when FDR had
been the VP candidate. He put together a new coalition of voters, which would
be the Democratic base for the next 50 years: rural white Southerners, factory
workers, farmers, blacks, immigrants, and intellectuals. So to give D’Souza
some credit, this was the beginning of a major shift- but again, it did not
include Southern blacks so much, as
only 5% of eligible black voters were registered to vote in the South (due to a
combination of fear and despair of making a difference). FDR also back-pedaled
from racial issues most of the time, out of fear of antagonizing white Southern
voters. Also- I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about how MLK and Jackie
Robinson were Republicans. Well, they came into public prominence well after
the Great Depression, didn’t they?
The real changes, where race is concerned, started after FDR, with Truman. He put together
a permanent commission on civil rights, and integrated the U.S. military by
executive order (because it would never have passed Congress- but as
Commander-in-chief it was within his purview.) Southern Democrats were very
upset about this. They got even more upset at the Democratic National
Convention in 1948- the same month as that executive order –when northern
liberals led by Humbert Humphrey of Minnesota not only endorsed Truman and his
actions, they called for several civil rights concerns to be made an official
part of the Democratic Platform, which they were (for the very first time
ever). Humphrey said it was time for the Party to “get out of the shadow of
states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
Most of the delegates from the South were outraged
and stormed out of the convention. They split off and formed a third party, the
States’ Rights Democratic Party, alias the Dixiecrats, and ran Strom Thurmond
for president against Truman and the Republican, Dewey.
In the 1950s, non-Southern Democrats and Republicans
were generally in favor of civil rights. As demonstrated by MLK and Jackie
Robinson, many blacks continued to be Republican. Eisenhower was a lot like FDR
in the sense he tried to avoid directly engaging in race issues, but when he
had to he came down in favor of blacks (his office sent a letter to the Supreme
Court when they were considering Brown v.
Board of Education, saying that America having segregation made us look bad
to the world and made it hard to have moral standing in criticizing the
Russians for anything. And of course, he sent troops in to enforce
desegregation.) I say most Republicans- but Republican intellectual William F.
Buckley promoted white supremacy in the pages of his magazine National Review (he later recanted these
views).
In 1956
almost the entire Democratic Senate and House of Representatives from the South
signed a “Southern Manifesto” protesting desegregation and civil rights. They
were joined by the two Republican Senators from Virginia. Only three Southern
Senators refused to sign –Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and Estes Kefauver and Al
Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Strom Thurmond, who had returned to the Democratic fold
after the collapse of the Dixiecrats, wrote the first draft of this manifesto.
JFK, like FDR and Eisenhower, was at first reluctant
to address race issues (a surefire way to anger your base at that time), but
after several violent events within the space of a few months (assassination of
civil rights leader Medgar Evars, dogs sicced on black children in Birmingham,
and the church bombing in that same city that killed four little girls) he gave
a presidential address on the subject of racism, the first president ever to do
so, and this gained him a lot of
support among blacks.
After he was assassinated, LBJ took over and made it his
mission to push through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. LBJ had
a lot of rough edges, and messed up royally on Vietnam, but he was sincere
about fighting racism and was not afraid to be associated with the cause. When
the Civil Rights Act passed, he famously said “We (the Democrats) have lost the
South for a generation.” He knew, of course, that pro-segregation white
Southerners –who had always been Democrats –would be furious that the party had
pushed that legislation. Bear in mind, Democrats outside the South were
overwhelmingly for it, as were Republicans –except those in the South (there
weren’t many) and those in the Southwest, like Barry Goldwater. Southwestern
Republicans had a strong libertarian streak, and were opposed to the federal
government telling private businesses they could not discriminate. Goldwater
and his followers also opposed LBJ’s social net / war on poverty initiatives,
especially Medicare, which they called a form of communism (including actor
Ronald Reagan, who switched parties to become a Republican around this time and
gave a famous speech in which he said if Medicare passes one day we’ll all be
communists. Reagan also opposed the Civil Rights Act.)
It was in the midst of all this that what has become
known as Freedom Summer happened –summer, 1964. Civil Rights activists from all
around the country went to Mississippi and started helping blacks register to
vote. The goal was to elect liberal Democrats and oust the establishment racist
Democrats. Several volunteers were murdered, as you are no doubt aware. Again,
if D’Souza’s claim that black Southerners had turned Democrat in the 1930s were
accurate, this would not have been a thing.
In 1968, Alabama governor George Wallace –who had
famously stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to personally
prevent blacks from entering –ran for president as an Independent. He ran for
the democratic nomination in 1964 and 1972. LBJ declined to run for re-election,
and Robert Kennedy was assassinated while in the lead for the Democratic
nomination, and Hubert Humphrey got it instead. Former VP Richard Nixon got the
Republican nod, and won the election and re-election in 1972.
This, of course, is where we talk about the Southern
Strategy. Nixon –who presented himself as the “law and order candidate” and
representative of the “silent majority” –employed a strategy devised by his
advisers to peel away votes from the traditionally Democratic South, taking
advantage of the anger white Southerners felt about desegregation, and the
Democrats’ role in it. It was a plan to specifically take advantage of racism.
This is a real thing, not someone’s theory; the Republican Party itself
admitted to it and apologized for it (in 2005.) Note: two months after the
passage of the Civil Rights Act, Senator Strom Thurmond quit the Democratic
Party and became a Republican, which he remained until he died in office in
2003 at the age of 100.
Here is where I let the actors speak for themselves.
First, Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips in an interview in 1970. Phillips, by the
way, is still a prominent conservative commentator.
•“From now on, the Republicans are never
going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need
any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened
enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as
Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the
Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that
prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable
arrangement with the local Democrats.” –Kevin Phillips, 1970
Next, Lee Atwater- campaign adviser to Nixon and
later to Reagan and Bush Sr. This is from a 1981 interview that he thought was
going to be anonymous, but after he died his identity was revealed.
·“You start out in 1954 by saying,
“Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you,
backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all
that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things
and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut
this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a
lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” –Lee Atwater, 1981
So: in 1964 Republican nominee Goldwater was opposed
to the Civil Rights Act. In 1968 and 1972 Nixon appealed to white racism to get
elected. Blacks around the country stopped supporting Republicans. Go figure.
But it doesn’t stop there.
What Atwater was talking about is called
“dog-whistle politics.” You know, as in only the dog can hear the whistle
because it is tuned only to his hearing range. You no longer come straight out
and say the directly racist thing, because that would be unpopular- instead you
use code language that can be defended as innocent but which racists –even if
they don’t realize they are racists –will hear and understand. Atwater himself
said one of those codes is “cut taxes.” How can that be racist? Because cutting
taxes would mean cutting social programs, and Atwater knew that white racists
–not just in the South –associated welfare with minorities, being lazy and
dishonest and getting fat off the hard work of decent white people.
Remember this?
In 1976 California governor Ronald Reagan ran
against incumbent president Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Lee
Atwater was his campaign adviser. (He lost, of course, but won the nomination
when he tried again four years later.)
While Reagan was on the campaign trail in 1976, he
told a particular story often at stump speeches. The story is about a complaint
he received from a voter –a hardworking man who can only afford to buy
hamburger, while the man in front of him in the check-out line was buying
steak… with food stamps. Living high off the hog at the expense of the
hard-working tax-payer. According to Atwater, in a story like this a racist
audience would automatically associate a person on food stamps with a minority,
probably a black person. But Reagan didn’t leave it to chance. On his stump
speeches in Southern states, he didn’t say “The man in front of him was buying steak.”
He said “The young buck in front of him.” You know what a young buck is, don’t
you? It is an old-fashioned euphemism for the n-word.
Reagan told another story on that campaign. It was
about a woman he had heard about in Chicago, who was getting welfare under
several different fake names, and driving a Cadillac. It was later proven that
this case never happened, and was made up, but “welfare queens in Cadillacs”
became a common expression of frustration for working class white voters.
Reagan never said she was black- but this imaginary Cadillac-driving welfare
queen of Chicago was a perfect dog-whistle.
These types of dog-whistles are still being used, by
the way, they just differ over time. In the 2012 election cycle Paul Ryan and
Newt Gingrich talked a lot about how many of society’s problems are a result of "inner city" “urban culture” having no sense of personal responsibility or work ethic.
Urban culture.
I wonder who that is?
In fact, Dinesh D’Souza is blowing some dog-whistles
in this video. He is espousing this idea that Southern blacks left the
Republican Party –not as a result of the Southern Strategy after the 1960s –but
in the time of FDR. And why? Because FDR was offering them free stuff, and
they’re all about that free stuff at the hardworking taxpayer’s expense. By the
way, side point, this is the first time I have ever heard this theory. And I
don’t even know where to begin with his claim that it was only the white
Southerners who weren’t racist that
switched parties to become Republicans. I have to take a moment to point out
that D’Souza has sold a lot of books to his conservative audience, but has no
credibility among journalists or academics outside that specialized sphere
(hardcore neoconservatives) and the last I heard he had been convicted on
corruption charges. But I digress. [My thanks to colleague Jeanne Schmitzer who read this and pointed out that, in order for FDR to get his agenda through the Southern Democrats in Congress, he had to make sure things like social security did not apply to agricultural workers and domestics, which meant that most Southern blacks didn't even qualify for the "free stuff" D'Souza says motivated them. Those exceptions were removed, I believe, during the Eisenhower administration.]
The assertion was made that a majority of
Republicans in a survey said that race doesn’t matter to them, therefore there
is no racism. At the same time, polls show that three-quarters or more of
Republicans either conclusively believe that Obama was born in Kenya and is a
Muslim despite all evidence to the contrary, or they believe he might be. Because he is an outsider,
clearly not one of “us”.
Now let’s take a look at Republican efforts to
restrict the black vote. The most talked about way is this photo ID thing, but
that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I am going to cheat, now, and paste a very
lengthy reply I recently gave someone on Facebook who asked how on earth photo
ID can be construed as racist:
It does sound normal and sensible. And know
what? I'd be fine with it if the state governments that made these laws paid
for the ID's, and paid to set up convenient stations for people to go and get
them... and paid someone to go pick up any shut-ins or elderly people who have
no way to go get the ID. But they would never do that. What makes ID racist?
The fact that, if I recall the statistics right, in one of these states
something like 25% of minority voters don't have a photo ID already, whereas
only 5% (or somewhere around that number) of white folks don't; and there are
countless horror stories about people being turned away because of insufficient
ID to get ID, having to start the
process all over, and of people having to travel to distant sites to get the
ID, and the stations being open at odd hours, and on and on, with the end
result that something like 100,000 registered voters in Wisconsin were unable
to vote last election- most of them (but not all) black and other minorities.
And even if you get your ID, the process of showing it slows down the line at
the polls... and the same state governments that have mandated voter ID have
shortened voting hours, making it more likely people will not make it through
or give up and go home. Why are they doing this? A recent study showed 35
verifiable incidents of in-person voter fraud over the last decade, out of
millions of votes cast. So the problem of fraud is virtually nil, and to stop
it they've prevented 100,000 people from voting, just in one state. So why go
to all this trouble to prevent something that almost never happens? Well, it is
no coincidence that almost all of the states who do this have Republican
legislatures. As Eugene Robinson points out in the article you posted, in 2012
there was a GOP politician in Pennsylvania who said publicly "Romney will
be able to win this state now, because we have voter ID." And there is the
situation in NC. It was proven in court that the Republican legislature
authorized a study to see which forms of voting black people are most likely to
use -and then, in addition to voter ID, they passed laws specifically targeting
THOSE FORMS (shorter voting hours; no same-day registration, no voting on
Sunday) but did not restrict the forms (early voting and mail-in ballots, for
example) that their study showed black people do NOT use that much. And a NC
GOP official accidentally let the cat out of the bag when he was trying to
defend the state party from racism charges by saying essentially "we're
not racists! Sure we are taking these steps to keep black people from voting,
but it's not because we hate black people, it's because black people vote for
Democrats and black voter turnout has increased by 50% and we want to make sure
we win!" Federal court ruled that all that evidence proves that NC was not
REALLY concerned about fraud, they were really trying to make it harder in
general for black people to vote -and that is a violation of the Civil Rights
Act, whether it's because of bigotry or political expedience does not matter.
And in state after state judges have been striking down these voter ID laws
because the evidence shows the real motive for them. In fact, my friend and
mentorVernon
Burtonhas
testified in some of these cases, as a historian of race in the South,
comparing these methods of restricting the black vote with the things they did
during Reconstruction (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.), every one of which
was eventually banned for being unconstitutional, but every one of which states
at the time defended and propounded because they claimed it was necessary to prevent voter fraud.
That was one long paragraph! And it included a lot
of approximations, reliant on memory, where statistics are concerned –I’m sure
I was off a little here and there, but the points stand.
(checking the links below, I see my memory was
correct- if anything, the situation is worse than I said in that FB
conversation.)
The assertion was made that Democrats are racist
toward black people. Again, when talking about the 19th into the
mid-20th century, it does not apply that way. But I’m not letting
Democrats off the hook. As I said above, one could argue that it is politics,
not racism, that is leading Republican legislatures to try to curtail black
voter turnout- because they know 90% or more of them would vote Democratic. But
it works both ways. Because the Democratic Party knows only a tiny percentage
of blacks vote Republican, they mostly give lip service to the issues that
matter to the black community, with no real impetus to tackle those issues.
Where are they going to go, after all? They are the same way with labor unions,
and Republicans are the same way with Christian evangelicals.
In summation, it was indeed the Civil Rights Act and
the Southern Strategy that finally flipped the South from Democrat to
Republican –with help from Nixon and Reagan –and was the final straw that made
black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats. The assertion that black voters
support Democrats because they are lazy and want free stuff is, in itself,
racist. And there is no shortage of reasons in this year of 2016 why 90+% of
blacks are not voting Republican (heck, we haven’t even mentioned Trump.)
The student to whom I addressed this
mini-dissertation found it very compelling and requested that I share it with
the whole class, which I did. He then had a follow-up question.
Question: In light of the
dog-whistle politics/Southern Strategy etc., how can I support the idea of low
taxes and less government spending without being, or appearing, racist?
Answer:
There were conservative Republicans promoting low taxes/low spending –and
opposing FDR’s New Deal- long before the late 1960s and the Southern Strategy,
and they did so with the support of a sizeable percentage of black votes.
Eisenhower had 39% of the black vote in 1956. Nixon had 32% of the black vote
in 1960. (Then, in ’64, Goldwater –who had opposed the Civil Rights Act –got 6%
of the black vote. Nixon only got 12% in ’68, 13% in ’72. Ford got 18% in ’76-
and no Republican got above 15% in the 80s and 90s. Since then: 2000, 3%. 2004,
7%. 2008, 1%. 2012, 5%. It looks like this year 1% may be kind of high.)
Eisenhower
was especially popular among blacks because of his civil rights record. As I
noted before, he wasn’t eager to get involved in race issues –he was from
segregated Kansas- but he did not shrink back from them when they came up, and
did what he thought was in the best interests of the country (including sending
troops into Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling he had supported.)
So the
answer to your question is: you can be financially conservative, and pursue a
philosophy of limited government, so long as you don’t try to get support for
that philosophy –or just get votes for people who do support it –by demonizing
or minimizing the poor, which I believe Paul Ryan for example has done with his
“urban culture” comments. And counter-balance that fiscal conservatism with a
real concern for issues that affect black and other minority communities. I am
no supporter of Rand Paul, but he is the only Republican candidate this season
that I saw doing that in any fashion, in his calls for prison reform.
