Tag Archives: race

5 Lessons to Remember as Ferguson Fades into History

September 1, 2014 – 9:53 am

If you learned anything from Ferguson, how are you planning to hang on to it?

Remember the days right after the Newtown Massacre? For a week, maybe two, it seemed like the country had finally woken up and nothing would ever be the same. Twenty innocent children were dead, along with six adults who tried to protect them. And it was our fault. Mass shootings had been happening more and more often for years, and — unlike Australia, which had the same problem and solved it — we’d done nothing. But now that was all going to change.

Be a Target(ed) shopper.

It didn’t. Within months, all the vested interests that benefit from our crazy lack of gun laws had re-asserted themselves, and nothing happened. Or rather, things continued getting worse, with the momentum still on the side of the guns-everywhere movement. Instead of trying to get rid of assault rifles (or at least keep them away from the mentally ill), we’re debating whether or not you can hang one over your shoulder while you shop for Oreos. (The ad to the right is a parody, but the picture is genuine.)

So now we’ve had Ferguson, another national trauma that has mesmerized the media and caused a number of people to see the light on some important issues. Maybe someday we’ll look back and see the Michael Brown shooting and the ensuing protests as a tipping point, a moment when things started to turn around. Or maybe we have just briefly tossed in our sleep and will soon settle back down.

In part, that decision is up to all of us. Will we let the things we’ve learned these last few weeks slip away like the trig identities we crammed into our heads for the big math test? Or will we hang on to our new understandings and not settle back into the same old conversations? Will we demand that our news sources and our political representatives recognize these realities? Or not?

The first step in hanging on to new knowledge is spelling it out clearly. Here’s my attempt to isolate five simple Ferguson lessons that we shouldn’t forget or let the country forget. I admit they’re not rocket science. If they were, we’d already be forgetting them.

1. Police mistreat black people. It’s not a fantasy created by “the grievance industry” and it’s not a few isolated incidents caused by a handful of bad apples, it’s a pattern.

Some parts of the national media have finally started covering it like a pattern, and drawing attention to incidents that by themselves wouldn’t usually get national attention. Just this week I ran across the following stories.

  • New information the John Crawford shooting came out. On August 5, a 22-year-old black man was killed by police in a WalMart in Ohio because he was carrying an air rifle that he had picked up from a shelf. We had already heard from his girl friend, who was talking to him on the phone as he was being shot. Tuesday, we heard that the shooting was captured on WalMart’s surveillance video. It has not been released (though information favorable to the police has been), but Crawford’s parents and their attorney have been allowed to see it. The attorney said that Crawford was facing away from officers when they killed him, and that “John was doing nothing wrong in Walmart, nothing more, nothing less than shopping.” One of the officers involved in the shooting is back on the job. (A fake news site’s story of a second WalMart shooting got taken seriously by a number of people, but didn’t actually happen.)
  • Chris Lollie was arrested and tased by police in St. Paul while he was waiting for his kids to get out of school. He was trying to walk away from police when they got violent with him. The incident was recorded on his cellphone when it happened in January, but only became public recently after charges against Lollie were dropped and he got his phone back. St. Paul police have defended their officers’ actions, which is hard to imagine as I watch the tape.
  • Kametra Barbour and her four young children were pulled over in Texas, even though their car was a different color than the one police received a complaint about. The police dashcam video shows the terrified woman being forced at gunpoint to walk backwards towards the police cruiser, protesting all the while that they’re making her leave her frightened children alone in the car. The confrontation doesn’t end until her 6-year-old son also gets out of the car and walks toward police with his hands up. (What if he’d come out some other way?) “Do they look young to you?” one officer finally asks the other.
  • A week and a half ago TV producer Charles Belk was walking back to his car from a Beverly Hills restaurant when his evening took a bad turn. “I was wrongly arrested, locked up, denied a phone call, denied explanation of charges against me, denied ever being read my rights, denied being able to speak to my lawyer for a lengthy time, and denied being told that my car had been impounded…..All because I was mis-indentified as the wrong ‘tall, bald head, black male,’ … ‘fitting the description.’ ” It was six hours before his lawyer convinced police to watch the surveillance video and recognize that the bank robber’s accomplice was obviously not Belk. According to his lawyer (as summarized by ThinkProgress) “many other individuals who found themselves in Belk’s situation without his resources would likely have been detained at least until Monday”.
  • Rev. Madison T. Shockley II published similar stories from his own life, his father’s, and his son’s. “I fit the description. I was a black man.”

What makes these stories hit home is that they’re not about purse-snatchers who got roughed up a little too much. They’re about people who did nothing and suffered for it.

I know blacks must look at this lesson and say, “Well, duh.” But for the most part, whites — and the media that caters to whites — have refused to take it seriously until these last few weeks. Many of us came to a similar insight after Trayvon Martin, and then backslid into denial. Let’s not do it again.

2. Police kill a lot of people in America. Responding to the racism charge, some conservatives put forward a bizarre police-kill-white-people-too case centered on the shooting of Dillon Taylor in Salt Lake City — as if that should make everybody more sanguine about Michael Brown or John Crawford. But if white deaths are what it takes to get a certain segment of the public excited about police violence, then let’s publicize them. Because whether you break things down by race or not, there’s a problem.

You can say policing is a tough, dangerous job — and it is. But somehow police in other countries manage to do that job without killing nearly so many people. No government agency totals the exact number — it’s like we don’t really want to know — but various available statistics point to around 400 police killings a year in the United States. Here’s how that stacks up internationally.

If you want some real contrast, look at Iceland, where last December police shot and killed someone for the first time in the country’s history. Admittedly, Iceland is a thousand times smaller than the U.S., but even so, at our rate you’d expect Icelandic police to shoot someone dead every two or three years, rather than once since World War II.

3. We need better ways to hold police accountable. One inescapable feature of the Michael Brown investigation is that the Ferguson police are an interested party, and are not simply seeking to bring the truth to light. (For example, the only detail they were willing to release from Brown’s autopsy was that he tested positive for marijuana. And they released a video that they claimed was Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store, but not an incident report on his death.) It’s crazy to believe that they — or a prosecutor who works hand-in-glove with them every day — will investigate Brown’s death fairly and see that justice is done.

And yet, that is the standard situation whenever a citizen feels mistreated: Police will investigate themselves and find that whatever they did was justified. After police killed his white son, Michael Bell did the research:

In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified.

Police will also control — and distort — the flow of official information to the media. Reporters, in turn, depend on police leaks for their scoops, so they are often active participants in smearing victims. (It’s the same pattern we saw in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when reporters whose careers depended on their relationships with Bush administration sources published whatever they were told as if it were fact.)

Civil rights attorney Norman Siegel (whose interview with Chris Hayes starts around the 14-minute mark) suggests a common-sense reform:

There should be a civilian review board in Ferguson and in every city in America. And what that means is that you can’t allow the police to investigate the police. You have to have independent civilians looking at the complaint. We need a permanent special prosecutor for police misconduct so we can finally get accountability.

In April, Wisconsin passed a law requiring an outside investigation whenever someone dies in police custody. Every state should follow.

There has been some limited accountability for the most outrageous police behavior during the Ferguson protests. Dan Page, the frighteningly paranoid St. Louis officer I described last week, has been allowed to retire; he’ll get full pension and benefits, but at least he’s not wearing a badge any more. Ray (“I will fucking kill you”) Albers was forced to resign. Matthew (“These protesters should be put down like a rabid dog the first night”) Pappert was fired. Chris Hayes asks the right follow-up question:

The national media came to one (in some ways) random metro area suburb, St. Louis Country, with a hundred cameras for two weeks. And you’ve got at least four police officers essentially caught on camera doing really awful things, and a bunch more unnamed. It was almost a random audit. And the thing I can’t help thinking is “OK. There’s two ways to interpret this. Is this area particularly bad in terms of the quotient of police officers who act like this? Or is this just normal, and we just happened to have the cameras pointed there?”

What if we put the cameras right on the police? Events in Ferguson have added momentum to the notion that all police cars should have dash-cams and all officers should wear cameras on their uniforms. Private sources have donated enough body cameras for every Ferguson officer to wear one. Let’s see if they do.

4. White privilege is real. Stephen Colbert advised the Ferguson protesters to learn from Cliven Bundy and his friends in the militia movement.

By the way, black people, why can’t you be more like these guys? They were armed, and they dared the cops to shot them, and nothing happened. Just figure out whatever was different about them, and you’ll be fine.

But being treated with more respect by police is just one aspect of white privilege, which affects everything from hailing a cab to whether your resume will get you an interview. Pre-Ferguson, most whites reacted to talk about white privilege as if it were just an Ivy League way to call them racists or tell them to STFU.

But recently more whites have started to get it and explain it to others. One of the most approachable explanations is in “What My Bike Has Taught Me About White Privilege” posted by Pastor Jeremy Dowsett on his blog A Little More Sauce. Dowsett, who is white but has non-white children, compared being black in America to his own experience riding a bicycle on the busy streets of Lansing.

[Bike riders] have the right to be on the road, and laws on the books to make it equitable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are on a bike in a world made for cars. Experiencing this when I’m on my bike in traffic has helped me to understand what privilege talk is really about.

Now most people in cars are not intentionally aggressive toward me. But even if all the jerks had their licenses revoked tomorrow, the road would still be a dangerous place for me. Because the whole transportation infrastructure privileges the automobile. It is born out of a history rooted in the auto industry that took for granted that everyone should use a car as their mode of transportation. It was not built to be convenient or economical or safe for me.

And so people in cars—nice, non-aggressive people—put me in danger all the time because they see the road from the privileged perspective of a car.

Similarly, our laws promise racial equality and not all whites are racists, but our society was built with whites in mind. Systems that seem perfectly natural and transparent if you’re white are problematic if you’re not.

Elaborating on Dowsett’s metaphor from my biking perspective: I can’t count how many times I’ve nearly fallen off a no-shoulder country road because car drivers have no idea how loud a “light” beep of the horn sounds to someone not enclosed in a glass-and-metal bubble. (Apparently they worry that their internal-combustion engine might “sneak up” on me because it seems so quiet to them.) Keep that in mind the next time you offer a “reasonable” criticism of the black experience.

Jon Stewart’s epic response to conservative fury that blacks “make everything about race” is worth watching from the beginning, but it came down to this:

Race is there, and it is a constant. You’re tired of hearing about it? Imagine how f*cking exhausting it is living it.

How are we whites going to keep this increased consciousness of privilege from fading away? Christian Lander, who writes the blog Stuff White People Like, suggests making it the next ice-bucket challenge. He observes that what whites really need to raise their awareness of (far more than any deadly disease) is what it’s like to be a black teen. So he proposes the BT Challenge: Video yourself doing something that is dangerous for a black teen — like, say, walking to the convenience store for Skittles — and post it on social media.

5. We need to de-militarize our society. Americans from coast to coast were repulsed and alarmed by the images of mine-resistant military vehicles roaming American streets with camo-clad police snipers perched on top of them. It was way beyond ironic that equipment created to defend an occupying army in a guerrilla war was being deployed against American citizens protesting excessive force from police.

The militarization of police has been roundly denounced — most effectively by John Oliver — and it deserved every word of that denunciation.

That public outcry has even started to have some effect. Anchorage police have rescinded their request for military vehicles. Claire McCaskill will be chairing Senate hearings on police militarization.

But while MRAPs are obviously over the top, Ladd Everitt from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence told Business Insider that some advanced weaponry is justified by the level of armament police might face (from someone other than mostly non-violent protesters).

 “We see this as a product of the continuing arms race between law enforcement and civilians that has been going on for decades.” Everitt said the increasingly sophisticated weaponry being sold to U.S. civilians is forcing police to keep up, with both sides purchasing ever more powerful weapons. The arms race means “police officers have legitimate fears about the nature of the firepower they are confronting on a daily basis,” he said.

So the problem isn’t just the militarization of American police, it’s the militarization of American society.

That puts a different spin on the gap in police killings between the U.S. and every other first-world nation. American police are on a hair trigger because, in a country with over 300 million firearms, the possibility that a suspect might start shooting at them is never far from their minds. Over the course of a long career, it just doesn’t seem safe to take the more laid-back approach of a German or English policeman.

Bear that in mind the next time the NRA frames guns-everywhere as purely a question of personal rights. No matter how responsible and well-intentioned that gun-toting Oreo shopper might be, his presence raises the temperature in the room. All of us — and especially police — have to shorten our response times, given how fast a situation can turn deadly. So whether I choose to carry a gun or not, that raised room temperature might get me killed someday.

And that brings me full circle, back to gun control. Remember Newtown?

By weeklysift | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (14)

What Your Fox-Watching Uncle Doesn’t Get About Ferguson

August 25, 2014 – 10:01 am

It doesn’t matter how many details you know. If you start the story in the wrong place, you won’t understand it.

Part of my regular news-watching cycle is to check in on Fox News from time to time. It keeps me honest and helps me anticipate the kinds of arguments I’m likely to start hearing from conservatives.

Watching Fox was particularly interesting in the early part of this week, because in the evenings they (like MSNBC and CNN) gave a lot of air time to their reporters on the streets in Ferguson, Missouri. So it was a rare opportunity to see all three cable news networks cover the same controversial events at the same time. Most days, the difference between the networks lies mainly in what they choose to cover — a new report on climate change might lead the news on MSNBC, while Fox focuses on Benghazi hearings in Congress. But for a few days the what of the news was obvious and inescapable, so Fox’s unique perspective on the world could only express itself in the how.

Some of the difference in coverage has been on the detail level and is easy to filter out if you’re aware of the various networks’ points of view. When police would start moving in on demonstrators, for example, Fox would report as fact whatever they were hearing from police — that, say, shots had been fired from the crowd — while MSNBC would stick closer to what they could see (police moving in), express ignorance as to why it was happening, and then later report what police were saying (shots were fired from the crowd) as a claim they couldn’t verify. Whether you were pro-demonstrator or pro-police, you could watch either network and make a good guess about what the other was reporting.

But there has been a much more subtle, harder-to-compensate-for difference in the way each network answers the fundamental question: What are the demonstrations in Ferguson all about?

On Fox, the answer to that question is very simple. Demonstrators in Ferguson are reacting angrily to a single, one-of-a-kind event: White police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old, Michael Brown. That restricted context drives the rest of their narrative.

The apparent mystery. Like any good narrative hook, Fox’s omission of context creates a mystery: Why do so many people in Ferguson care so much about that particular event? Of course, Michael Brown’s family would be upset, and even Fox’s audience can cut them some slack if they want Officer Wilson nailed to the wall. But what about all those other people on the street night after night? It’s safe to say that most of them never even met Michael Brown. Why were they giving up their evenings and risking arrest or worse?

Once you have that question in your head, several answers suggest themselves: Maybe they’re all just crazy. Fox’s resident psychologist, Dr. Keith Ablow, says “the psyche of the community” deserves as much investigation as the actions of police.

Or maybe most of the protesters really don’t care about Brown, and the demonstrations are just an exciting thing to do in a boring town. At night on the streets, you’re where it’s all happening. You might even get on national TV. That’s the interpretation Fox correspondent Steve Harrigan was promoting when he described the demonstrations late Monday night as a “media event” and “child’s play”. (In response, he got cussed out on camera by one of the black “children” he was demeaning: “We go through this shit every day,” the young man reported. Harrigan did not follow up on that observation.)

An even more sinister solution to the mystery evokes racial stereotypes that Fox doesn’t need to spell out. A hint is enough: Maybe these young black men are just wired for anarchy and violence. The Brown shooting was nothing more than an excuse for doing what they’d do all the time if police weren’t stopping them. And once you raise the stereotype of the lawless black savage, the incidents of looting take on a significance far beyond their number or the number of people responsible: This isn’t about Brown or the police at all, it’s about grabbing some free liquor or a new pair of Air Jordans.

In addition, the why-do-they-care mystery leads right into a question Fox raises at every opportunity: Why do blacks only go to the streets about white-on-black cases like Brown and Trayvon Martin, when black-on-black violence [see endnote 1] kills far more people? How street demonstrations could prevent black-on-black violence is a question they never address. (Demonstrations speak to governments and the national electorate, and have little effect on criminals or hot-headed youth.) But Fox presents the Brown and Martin demonstrations as pointless anyway, so why shouldn’t there be equally pointless demonstrations against black-on-black violence instead?

Second, restricting your attention to that one context-free event makes the crowd look like a lynch mob. Why are they so sure Officer Wilson wasn’t justified in shooting Brown? Why can’t they wait for the investigative process to play out? And why can’t they cooperate with police now to keep the peace?

And finally, the mystery-framing makes the politics of the situation look purely venal. How outrageous it seems that liberals — they must be liberals — are exploiting the Brown shooting to register Ferguson’s black population to vote!

What makes Fox’s frame so convincing to its audience is that you can feel well-informed inside it. You can know how many people were arrested each night and which stores they looted. You can learn details of the shooting (though anonymous leaks from police will be reported more authoritatively than eye-witness testimony from black citizens). You can learn statistics about black crime in America. You can know just how rare police killings are compared to drug killings or other black-on-black murders. You’re not ignorant; you’re a walking storehouse of the kinds of information MSNBC would never tell you.

But in spite of that well-informed feeling, you don’t understand what’s really going on, because Fox is leaving out key background information and then beginning the story in the wrong place. The right story begins not with Officer Wilson’s bullets, or even with Michael Brown in the convenience store, but with a community where lesser forms of police abuse are an everyday occurrence.

Start by asking. Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie did what Fox reporters (or most individual whites) hardly ever do: ask the black community what they’re concerned about and listen to their answers.

Talk to anyone in Ferguson and you’ll hear a story about the police. … Everyone—or at least, every black person—can recall an incident. Everyone can attest to friends and relatives who have been harassed, assaulted, or worse by the police.

The right story begins here: A majority-black community feels abused by its almost entirely white police force. [2] And complaining to the white-dominated local government does no good. (As a report from Arch City Defenders spells out, the town of Ferguson gets significant revenue from assessing fines against poor people.)

If you start there, the narrative takes a completely different path. When a policeman shot Michael Brown six times on a city street in broad daylight in front of witnesses, the Ferguson community was not shocked (the way I would be if one of my white friends were gunned down by police in my majority-white town). Quite the opposite, this was the kind of incident they found all too believable, given the police behavior they see all the time.

So the reaction we’ve been seeing on the streets isn’t “OMG! How can something like this happen?”, it’s “This shit has to stop.”

No mystery. So it’s no mystery at all why people who never met Michael Brown have been out on the streets. Brown’s death is part of a bigger issue that they all have a stake in: How can the police be gotten under community control, and disciplined to treat the community with respect?

Their tactics are also no mystery: When the political process is unresponsive, the streets are the only communication channel left. Trayvon Martin’s mother is supposed to have said, “If they won’t hear us, make them feel us.” And Ja’han Jones put it more aggressively on Salon: “What if being peaceful won’t change a thing?”

As far as Officer Wilson is concerned, the crowds are not rushing to judgment, they are speaking from experience. Yes, police act this way, and the result is always the same: If the incident isn’t ignored completely, it is shunted into an opaque “process” in which eyewitnesses are ignored and no quantity of physical evidence is sufficient to bring charges. Ferguson police have shown every indication of wanting to go that way: keeping back relevant information as long as possible, smearing Michael Brown, responding to protests with even more excessive force, leaking bogus “facts” that support Wilson, and arresting reporters.

What’s rare about the Brown shooting isn’t the shooting itself, but how visible everything is: The body was lying in the street for hours. The eyewitnesses have been on TV. Nothing in the autopsy or other available evidence contradicts their testimony. If the police don’t have to answer for this, then what are the limits? Is there anything they can’t sweep under the rug?

Once you understand where the story really starts and what it’s really about, then the whole detour into black-on-black crime is revealed to be “the politics of changing the subject“. Other than corpses, the two issues have nothing in common. It’s like asking Sean Hannity, “Why have you spent so much time on the four Americans who died at Benghazi when tens of thousands of Americans die in car accidents?”

My reality and theirs. Demographically, I look more like a Fox viewer than a Ferguson protester. I’m white, over 50, and have an above-median household income. I barely notice when a police car goes by, and when I have had occasion to deal with my local police — usually because I approached them with a question — they have been unfailingly polite. When I arrange to meet people socially or promise to be somewhere, I don’t allow extra time for the possibility that I might be stopped and frisked, or taken down to the police station and questioned about some crime I never heard of. That kind of stuff never happens to guys like me.

If I did find myself in an unexpected and unpleasant run-in with police, it would feel like snow in July. My instinct would be to wait it out until polite normality re-asserted itself. So I could easily follow the advice of LAPD’s Sunil Dutta:

if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long? … Save your anger for later, and channel it appropriately. Do what the officer tells you to and it will end safely for both of you. We have a justice system in which you are presumed innocent; if a cop can do his or her job unmolested, that system can run its course. Later, you can ask for a supervisor, lodge a complaint or contact civil rights organizations if you believe your rights were violated. Feel free to sue the police! Just don’t challenge a cop during a stop. [3]

Great advice for me, but I don’t believe it has much to do with the reality of places like Ferguson, or even parts of Dutta’s own Los Angeles.

What if I weren’t a middle-aged middle-class white guy? What if police abuse is normal in my experience? What if I’ve cooperated before, and before, and before that … and the stop wasn’t “complete in minutes” and I got tased, pepper-sprayed or worse anyway? What if I “saved my anger for later” and the appropriate channels laughed at me? What if I have dead or injured friends whose attempts to cooperate didn’t “end safely”, and other friends who weren’t “presumed innocent” in court, and are now in prison on sketchy or manufactured evidence?

What’s your advice for me then, Officer Dutta?

What your Fox-watching uncle doesn’t get. The frustrated citizens of Ferguson are pursuing a plan that makes sense: Wait for an incident so egregious that it can’t be swept under the rug, and then get out on the streets in large numbers. Tell your story to the country, put your political leaders on the spot, and show the world how “justice” works in your town. Shine a spotlight on the usual shadowy self-investigation process, and dare the powers-that-be to work their usual trickery in front of a national audience.

That plan might not work — it didn’t work in Florida — but what more likely plan have you got for them? They can’t just be quiet and wait for justice to be served. They’ve got to do something.

Because “we go through this shit every day”, and that shit has to stop.

[1] Reason‘s Steve Chapman asks:

Most crimes are committed by males, but we don’t refer to “male-on-male crime.” Whites in the South are substantially more prone to homicide than those in New England, but no one laments “Southerner-on-Southerner crime.” Why does crime involving people of African descent deserve its own special category?

[2] Unlike Bill O’Reilly, Ferguson residents aren’t giving police credit for all the people they stop and don’t kill. What’s up with that? And what about the 3/4ths of the people police across the nation kill who aren’t black?

[3] This advice was funnier when Chris Rock was giving it.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (20)

The Ferguson Test

August 18, 2014 – 9:37 am

This week’s events in Ferguson have tested all of us, not just police and politicians.

In a classic South Park bit, Stan’s Dad is on Wheel of Fortune. The category is “People Who Annoy You”, and the letters showing are

N-_-G-G-E-R-S

The solution is naggers, but Mr. Marsh is so overwhelmed by the horror/forbidden-pleasure of saying “niggers” on TV that he can’t think of anything else. Watching for the first time, neither could I. Surely no TV-game-show puzzle could have niggers as its solution, but it instantly jumps to mind anyway. And once you’ve had that thought, calmly running through the other vowels to find a more probable solution doesn’t seem like an option any more.

By the time he blurts out “Niggers!”, Mr. Marsh even seems proud of himself for having found the courage to overcome political correctness and speak the truth as he sees it. But it isn’t truth. It’s just an idea that shines so brightly in his head that he can’t see any alternatives.

