A Liberal Dose, November 2, 2023 "Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 2, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today”

 

I have been talking about the origins of slavery in America. In part, I’ve been doing so because there is a lot about that subject that most people don’t know -and our current political climate, especially in red states like ours, suppresses honest discussion and true understanding of the subject. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past, nor can you effectively build the future, and some people would rather you not do any of those things. Their strategy for controlling the present and shaping the future is controlling your ability to know the past.

That said. For roughly the first century of the English colonies, labor in the South was done by three groups: African slaves, white indentured servants, and American Indian slaves. For reasons discussed last week, by about 1720 it had become exclusively the task of African slaves. Southern colonies started passing laws to keep even free blacks separate from poor whites, the better to control them both and avoid a replay of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Those laws became, in fits and spurts, more and more restrictive as the eighteenth century progressed. Every time there was a failed slave revolt, or word was leaked of a planned one, Southern colonial legislatures passed more laws exerting ever more control over the black population, free and slave alike. Free blacks lost most of the rights they had possessed the previous century, and slavery became harsher and harsher. This continued after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century. Race was simultaneously defined by LAW, and shaped by custom. This was a way for the planter class -who controlled the economy and the politics -to tell poor white workers and farmers, “Hey, you may not have any money or access to education or many opportunities in life, but you are white like us and we are all on the same side. You are not like those OTHER people... so stop hanging around with them. They are inferior to US.” This was a way to both delude the white “lower classes” and keep them from turning on the powers that be, and to protect the institution of slavery which was making the elites rich.

I’ll return to the cookie analogy I’ve used often. Picture three guys sitting around a table: a black guy, a poor white guy, and a rich white guy. There are ten cookies at the table. The rich guy has eight and the other two each have one. The rich guy tells the poor white guy, “You’d better watch that black guy, he wants to steal your cookie.” And while the poor white guy and the black guy are watching each other, neither notices that the rich guy now has ALL the cookies. Or, as Lyndon Johnson put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This was done to maintain the social status quo, and keep the empowered in power. And it worked. Thousands and thousands of poor white Southerners who had never owned a slave and never would fought and died to protect the institution that only benefited the people at the top. And when that war ended slavery in America, the same economic/political class leaned in heavier than ever on reinforcing racism in order to hold on to that control -and that worked, too.

Today many Americans -95% or more of them white, I would guess -want to gloss over all the history I have laid out these last few weeks, because they think it makes America look bad… and because they want people to stop complaining about racial injustice, because doing so is a “divisive concept.” “Let’s forget it and move on.” But “forgetting” it (or never learning it in the first place) only further cements it.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

 

A Liberal Dose, Feb. 24, 2022 "Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court"

 

A Liberal Dose

February 24, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court”

 

People who are terrified by critical race theory almost always prove unaware of what it actually is: a legal studies framework that examines how race has been affected (and, in part, created) by law. It is patently inaccurate to claim that race and the law have not gone hand-in-hand in American history, or that the effects of that relationship are not felt in the present.

This is demonstrated in a recent history book that I have mentioned in these pages before –Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court by Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner. In roughly 350 pages, it traces the intertwined story of race and law, from the colonial period to the 2020s. (Full disclosure- Vernon Burton was my grad school co-adviser and mentor.) The authors make a sobering point early in the work: for three hundred years, the law was used to justify racial oppression and maintain white supremacy, and then for four decades (the 1930s to the 1970s) it was used to fight against, and try to turn the tide of, that oppression. This was followed by another half-century (the 1970s until now) of largely walking back the gains made in that forty-year period. For the vast majority of American history, the law -as ultimately interpreted by the Supreme Court -has, in fact, served to buttress racism rather than to dispel it.

Slavery, after all, was legal for most of that time -and protected by law. The infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 said that even free black people “had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” Even when slavery was ended after the Union victory in the Civil War, Southern states had repressive slave codes and, starting after Reconstruction, legally enforced segregation which the Supreme Court upheld in Plessy v Ferguson (1896). SCOTUS ruled in the 1820s and 1830s that Native Americans had never had the right to own their own land, and that they were “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the United States “resembles that of a ward to his guardian.” In 1889 SCOTUS upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese people from immigrating to the U.S., saying the country had a right to prevent “vast hordes of its people from crowding in on us.” In 1922 the Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States that immigrants must be, not only white so far as skin tone, but specifically Caucasian. The following year, when Indian immigrant Baghat Singh Thind’s counsel pointed out that people from India are technically Caucasian, the Court ruled that they weren’t white enough to be U.S. citizens, Caucasian or not.

Many advances toward racial equality were then made over the following decades, especially during the Civil Rights era. However, the authors point out that, after 1970, the question became “Are discriminatory results of a law enough for the Court to strike it down, or is proof also required that the people who wrote and passed the law intended it to discriminate?” Conservative justices in recent decades have almost always taken a very narrow view of that question, with the least latitude possible, even when they give extremely broad latitude to questions of religion or the second amendment. In other words, they have been strict constructionists only when it suits them, and not on a consistent basis -the inconsistency coming on questions of race.

The book ends by observing that American democracy is not a thing that is broken, but rather a thing that is unfinished. That simple statement, whose truth seems so obvious to some, is somehow threatening to others. So threatening that, despite the historical accuracy of everything I have cited from this book, it is a discussion that would currently be illegal for high school teachers to have in Tennessee, and, if some have their way, might even be illegal in college history classes.

On second thought, maybe things are becoming broken.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE