August 13, 2017
Don’t pretend to be shocked. We all knew that we’d get here. We all knew that this vein of hatred ran rich through American soil, never far from the surface. The ideology of white supremacy is in our DNA and every serious effort to dismantle it has been met with a vicious backlash. Our bloodiest war was fought because half of our countrymen were willing to die for the right to keep Black people as property. Too many Americans never accepted that loss.
After The Civil War, when Southerners saw that emancipated Black people intended to really be free, to assert our full humanity, build communities and businesses, run for office and be equal participants in society, there was a second rebellion. Southerners devised the crudely effective system of Jim Crow to terrorize Black people into second-class citizenship. Southern whites used lynching and riots that burned entire thriving Black communities, like Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the ground, rather than allow Black people to be equal.
In the more genteel precincts of the North, an artful edifice of state sanctioned segregation was constructed that just as effectively consigned Black people to second class citizenship, without anyone needing to get their hands dirty. Social Security, redlining and the G.I. bill were ingeniously designed to ensure that retirement security, homeownership and college educations that catapulted the Greatest Generation into the middle class, initially remained beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of Black Americans (When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson).
Culture played a key role. Minstrel shows, which presented inhuman caricatures of dimwitted, lazy and oversexed Black people contributed to the perception of Black inferiority. Minstrel shows gave way to film, starting with the cinematic “masterpiece,” D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of A Nation.” D.W. Griffith trotted out every trope that has continued to haunt Black people for more than 100 years, from rapacious Black men eager to defile white women to barefoot Black politicians throwing chicken bones on the floor of the state legislature. In D.W. Griffith’s racist reimagining (which reinvigorated a dormant KKK), the Klan were not traitors who objected to the freedom of Black Americans, but literal “White Knights” heroically saving American civilization.
When the Civil Rights Movement gave birth to a second Reconstruction, the reaction was no less swift, although more covert. Southern states shut down school districts, rather than integrate, or set up a parallel system of private, segregated Christian academies to avoid giving Black people access to an equal education. Northern states adhered to a school funding formulas based on local property taxes, which ensured the redlined, segregated Black communities would have inferior schools.
Every advance we make toward our alleged ideal of a country where “All men are created equal,” means ALL Americans, regardless of race, creed or color, has been met with a combination of political chicanery like voter suppression and school re-segregation and murderous rage, like unchecked police brutality and white supremacist terror. For too long, too many Americans have refused to connect the dots, treating each act like an isolated incident. Too many Americans have looked the other way while state after state passes legislation expressly designed to deprive Black people of the vote, as retribution for a Black president. Too many Americans have looked the other way as Black children as young as twelve are murdered by the police and nobody pays the price. The truth is, all of those Confederate street names and monuments are just the most obvious symbol that The Civil War never really ended. What happened in Charlottesville yesterday removed any doubt. So my question for you is, “Which side are you on?”