This
conversation started with questions about the Republican Party and racism. I do
not believe that being Republican makes someone a racist, by any means, nor do
I believe that Republicans are generally racists – and I know plenty of white
Democrats who are. But. Decades of getting votes for Republican candidates by
using dog-whistle appeals TO racists has led the GOP to a dangerous place. How
many neo-Nazis, Skinheads, Klansmen, and white nationalists have you heard of
endorsing the Democrats lately? But how often do you hear of them endorsing
Trump? And during the Obama years, how many low-and-mid level GOP politicians
have you heard about getting in trouble for spreading stuff like this:
My point
is, Republicans have long courted the votes of white racists –and now they are
stuck with a bunch of white racists contaminating their party’s image, message,
and philosophy. All the pundits and party establishment figures were astounded
this past year when so many big-league conservative candidates lost out to
Trump- who, if you look at his policies beyond immigration, sounds a lot more
like a Democrat than a classic Republican. How could this happen? A lot of the
base that the party has invested in stirring up, it turns out, were responding
more to the race dog-whistles (which was planned as a tool for getting votes,
not an expression of conservative philosophy) than to the libertarian-leaning
fiscal responsibility message that is the actual core of the Republican Party.
And now we are seeing the results of that.
Now a
note about poverty and the social net. When I was growing up, here is what my
situation was: my mom did not graduate from high school- I am in fact the first
male in the entire history of my extended family ever to graduate high school,
because the men and most women always had to quit to help support the family
–so therefore the best she could do was a minimum wage job in a shirt factory.
She worked full-time. She worked overtime. She worked like a dog. We had
government assistance, because we needed it.
Then
Ronald Reagan was elected, and within a year almost all that assistance was
gone. I very distinctly remember coming home from school one day in the 7th
grade, hungry, and looking in the cupboards. We had a can of Crisco, and that
was it, and I knew no one was getting paid until the end of the week. If not
for free school lunch, there are many days I would not have eaten at all.
Trickle-down economics? I spent the ‘80s getting trickled on.
Then in
the ‘90s, when I was just a few years older than you, I was a husband and father,
cleaning floors for a living (mostly at Wal-mart). Most of the people I knew at
Wal-mart made less money than me. They all worked hard, and most of them were
adults with families, not high school students. I worked hard. My wife worked hard. I still needed food stamps and
WIC to feed my family for those years. And was darned glad to get that EIC
refund in the spring. And most of the people I knew were in the same boat.
When I
went to college here at Tech, I was taking 18 or more hours per semester. I
worked three 8 hour night shifts buffing floors at Crossville Wal-mart
(Fri-Sun) and 4 to 6 hours the other four days, beginning at 4 am, buffing Food
Citys in Crossville and Jamestown. That’s 40 to 48 hours per week. My wife
worked as a police dispatcher but could not work full-time due to a disability.
I still could not have finished
college and gotten to grad school without government loans and Pell grants.
It is
for these reasons that when I hear people telling stories about seeing someone
buying a steak with food stamps, it makes me see red. They don’t know those
people. They don’t know that maybe they are feeling depressed and down-trodden,
so maybe they are going to over-spend so their family can have steak one day
this week even if it means Vienna sausages the other six days.
I hear
people say, “well, I grew up poor, and we grew everything we needed.”
Newsflash: if you grew up poor on a farm, that means your family had enough
money to afford to own land to have a farm. Not everyone has that option.
Do some
people game the system? Of course. Is that reprehensible? Of course. Does that
describe the majority of people who need those types of assistance? It
absolutely does not. And yet, in political rhetoric, all too often people preaching
fiscal responsibility lump everyone who is poor into one big category: the
people who want free stuff because they are lazy and unprincipled. And I for
one take that personally, because they are talking about me, about my mother,
about practically everyone I worked with (worked)
for years. It is an expression of classism as well as racism: the “lazy, greedy
underclass” = blacks, Latinos, and white trash.
So: if
you don’t think the government should provide a safety net for the
disadvantaged, support conservative candidates who have pro-active plans to
benefit the working class and ensure that someone who works 40 hours a week
does not need public assistance.