That’s how unconscious racism works.

Stan’s Dad is not an I-hate-black-people kind of racist, and undoubtedly he would be offended to be described as any kind of racist at all. In most ways, he’s a fairly typical middle-class white parent. He didn’t wake up that morning thinking, “I’m going to say ‘nigger’ today, and don’t let anybody try to stop me.” He knows what attitudes and behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable in today’s society, and he does his best to pretend that his mind really works that way.

But it just doesn’t. Whatever his conscious intentions, his mental reflexes have been passed down from another era, when racism was as common as air.

Reacting to presidents. Earlier this year, I described how unconscious racism figures in people’s responses to President Obama. Being president and living in the White House has always been a pretty sweet ride. Protocol requires everyone to defer to you. Wherever you go, no expense is spared to keep you and your family comfortable and safe.

The public has known and accepted this for a long time. The President symbolizes the United States, so of course the Kennedys or Reagans or Bushes should be treated with utmost respect. But when the First Family became black, all that luxury and deference suddenly looked different. Why were the Obamas lording it over us like this?

So, those white folks who didn’t even notice when Reagan’s or JFK’s feet were on the desk, but who see Obama’s and think “He was raised so badly.” — are they also secretly thinking “Who does that uppity nigger think he is, acting like he’s a real president or something?” Maybe a few here or there, but mostly no. They aren’t consciously hating Obama because he’s black. But they can’t look at a black president the same way they looked at the 43 white presidents. Things just look different when Obama does them.

And once the thought “Why are the Obamas lording it over us?” pops into your head, it’s genuinely difficult to back up and think: “Wait a minute. Are there other ways to look at this? Would I be interpreting the situation this way if he were white?” In fact, not voicing that bright and shiny “truth” feels like cowardice. The racial influence is long forgotten: Who does this Obama guy think he is, acting like he’s President of the United States or something?

Unconscious racism in the police. At this point, we don’t really know what Darren Wilson was thinking when he killed Michael Brown, sparking more than a week of civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. But we know that there’s a long history of police officers reacting differently to black citizens than to whites. Ezra Klein put it bluntly:

Incidents of excessive force are commonplace, and increasingly, there’s a list of young black men who have died for no other reason than that they ran into a police officer at the wrong time and in the wrong way.

Earlier this month, for example, 22-year-old John Crawford was killed by police in a WalMart in Ohio. After he picked up a realistic-looking air rifle from the shelf, another customer called police about an armed man in the store. Crawford was talking to his girlfriend on the phone when police demanded he drop the weapon. While he tried to explain that it wasn’t a real weapon, they killed him.

By contrast, white open-carry activists have been showing up in public places like Target or Home Depot, prominently displaying actual deadly weapons. None of them have provoked a similar misunderstanding. In Aurora, Colorado (site of the 2012 movie-theater massacre) an 18-year-old white man was carrying a shotgun down a public street. When stopped by police, he argued with them and refused to turn over the gun or show any ID. They let him continue on his way, gun in hand.

Most of this disparity, I suspect, is unconscious. I sincerely doubt that Crawford’s killers went to work that morning thinking, “I hate those young black bucks. I’m going to shoot me one today if I get the chance.” But police have to deal with emergency situations that may require quick action. Somebody seems to have a gun and people might be in danger — do you calmly talk him down or go in shooting? There may be no time to work through a checklist and make an objective decision; you have to go with your gut.

But what if your gut is prejudiced? What if seeing a young black man in an emergency situation is like seeing N-_-G-G-E-R-S on the puzzle board? One possibility — that he’s a dangerous criminal and innocent people will die unless you shoot him right now — pops to mind and blots out all others.

The Ferguson test. “This is a test,” Missouri Governor Jay Nixon said. But it’s not just the people of Ferguson or the police or Nixon himself who are being tested this week. It’s all of us. As we watch events unfold, in how many ways do they just look different because of race? How hard is it to back up, re-examine our initial framing, and ask ourselves what we’d be thinking if race were not a factor?

The Ferguson police as an organization. Looking at their initial treatment of the Brown shooting, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Ferguson police didn’t think killing a black teen-ager was a big deal, or that his family or the community deserved any answers about how it happened or who did it or why. Shielding the shooter appeared to be the paramount concern.

When protests did erupt, police seemed to see only the public order and safety issues rather than the community relations issues. Instead of working with community leaders to balance public safety concerns with the public rights of assembly and free expression, police attempted to dictate to the community, and to enforce their edicts with overwhelming force.

The fact that the police version of the shooting was at odds with the accounts of eye-witnesses, including at least two who did not know Michael Brown, did not seem to bother them. Witnesses and the family’s private autopsy (results of the police autopsy haven’t been revealed) paint the picture of an intentional, unnecessary killing: shots aimed at Brown’s back while he attempted to run away, and then more shots after Brown turns with his hands in the air. After interviewing one witness, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell assesses her testimony as a description of first degree murder, and the legal experts on his show agree. And yet the officer has not been arrested or charged with any crime at all.

When police finally released Wilson’s name, they simultaneously released video of Brown apparently stealing cigars from a convenience store. That video has no relevance to the legal case — officers can’t shoot down suspects trying to surrender, no matter what they are suspected of doing — but it did have public relations value. It fed the storyline that focuses on black lawbreaking and violence to the exclusion of police misconduct.

Political leaders. It was obvious early on that local officials in Ferguson were making the situation worse, and yet higher authorities were slow to intervene or comment. The swing voters in Missouri are rural or suburban whites, and Governor Nixon has been careful not to look too pro-black. You have to wonder: If police were treating a white community like an occupied war zone, and if large numbers of local whites and their elected representatives were protesting, would it take that long to get a response?

Media. Some reporters are doing their best to get the facts out and portray them fairly, but it is far too easy to treat Ferguson residents as one big black blob. If there is looting and violence, then the citizens of Ferguson are violent looters. No wonder police are shooting them in the street and riding around in tanks and paying no attention to their concerns. Let them stop breaking the law and then maybe we’ll listen to them.

It’s hard to imagine a white community getting this kind of treatment. Whites who break the law are typically presented in the media as aberrations. Often they are portrayed as crazy loners, even when they belong to groups that promote precisely the kinds of crimes they commit. If you’re a law-abiding white homeowner with complaints about your local government, you stand very little chance of being lumped together with thieves and vandals who live in your neighborhood and also happen to be white.

Again, maybe a few journalists or TV personalities are thinking, “Here’s a chance to smear blacks”, but I doubt that’s the primary motivation. I think rioting black ghetto is another one of those bright shiny notions. Get it in your head and it’s hard to get it out.

Also, I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into the comment that we shouldn’t “jump to conclusions” because “we don’t know all the facts” or “we don’t know what really happened”. If several white eyewitnesses gave consistent accounts of excessive force by a black police officer, would we be instructed to ignore them in the same way? Or does the fact that the witnesses are black make it easier to discount their testimony? Does the whiteness of the police chief make his version more authoritative?

All of us. We can blame the police for laying out self-justifying and community-diminishing narratives, and we can blame the media for promoting them. But why do we fall for them?

And I do mean we. Like Randy Marsh, I was raised at time when racism was common as air. When I take a step back, I can see the effects of that training in the way my pre-conscious processes shape the perceptions that my conscious mind then wants to treat as facts.

Situations involving black people just look different. Their lives seem less consequential, their deaths less tragic. When I hear of their misfortunes or the injustices they suffer, part of me is waiting for the explanation of how they brought this on themselves. Their stories and testimonies are easily discounted. The thought, “I need to do something about this” does not arise on its own, unless the something involves defending myself and other respectable white people. A crowd of blacks easily stops being a collection of individual humans and becomes a malevolent unit. I expect violence and lawlessness, and when it appears it dominates the picture I see. “Well, there you go,” I think.

I can see how unfair those thoughts are, when I take a step back. But it’s so easy not to.