That’s what Republicans used to do… for a very long time. Heck, all that stuff
I said about the founding of the Republican Party –Free Labor,
self-determination, hard work, responsibility –are things which should still be
at the heart of the party, and which I respect and agree with. Be like Teddy
Roosevelt, who emphasized that everyone is not guaranteed success, but everyone
should be guaranteed a fair shot at it. And don’t use those dog-whistles
–ultimately they are just a cheap and easy way to get the support of people
whose support none of us should want.
I keep seeing these articles and memes going around about
how there were “White slaves”, usually Irish, in the New World. I am attaching
a link to a good article that debunks this idea –which is hogwash –but I want
to take a couple of minutes to talk about why this myth has become so popular.
It first hit the radar in a noticeable way in the 1990s –around the same time
as another myth, that there were large numbers of black soldiers in the
Confederacy –and, like that myth, has gained steam in the last few years. I
constantly have students on exam essays talking about “white slaves” instead of
indentured servants, which is what they were. How are the two different? Unlike
slavery, indentured servitude was not permanent- it was limited to seven years
(or adulthood, if the servant was a child). In most cases, the person signed a
contract willingly, often to gain passage to the colonies. In some cases
indentured servitude was forced on criminals or people in debt, and during the
Cromwell years on Irish captives. But even if not entered willingly, it was not
slavery: a slave did not have a contract, he was a slave until he died, and if
a woman her children would be lifelong slaves as well. Plus, no one volunteered
for slavery. It IS true that indentured servants had miserable lives, and many
were worked to death, but those who survived for a few years went free and
often even had a small monetary bonus.
So why do so many people want to insist this was actual
slavery, and that there is a conspiracy to keep the public from knowing about
it? Well, the conspiracy part is to counteract actual historians who would
debunk it as inaccurate. But why slavery? It is no accident that this myth and
the one about black Confederates have blossomed simultaneously (note: the “Irish
slaves” meme proliferated on Facebook right after the event in Ferguson,
Missouri in 2014.) Part of the white slavery thing is a form of ethnic pride
for people of Irish descent, telling how their ancestors endured suffering.
Well, the Irish certainly suffered a lot in America, but they were never
slaves. And there is a deeper reason that even non-Irish white people have
sustained these myths.
Here’s why: If I can say that white people were slaves TOO,
then I can minimize the legacy of slavery and racism. Why, we had it as bad as
you people did, and you don’t hear us still whining about it. Similarly, if I
can say that large numbers of black men fought for the Confederacy, then I can
go on believing that the Civil War –and said Confederacy –were not REALLY about
slavery. Thus can we salve our collective conscience, while simultaneously
de-legitimizing the complaints of the black community about racism.
[click HERE to see a list of "white slavery" tweets collected by Irish historian Liam Hogan in the wake of the Ferguson protests]
Now, I’m not saying that everyone who re-posts one of those
articles/memes has these goals in mind. To most people it just seems like a
fascinating story, and it is presented as verified fact. But you have to check
the sources. You’re not going to find any credentialed, trained historians
making such claims –well, maybe I should say 99.9% of them don’t, since there’s
always that one wacko out there somewhere. No, most of this pseudo-history is
presented by amateurs and are self-published. One notable exception is a book
released by NYU Press called White Cargo,
by two television documentarians. The authors make it a matter of semantics, arguing that forced servitude is slavery no matter what the circumstances or duration. People who use this argument to assert that indentured servants were slaves, in my experience, rarely agree that convict labor is slavery. The idea is also propagated a lot on white
supremacist blog sites. In fact, the most cited book on the subject is 1993’s They Were White and They Were Slaves
(also the first book on the subject that I’m aware of); it was self-published by a
Holocaust denier who blamed the Atlantic slave trade on the Jews.
Bottom line: if you’re interested in the history, read some
books about indentured servitude (which really could be a horrible experience). But when you see things framed as “white
slavery” in the Americas, be aware of what’s really going on. It may seem like only a matter of semantics, but words matter... because of the ideas behind them.
By the way, here are a few quotes from readers’ reviews of White Cargo on amazon:
“I assume since America was
founded by the British the history books were ‘edited’ not to mention this time
in history or ‘edited’ to use lighter language like ‘indentured servants’
instead of slaves.”