Unitarian Universalist minister Meg Riley writes:

As a white person in the U.S., I am conditioned from birth to see whiteness as safety — white neighborhoods, white people, white authority figures. My lived experience, my conversations with people of color, and my study of history have shown me over and over that this is a wild and cruel perversion of the truth. But the cultural conditioning is strong. Unless I fight it every day, white superiority seeps into my brain in slow, almost undetectable ways.

A lot of whites get offended by the suggestion that America is a racist society. They know that the vast majority of whites are not KKK-style racists, actively plotting evil against non-whites. (Some are, of course, but it’s not fair to judge the many by the misdeeds of the few — at least not when we’re talking about whites.)

My point is: We don’t have to be KKK-style racists. We can maintain a racist society quite well just by letting our minds do what they do: assemble age-old stereotypes into the narratives we’ve been hearing all our lives.

We can do that, or we can “fight it every day”. I invite you to take the Ferguson Test and see how you’re doing in that fight.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (23)

Ta-Nehisi Coates Goes There: Reparations

May 26, 2014 – 10:47 am

The wealth gap between blacks and whites is the direct result of centuries of policy. Why should using policy to fix it be unthinkable?

Wealth is off limits.

For as long as I can remember, the idea of paying reparations to African Americans has been the boogyman in any discussion of race. Just say the word reparations in any room with more than one white person, and rational discussion ends. And if you can tie any other program to reparations — affirmative action, food stamps, whatever — rational discussion of that ends too. That’s what Rush Limbaugh meant to do when he invoked reparations in an attack on ObamaCare:

This is income redistribution. This is returning the nation’s wealth to its quote/unquote “rightful owners”. This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations — whatever you want to call it.

He didn’t go on to explain why that would be bad, or even why blacks aren’t really the “rightful owners” of more than they own now. He didn’t have to explain, because reparations are literally unthinkable: Just say the word and whites stop thinking.

So The Atlantic‘s senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates was throwing down a gauntlet this week when he wrote the current cover article “The Case for Reparations“: Approve of them or not, reparations are not unthinkable. Here’s the argument. Think about it.

Coates’ article is very good and very long, and you should absolutely read it rather than just my summary of it. (Second best: Watch Bill Moyers interview Coates.) But judging from the comment thread on even a relatively liberal site like The New Republic (not to mention Free Republic , where the most popular reparations offer is “25 grand and a plane ticket back to Africa”) a lot of people are struggling very hard to continue not thinking about it. Rather than engage any of Coates’ arguments, they are going off in response to that one offending word.

In “How to tell who hasn’t read the new Atlantic cover story” NPR’s Gene Demby quoted this Adam Serwer tweet:

How to Read TNC’s piece on reparations: 1. Read the title. 2. Stop reading. Do not read past the title. 3. Explain that racism is over.

So before you react, at least understand these two things about Coates’ article:

  • It’s not just about slavery.
  • He’s not saying, “All you white people need to send me a check.”

What it’s about. Coates’ argument is that the wealth gap between whites and blacks in America has a simple cause: Throughout American history, blacks have been systematically cut off from the sources of wealth. It started (but didn’t end) with slavery: Black labor cleared the forests and drained the swamps to create those southern plantations, and black labor built the planters’ mansions, but after the Civil War all that black-created wealth stayed with the whites. The first reparations proposal — forty acres and a mule — would have been simple justice for the people who built the South, but it never happened.

Instead of restoring some of the Confederacy’s wealth to the people whose labor had created it, or even just starting blacks at the bottom and letting them work their way up, it wasn’t long before whites instituted a new system for building their wealth with black labor. In a story told at length by Douglas Blackmon in Slavery By Another Name, blacks in the post-Reconstruction South were blocked from owning land, preventing from leaving, forced back into exploitative relationships with whites, and denied access to the courts when they were cheated. Tens of thousands were literally re-enslaved: convicted of bogus crimes and sentenced to hard labor for a white employer. This lasted well into the 20th century.

Blacks who managed to succeed in spite of the system were often the targets of white violence. Today the words race riot evoke thoughts of black uprisings in the 1960s — Watts, Detroit, etc. — but white race riots against blacks had been going on for a long time: New York in 1863, Louisiana in 1873, Atlanta in 1906, Chicago in 1919, and many others. (Add to that the 3,446 blacks who died in lynchings between 1882 and 1968.) Two riots in particular — Greenwood, OK in 1921 and Rosewood, FL in 1923 — destroyed entire black communities that were thriving and building wealth for their citizens.

In a story told at length by Ira Katznelson in When Affirmative Action Was White, blacks were largely cut out of the mid-20th-century New Deal and Fair Deal programs that created the white middle class. Even the benefits of the G. I. Bill were constructed in such a way that blacks had difficulty taking full advantage.

Coates talks at some length about real estate discrimination. Legally until the mid-1960s and practically for some time afterward, blacks were allowed to buy homes only in certain neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Administration considered those neighborhoods high-risk and refused to insure mortgages in them. Banks followed that lead with red-lining, refusing to issues mortgages at all on those houses. Blacks who wanted to own their own homes were forced to buy on contract from brokers who frequently cheated them.

For most middle-class American families in the post-World-War-II era, home ownership was a wealth-building tool that the government subsidized through mortgage insurance and mortgage-interest tax deductions. But that tool was not available to many black families.

Red-lining concentrated urban blacks in a few neighborhoods. And — surprise! — those neighborhoods often had poor infrastructure and bad schools, a pattern that continues to this day. They are also over-policed, resulting in blacks being far more likely to go to jail for minor crimes (like smoking pot) that whites commit equally often. This story is told at length in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

Taking it personally. On the surface, I have a good case for claiming that this all has nothing to do with me: My family never owned slaves, hired convict labor, or profited from real-estate scams targeting urban blacks. I was a working-class kid who entered the professional class on his own merit, by getting an education that led to a high-paying job.

But look again. My town’s public high school did well by me. I went to a state university in an era when tuition covered only a fraction of the cost. My Ph.D. was paid for by the National Science Foundation. So, sure, I worked for what I have. But I also had help every step of the way.

Now consider: What if my family had been red-lined into a neighborhood with crummy schools? Maybe I never step on that educational escalator to begin with. And what if generations of hard knocks had hammered home the point that even when people like me work hard and play by the rules, somebody just invents a new rule to take it all away from us? Under those circumstances, do I really stick it out all the way to a Ph.D? Or do I grab the first shiny career-bauble that shows up?

Finally: My sister and I just sold the small farm that our grandfather bought in the 1920s. For each of us, that sale put the capstone on a retirement plan. And why shouldn’t it? Grandpa took a risk and worked hard, and my father worked hard after him. Why shouldn’t we benefit?

But family lore tells of a crisis during the Depression. Failing crops weren’t paying the bills, and new bank loans were out of the question now that Grandpa’s $22K farm was appraising at $8K. Fancy footwork by a friendly lawyer stalled foreclosure long enough for a New Deal farm-loan program to become available. Would those breaks have gone in our favor if we were black? Or would the white lawyer have shrugged and the white federal bureaucrat have moved our application to the bottom of the stack? Maybe. And then our family would have lost the farm — totally legally and by the rules — and had to start over in our attempt to accumulate wealth. If I complained about that circumstance now, what would people tell me? “Well, you gotta pay your debts. Your grandfather should have known that.”

As I’ve describe at length elsewhere, the point of that what-if fantasy isn’t to make me feel guilty, and in fact it doesn’t make me feel guilty; it makes me feel lucky. It gives me a more accurate assessment of my success. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper elaborates:

I think what motivates the worst responses to Coates’ piece is … a resistance to being labeled a racist. And that is missing the point. His article is not a personal critique; it is a structural one, which ought to minimize some of its personal sting. Structural racist outcomes (mostly) aren’t the fault of white people alive today; they’re about the foundations of society and the legacy of history. Such analysis isn’t about making white people feel guilty, it’s about providing countervailing structural pressure to right past wrongs.