“It is significant that
two journalists wrote this extremely important book. Many professional
historians don't want much attention paid to white slavery for fear that it
will take something away from black slavery or make whites feel less compassion
for black slaves.” [this person goes on to recommend a long list of
books defending the Confederacy or denying racism]
“Euphemistically white
slavery was referred to as `indentured servitude'. Indentured servitude however
was in fact slavery.”
You can find my essay about forced labor on colonial
plantations HERE.
You can find a well-researched essay –part of a longer piece
in progress (not by me, by the aforementioned Liam Hogan) –HERE.
Note: you will find references to "white slavery" in relation to the pirates of the Barbary Coast (in North Africa). This is a completely different subject; Barbary pirates were known to capture Europeans in the Mediterranean and sell them into slavery.
I first started blogging almost a decade ago, first on my author's homepage and then, beginning in 2011, here. It was something I did to promote my writing, and most of the posts reflect that: announcing award nominations and new releases, interviews, promoting other writers in my genre(s), and a lot of blogs about the western genre, including book and film reviews.
But every once in awhile I also would write, sometimes at length, about history, culture, and world events, bringing to bear my perspective as a historian of race and a labor activist. Such essays were rare, but in the last couple of years have largely replaced self-promotion in this space.
For those who may have read some of these and found them interesting, I thought it might be helpful to provide a list of such essays in case you want to read further. And here they are, in reverse chronological order.
This is the first of several topics I have been mulling over for a few years, which I will probably not pursue in an academic article (as I have a long queue of such articles to do.)
By presenting it in this format, I am essentially throwing a rough idea out there, not making an argument with attendant evidence. This first effort, which involves some historical similarities I have noticed in English and Japanese history where race is concerned, is no doubt full of weak points and scholars in the appropriate fields can no doubt poke a lot of holes in my loose theory. BUT, it's still interesting to think about.
First, a little background. I earned my Ph.D at the University of Illinois in 2011. My three examined fields were U.S. History (post-1815), Race and Ethnicity (with a focus on Native American and African American), and Southern U.S. History. My dissertation was entitled Race, Slavery, and Nationalism in Indian Territory: 1830-1866. I had to have a non-Western comparative element in my fields, and chose Japanese history, which has always fascinated me and which I almost chose as my graduate focus. I took Japanese history classes in both my undergrad and graduate studies, and was a teaching assistant in East Asian Civilization classes for two semesters. Nowadays I co-teach an upper division Japanese history class at Tennessee Tech.
Japanese history was a good fit for comparison when studying race in America for a couple of reasons. First, there is an indigenous, traditionally tribal people in the Japanese islands called the Ainu (genetically distinct from the Yamato or Wajin, or modern ethnic Japanese.) For centuries (along with other related groups like the Emishi) they were known as the "northern barbarians" and were eventually the focus of discrimination and efforts at forcible assimilation, not unlike Native American Indians.
Another reason to compare Japan and the English colonies/United States is the fact that, like that latter culture, Japan has developed a very strict racial hierarchy, with ethnic Japanese at the top (who also had a class-based inner hierarchy, with a group of Japanese "untouchables" called the eta), and the bottom segmented among the indigenous peoples like the Ainu, the Okinawans/Ryukyuans, and all foreigners (with Koreans probably bearing more stigma than other Asian groups.)
Studying Japanese history while also being immersed in American race studies, I noticed something else. When Japan entered their colonizing, imperialist period -much later than England had -they had similar attitudes about the "inferiority" of the groups they colonized, and were less than permissive about local rules and customs in the areas they occupied. These broad similarities started me thinking about a lot of other similarities, and how to explain them.