Why we’re not fixing it. In order to understand where Coates is coming from, you need to appreciate where we are: The Supreme Court believes that any government action for the specific purpose of benefiting blacks (or any racial group) is unconstitutional. To the extent that affirmative action still exists, it has to claim other justifications. (A racially diverse classroom provides a better educational experience, a racially diverse police force can relate to the community better, and so on.) Legally, reparations are the dirty secret of affirmative action. If a program is caught trying to fix the racial injustice of American history, it is thought to violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.

That legal situation is reinforced by the political situation: Even colorblind attempts to deal with America’s underclass, or to make life easier for the poor (even the working poor), are undercut by the politics of white racial resentment. If you want to campaign against food stamps or the minimum wage or Medicaid, all you have to do is suggest that this is really a racial transfer from white makers to black takers. It’s no coincidence that Arkansas is the only state of the Confederacy to accept Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare, while all but four Union states have. (And two of those are still on the fence.)

If you ask, whites will explain that if black oppression happened at all, it is ancient history. We have said this in every era. In 1837, Senator John Calhoun argued that slavery was a benefit to blacks:

Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled as they have been, to its present compara­tively civilized condition.

In 1883, the Supreme Court explained why further civil rights laws were unnecessary, now that whites had ended slavery through “beneficent legislation”.

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.

And in 1896, the Court saw the problem of segregation as existing mainly in black psychology.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

I could go on. The Brown decision leveled the playing field in 1954. Or maybe the civil rights legislation of the 1960s leveled it. The election of Obama proved it was level. And so on down to John Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act last summer by simply saying “Things have changed.”

In every era, whites claim that we have done everything justice demands, and that any remaining problem is due to some inherent black inferiority of either biology or culture. And then a few decades later we realize that wasn’t true then, but it certainly is now.

What Coates wants. In his Atlantic article, Coates doesn’t put forward any specific plan, beyond endorsing a perennial bill by John Conyers to study reparations.

the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced.

Coates fears that the details any specific reparations proposal will become the issue, and allow whites to jump right past the question of whether reparations are justified in principle. And so the history of “multi-century plunder” will continue to be ignored.

But he also wants more than just a hearing or an apology, as he makes clearer in his Moyers interview. What he proposes is not personal reparations — trying to figure out what each individual is owed and cutting them a check — but a reorientation of public policy that holds the history of white supremacy in mind. (As a successful American, Coates expects that any tax increase to pay for this would hit him as well; quite the opposite of expecting me to send him money.) Rather than run away from policies that disproportionately benefit blacks, if we were looking for a way to make reparations we would consciously embrace such policies. We would recognize that black poverty and other social dysfunctions in the black community are not just specific examples of the general problem of poverty or social dysfunction. They are unique problems with a unique history, and they exist because they were created by public policy.

[W]e would not have to retreat to other language like quote unquote class. We would say, no, no, no, this is about white supremacy. And we have a problem with this. And we have had a problem with this for a long time. And we need to be conscious of that in our policy. When we pass a stimulus budget, for instance, we need to specifically think about helping people who have been injured in our past, because they’ve occupied a certain place in our country.

And when the Limbaughs charge that ObamaCare amounts to reparations, there could be simple response: Good.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (12)

No, Donald Sterling Isn’t the Victim

May 5, 2014 – 9:14 am

Wednesday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced his response to the recordings in which L. A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling makes racist statements: Sterling is fined $2.5 million and banned for life from interacting with the Clippers or any other NBA team. Silver can’t force Sterling to sell his team, but he says the other NBA owners collectively can, and he’s going to ask them to do so.

Trust Fox News’ Megan Kelly* to address the side of the story the liberal media doesn’t want to face: Isn’t the rich white guy the real victim here?

The question is whether the deprivation of his property rights — in terms of his ownership rights of a sports team … of basically taking away his livelihood, is a slippery slope. … Is this the future of America, where private conversations between two people who are supposedly in a relationship wind up going public and then somebody who makes clearly inappropriate remarks (to put it charitably) has everything taken away from them?

In this telling of the story, Sterling is the victim of two injuries: the original invasion of privacy, and then the reaction of the NBA commissioner, which might force Sterling to sell his team.

In response, I would paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: An NBA owner has a constitutional right to be a racist, but he has no constitutional right to be an NBA owner.

The invasion of privacy is definitely an injury, but it’s the kind of thing that has been happening to public figures (and occasionally non-public figures) for some time, usually without negative comment from Kelly. Just this week, there was another Rob Ford crack-smoking video. Remember the rant Alec Baldwin left on his daughter’s answering machine or when he was recorded yelling homophobic slurs at paparazzi? Or Mel Gibson? John Kerry got in trouble this week because someone leaked a recording of a closed-door meeting. Both Romney and Obama had trouble with secret recordings. The whole ACORN sting video was based on secret recordings (which were then edited to make them sound worse). Linda Tripp secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky. ESPN’s Erin Andrews was filmed naked through a hotel-room peephole, and let’s not even get into all the sex tapes and nude photos of ordinary people that have become public without their consent. (Here’s an example of someone who really lost her livelihood.)

I’m happy Megan Kelly has finally noticed this issue, now that there’s a racist billionaire to defend.

But “property rights” is a complete red herring. First, the obvious: Being forced to sell something is not the same as having it (or “everything”) taken away from you. Sterling will get a good price for the Clippers and continue to be a billionaire. His “livelihood” is not at stake.

Second, an NBA team is not an independent business like a barber shop or a diner. The NBA is a cartel, not a collection of independent businesses, and the value of the Clippers comes from its membership in the cartel, not its potential earnings as an independent basketball team. The cartel has rules that the owners have agreed to. If we start defending Sterling’s right to do what he wants with his team, regardless of what the league agreement says, then we’d also have to defend the other owners’ right to do what they want with their teams — like refuse to schedule games against the Clippers, making Sterling’s team more-or-less worthless.

There’s a reason sports teams are called “franchises”. You may own a McDonald’s franchise, but if you bring shame to the McDonald’s chain, I’m sure they have a way to get that franchise away from you. Same thing here.

In addition to shame, Sterling is bringing labor problems to the NBA.

Players’ union Vice President Roger Mason Jr. said Tuesday he spoke to representatives from every playoff team about the possibility of boycotting the upcoming postseason games in solidarity against any ruling that didn’t include a mandate for Sterling to sell the Clippers.

The NBA is 76% black, and the idea that the white (but for Michael Jordan) owners don’t respect them because of their race must always be in the background. In addition, Sterling’s remarks made it clear that he has a paternalistic view of ownership in general. Asked about his players, Sterling said:

I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? … Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game?

The players don’t earn their money — much less earn money for Sterling — Sterling “gives it to them”. This is straight out of Atlas Shrugged, when John Galt tells the workers at Hank Rearden’s steel mill:

Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of [a medieval] blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

So players are threatening work stoppages, sponsors are pulling out, and fans are protesting. In the lingo of another famous cartel — the Mafia — Sterling’s continued ownership is “bad for business”. The other bosses need to take him out.

* Kelly was the first one to draw my attention, but in fairness Sterling-as-victim has been a popular topic in the conservative media. See also Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, John Hinderaker, National Review …

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (4)

More Than Just Affirmative Action

April 28, 2014 – 10:57 am

The Court has decided to trust majority rule to defend minority rights. That didn’t work very well the last time.

It’s hard to appreciate this week’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action without knowing about a case from the 19th century.

The Civil Rights Cases. In 1883, just a few years after Union troops stopped occupying the states of the former Confederacy, the Supreme Court ruled on five cases it combined into the Civil Rights Cases (Wikipedia, text of decision). Eight justices ruled unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in “accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement”. The Court said that Congress had overstepped its power, because the 13th and 14th Amendments only gave it “corrective” power to reverse state laws that denied blacks their civil rights. Congress couldn’t legislate directly to guarantee those rights.

And then the Court went on to make a more sweeping statement:

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.

In other words, if the former slaves needed this kind of protection, they should seek it from their state governments, the way white people would. No doubt that sounded very reasonable to most whites, even most Northern white liberals: Slavery was over; the former slaves were citizens now; they should avail themselves of the protections the law had made for other citizens.