First, let me make a point about the European colonial powers in North America. Each major power had its own set of priorities in the New World, and those priorities would determine how they interacted with the natives. FRANCE was primarily after trade, especially the fur trade (this could be said of the Dutch, as well.) For that reason, they were not as likely as other powers to engage in full-scale settler colonialism (where you replace the natives with your own people, essentially). They tended to have more peaceful relations with Indians, establish fewer permanent settlements, and French traders frequently lived among Indians and freely adopted their customs and intermarried with them (bear in mind, this is a broad statement, and is meant primarily in comparison with the other European groups.) This is why most Indian tribes preferred the French over the English (though they all leveraged one European power against the others, to get the best deal.) Is this because the French are just naturally nicer people than other Europeans? Of course not. This only holds true in North America. In other places (such as the Caribbean), where the French had different goals, it was a completely different story and they could be just as vicious as anyone else.
SPAIN was primarily after resources, especially mineral resources. Right off the bat, Columbus set the tone by his horrible treatment of the gentle Taino people of Hispaniola, whom he enslaved and forced to provide him with gold. But contrary to The Black Legend, an idea propagated by the English that the Spanish were overwhelmingly cruel to native peoples compared to the English, the truth was more nuanced. A lot of Columbus's contemporaries were outraged by his cruelty. Bartolome de Las Cassas provides a good counterbalance: a clergyman (and contemporary of Columbus) who worked tirelessly for native rights, with considerable success. As with the French, we can say that the Spanish developed racial hierarchies of their own, but that they differed significantly from those established by the English, with considerable fluidity within them.
ENGLAND, though certainly after trade and resources, was primarily after land. The land in their colonies was quickly filled up, and there was always a desire for more land to the west, which brought them into conflict with the French and the Indians. Hence, as demonstrated in this map, the French (in blue) had a territory vastly larger then the English (in red), but there were many times more English than French colonists.
In addition to having a stronger desire for land, England differed from France and Spain in another very significant way. Spain and France were a lot more accepting of the mixed offspring of Europeans and Indians. While it is true that French plantation owners in the Caribbean colony of St. Domingue (later Haiti) had strict race laws where "mulattoes" were concerned, the French in general were more accepting than the English, who had anti-miscegenation laws for both blacks and Indians and who would called the mixed offspring of an English colonist and an Indian a "half-breed." Of all the European groups involved in North American colonialism, the English had the strictest race hierarchy, and -unlike the French, whose attitudes varied depending on their regional goals (and they weren't so "nice" in Africa and Asia) -the English carried these attitudes with them wherever they went, establishing strictly stratified racial hierarchies in all their colonies: North America, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa (though much of that was in place when the English took control of the country from the Boers, the English made it much more formalized), and so on.
In short then, the English and the Japanese, in their colonial ventures, were noticeably more prone to racial hierarchy and xenophobia.
And here are some factors which I believe contribute to the similarities.
1. England and Japan are both island nations. Their inhabitants would be less likely to regularly encounter other peoples than if they lived on mainland Europe or Asia, and strangers stood out more.
2. Both countries "unified" their island groups by striving against "primitive" northern "barbarians". The Emishi, Ainu, etc. in Japan -the very term shogun is short for sei-i taishogun, or "commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force against the barbarians" -and the Scots and Irish etc. in England (in both cases there were large barbarian groups to the north also smaller groups in need of subduing to the south, and of course in England's case the Emerald Isle to the northwest.) In fact, now that I think about it, in both cases the dominant group was composed of migrants from the mainland who took the islands away from their original inhabitants. In other words, the English and Japanese defined themselves against the "barbarians" with whom they struggled for their island home.
3. Both countries were attacked by a huge armada from the mainland which was miraculously defeated (against the odds). The Spanish Armada attacked England in the 16th century, and the Mongols/Chinese did the same thing (twice) to Japan in the 13th century, with similar disastrous results. For the Japanese, these huge victories against the great conquerors were a sign of divine favor, and the same can probably be said for the English. It added to their sense of being special and blessed.
It seems to me that these similarities would indicate that inhabitants of a beleaguered island nation might have a predisposition toward establishing racial hierarchies. As I said at the outset, I am no doubt missing a lot of things that a specialist in these two cultures would immediately see that could deflate my loose theory. Plus, when it comes to establishing racial hierarchies, the economic stimulus of slavery looms very large, as I pointed out in a previous essay.