But Douglas Blackmon observed in Slavery By Another Name that things didn’t quite work out that way.

Civil rights was a local, not federal issue, the Court found. The effect was to open the floodgates for laws throughout the South specifically aimed at eliminating those new rights for former slaves and their descendents. … [A] declaration by the country’s highest courts that the federal government could not force states to comply with the constitutional requirement of the equal treatment of citizens, regardless of race, opened a torrent of repression.

As reasonable as it may have sounded at the time, from the perspective of history the Civil Rights Cases decision was the opening bell for the Jim Crow era. Due process and equal protection under the laws had become pro forma rights; if a state preserved certain outward appearances, it need not provide any real equality. Or, more accurately, the state continued to have a moral obligation to provide equality, but the federal government had no authority to enforce that obligation. The lone dissent of Justice John Harlan (not to be confused with his grandson, John Harlan II, a 20th-century Supreme Court justice whose opinions figure as precedents in this week’s ruling) was prophetic:

[I]f the recent amendments are so construed … we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master.

Harlan also was the lone dissent in the 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision that enshrined separate-but-equal. He deserves to be more famous than he is.

Michigan. Now let’s talk about this week’s decision, Schuette v Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. Like most race cases these days, there has been a back-and-forth that makes the underlying principles hard to sort out: Until 2003, the University of Michigan used race as a consideration for admission to both its undergraduate program and its law school. That year, the Supreme Court ruled on both: It threw out the undergraduate system in the Gratz decision but upheld the law school system in Grutter.

Both cases hung on the same issues, and Justices O’Connor and Breyer were the swing votes. Previous cases had identified only one interest that could justify affirmative action by a state university: the overall educational advantage provided by a diverse student body. In other words, the state couldn’t favor one race for the simple purpose of giving that race an advantage, but it could decide that a diverse student body provides a better education for everyone. (Imagine studying the Civil War in an all-white classroom versus a classroom where other races are represented. Probably the discussions would be very different, and a university might legitimately decide that the mixed-race classroom experience is better.) But the Court insisted that the particular plan to promote diversity had to be narrowly tailored for that purpose, rather than resembling a racial quota system. The law-school plan passed muster under the narrowly-tailored standard; the undergraduate plan didn’t.

But Michigan’s anti-affirmative-action groups weren’t satisfied with a split decision, so in 2006 (as a direct response to Grutter), a referendum added an amendment to the Michigan Constitution banning “preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” in education, hiring, or contracting by the state or any public institution under the authority of the state. Overall, the amendment passed with a clear 58%-42% majority, but the exit poll showed major demographic splits: White men voted for it 70%-30%, while non-white women opposed it 82%-18%. If you work out the numbers, the entire margin of victory came from white men (42% of the electorate), while everyone else split almost evenly.

So you wind up with two separate levels of dispute: affirmative action itself, but also the limits of democracy. In other words, if the majority doesn’t get its way for some reason, under what circumstances can it change the rules?

The Political Process doctrine. The history of the Civil Rights movement since 1883 has been a story of the white majority changing the rules whenever the black minority seemed about to rectify some disadvantage. If the 15th Amendment gave blacks the right to vote, poll taxes and literacy tests could take it away, while grandfather clauses protected poor or illiterate whites from disenfranchisement. If Arkansas couldn’t keep blacks out of Little Rock’s Central High, the governor could shut the school down. Slavery By Another Name is about how Southern whites circumvented the elimination of slavery itself by inventing bogus crimes that blacks could be convicted of and then sentenced to hard labor.

The Supreme Court cases on race — from the Civil Rights Cases to Brown and beyond into enforcing Brown‘s requirement of integrated schools — revolve around the Court’s increasing realization that it couldn’t deal with state and local governments under the assumption of good faith. The white majority simply did not want blacks to receive due process and equal protection under the laws, and any high principles announced by the Court would be examined for loopholes rather than implemented.

As a result, the Court evolved what came to be called the Political Process doctrine: If a minority achieves one of its goals through the ordinary decision-making process — courts, school boards, elections, etc. — and the majority responds by changing the rules to move the decision to a different body where the minority will lose, that rule-change deserves special scrutiny from the courts. If there was no compelling reason to change the process beyond frustrating the minority, the change is invalid.

Justices Sotomayor, Ginsberg, Scalia, and Thomas all agree that the Political Process doctrine applies to this case. Sotomayor and Ginsberg want to invoke it to invalidate the Michigan constitutional amendment, while Scalia and Thomas want to take this opportunity to reverse the doctrine entirely. The plurality opinion (written by Justice Kennedy, and joined by Roberts and Alito), is another example of something I complained about two weeks ago: covertly reversing decisions without appearing to do so. After Schuette, the Political Process doctrine is dead. While it remains as a precedent, it’s hard to imagine a situation where it could be invoked.

And that development has consequences beyond affirmative action.

The opinions. The plurality opinion (representing Kennedy, Roberts, and Alito) was written by Justice Kennedy. If you’ve been reading the Sift since last summer, you know I don’t think much of Justice Kennedy’s writing style and the muddled mind it seems to represent. (Lower court judges seem not to know how to apply Kennedy’s rulings, which tells you something.) I suspect that’s why the Chief Justice chose Kennedy to write this opinion rather than doing it himself. Any judge who tries to invoke the Political Process doctrine in the future will have to glean some principles of application from Kennedy’s opinion; probably they will just throw up their hands and decide the case on some other basis.

Kennedy reminds us that “It cannot be entertained as a serious proposition that all individuals of the same race think alike”, that there are no clear legal standards for determining the interests of a racial group, or even of defining who is in or out of the group, and so on. If the Court allows that there are racial interests that prevent rule changes, race might be dragged into any number of issues in order to freeze the process in place.

In short, if racial majorities decide to act in bad faith, judges are simply not clever enough to catch them. Kennedy concludes:

Democracy does not presume that some subjects are either too divisive or too profound for public debate.

as if anyone had ever made that claim.

Scalia’s dissent (joined by Thomas) is painful to read, because as he gets older, Scalia is less and less able to pretend that he respects anyone who disagrees with him. So his opinions increasingly contain more attitude than law. But at least he does go through the relevant precedents, explaining why they were all wrongly decided. I would love to hear Justice Scalia’s opinion on the Civil Rights Cases, or whether rule changes that disadvantage a minority should ever be thrown out by the Court. Most of all, I want to hear how he will square all this with what he rules in the upcoming Hobby Lobby case, where the minority seeking protection is abortion-opposing Christian employers.

Justice Breyer’s concurrence shows more honest inner conflict than any of the others. He wants to support both the democratic process and minority rights, but has to come down on the side of democratic process.

the principle that underlies [the Political Process doctrine precedents] runs up against a competing principle, discussed above. This competing principle favors decisionmaking through the democratic process. Just as this principle strongly supports the right of the people, or their elected representatives, to adopt race-conscious policies for reasons of inclusion, so must it give them the right to vote not to do so.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (joined by Ginsberg) is as long as all the rest put together, probably because she alone is arguing that the Court needs to pay attention to nuance. Like Scalia, she takes the precedents seriously, but she wants to apply those precedents rather than reverse them. She also thinks the Court needs to consider where the Michigan constitutional amendment fits in the long history of changing the rules to short-circuit minority victories.

As a result of [the amendment], there are now two very different processes through which a Michigan citizen is permitted to influence the admissions policies of the State’s universities: one for persons interested in race-sensitive admissions policies and one for everyone else. A citizen who is a University of Michigan alumnus, for instance, can advocate for an admissions policy that considers an applicant’s legacy status by meeting individually with members of the Board of Regents to convince them of her views, by joining with other legacy parents to lobby the Board, or by voting for and supporting Board candidates who share her position. The same options are available to a citizen who wants the Board to adopt admissions policies that consider athleticism, geography, area of study, and so on. The one and only policy a Michigan citizen may not seek through this long-established process is a race-sensitive admissions policy that considers race in an individualized manner when it is clear that race-neutral alternatives are not adequate to achieve diversity. For that policy alone, the citizens of Michigan must undertake the daunting task of amending the State Constitution.

But that point of view lost. As in last summer’s Voting Rights decision (in which Chief Justice Roberts announced the profound legal principle that “things have changed”) the history of racism and racial progress in America is not considered relevant by the Roberts Court. Going forward, the Court appears ready to assume good faith on the part of the white majority. Let’s hope it works out better this time.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (5)

Cliven Bundy and the Klan Komplex

April 28, 2014 – 8:50 am

Why the rancher’s racist rant shouldn’t have surprised anybody

If you’ve been paying attention to the Cliven Bundy situation at all (as I started doing last week) you no doubt heard that Wednesday night he went off script in front of a New York Times reporter:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Reactions varied. Bundy’s own first reaction was to claim he had been misquoted — “I didn’t say nothing about picking cotton” — until Media Matters released the video of him saying it.

Mainstream Republicans who had made a hero of Bundy — Rand Paul and Sean Hannity in particular — claimed to be shocked, and dropped the rancher like a hot rock. But the true believers promoted a smeared-by-the-liberal-media theme. InfoWars posted a longer version of the video that it claims vindicates Bundy: “his argument is actually anti-racist in that it laments the plight of black families who have been caught in the trap of dependency on government.” (I invite you to click through and examine the larger context for yourself. I don’t think it vindicates much of anything, probably because I already see the “dependency on government” meme as a racist dog whistle. I mean, we all know who those dependent-on-government people are, don’t we? We’re not talking about my white mother depending on Medicare to pay her hospital bills.)

One of the best responses came from satirist Andy Borowitz, whose invented quotes nail the hidden meaning of the mainstream Republican reaction:

“We Republicans have worked long and hard to develop insidious racial code words like ‘entitlement society’ and ‘personal responsibility,’ ” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “There is no excuse for offensive racist comments like the ones Cliven Bundy made when there are so many subtler ways of making the exact same point.”

Fox News also blasted the rancher, saying in a statement, “Cliven Bundy’s outrageous racist remarks undermine decades of progress in our effort to come up with cleverer ways of saying the same thing.”

If you hear someone saying that Bundy just wasn’t “politically correct” — or that the problem is “an old man rancher isn’t media trained to express himself perfectly” —
that’s what they really mean: It’s fine to imply that slavery wasn’t so bad and to characterize black people receiving government assistance (i.e., all of them) as lazy and promiscuous and criminal, but you have to use the right words, like Paul Ryan did in March:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work. There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

Ryan presumably does have some media training, so he didn’t say Negro or mention slavery or picking cotton —  and it’s those words (and not the ideas behind them) that make Bundy’s quote racist, right? Ryan criticized the “culture” of the “inner city” rather than black people, so his comment couldn’t be racist — “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” he said afterward — even though everybody knew who he was talking about and what he meant.

By contrast to the apparent shock of Sean Hannity, liberals mainly expressed surprise that anybody would be surprised by the discovery that Bundy is a racist. Matt Yglesias found it “clarifying” that Bundy had gone off on race “because race has not been far from my mind since the story first hit the papers.”

On Bill Mahr’s Real Time, Daily Beast editor John Avlon explained:

The reason it’s predictable is that we’ve seen a pattern, especially at a time when the face of the federal government is an African-American. The association with racists is becoming the black lung disease of the conservative movement. It’s an occupational hazard. … You start seeing a pattern and at some point you’ve got to confront it: “How come we keep making common cause with racists?” Maybe it’s got something to do with some of the appeals they’re making.

Rachel Maddow did the best job of laying that pattern out: Much of what Bundy had been saying all along were the kinds of bizarre ideas that are not themselves racist, but are way more popular in white supremacist circles than anywhere else. (It’s like an accent; you don’t have to be Canadian to end a question with “eh”, but if you do you probably are.) Rachel drilled down into the history of one particular strange notion: that county sheriffs are the ultimate in legitimate legal authority. Bundy had been urging his own county sheriff to disarm the federal agents, as if the sheriff’s authority were paramount. (In 2012, a fringe candidate for sheriff in my own Hillsborough County, NH professed a similar view of the job he imagined himself to be running for. He lost.) Rachel chased that notion back through the 20th-century Posse Comitatus movement, and from there back to the Southern resistance to Reconstruction in the 19th century.

Something I’m just beginning to appreciate is how influential the Southern anti-Reconstruction movement that birthed the KKK has been in forming the ideas that are still running around on the extreme Right. If you want initiate yourself into this mindset, I recommend reading Thomas Dixon’s 1905 best-seller The Clansman: a Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which inspired the 1915 movie classic The Birth of a Nation, and whose themes were still echoing in 1936’s Gone With the Wind. Dixon drops you into a world where the Klan are the good guys. Evil Washington politicians have conspired with corrupt and rapacious local blacks to upend the natural order and create a black-dominated society. Unable to take any more, the noble Southern whites arm and organize themselves into a freedom-seeking secret society, the KKK. Once they do, the fundamentally cowardly black troops that Washington has tried to stand up against them scatter like nine-pins.

This “historical romance” has essentially nothing to do with the actual history of the KKK, which from the beginning was focused on terrorizing blacks out of claiming their rights.

But there’s a configuration of ideas we might call the Klan Komplex — a combination of Lost Cause mythology, John Calhoun’s* misinterpretation of the Constitution and miscasting of the Founders, love of guns, and hatred of the federal government — that survives to this day in radical right-wing fringe groups. Today many of these ideas sound like nonsense to outsiders, but the whole Komplex makes sense if you picture yourself as a defeated Southern aristocrat watching victorious Union troops side with your former slaves against you, and looking to the heroic knights of the KKK to restore you to your rightful dominance.

  • The federal government is illegitimate, having grossly exceeded the authority legitimately granted by the Constitution. Government officials have no claim to represent the American people.
  • The Founders were divinely inspired men whose vision has been betrayed.
  • The true federal government was an agreement among the states, and had no direct authority over the American people.
  • The Founders intended states’ rights to be paramount and the federal government to be weak.
  • Slavery in the old South was a benevolent institution. Through slavery, African savages were civilized and taught Christianity. They were treated well by their masters.
  • Slavery is the worst thing that can happen to a white man. Any time the federal government forces a white man to do something he doesn’t want to do, he is being enslaved.
  • Federal taxes are confiscation.
  • The federal government has corrupted blacks by removing them from the benevolent authority of whites and giving them goods that it has confiscated from whites. Blacks are addicted to these government handouts, and through that addiction the government dominates them more completely than their masters ever did.
  • The United States was founded to be a white Christian nation. Non-whites and non-Christians have been generously allowed to settle and prosper here, but now they are illegitimately taking over.
  • States can nullify federal laws.
  • States have the right to secede, and the South was right to do so.
  • The Second Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights so that citizens could overthrow the federal government if it exceeded its authority.
  • The vast armament of private citizens is the only thing that keeps the federal government from establishing tyranny. Armed citizens ready to revolt against the federal government are the true American patriots.

The three-percenters are fighting a new American Revolution.

Those ideas are not related to each other in any logical sense, so it would certainly be possible to believe a few of them without the others. But they originated together in the defeated South and have spread through the same channels ever since. As a result, although lots of people believe one or two of these ideas, if you hear more than a few of them from someone, probably you’ll eventually hear all the rest. When well-armed white men are rabidly opposed to the federal government and talk at length about their love of their own freedom, chances are excellent that they will eventually start waxing nostalgic about slavery, as Cliven Bundy did.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone.

* I keep meaning to write a longer article on the seminal influence of Calhoun on the Right. (Sam Tanenhaus has already done one, but I have a different take.) Whenever right-wingers talk about “the Founders” or “the Constitution” in ways that make no historical sense, they are probably invoking John Calhoun without realizing it. Calhoun re-interpreted (i.e., misinterpreted) the Founders in a way that allowed Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate secessionists to claim that they were the true heirs of the Revolution. In particular, Calhoun cast the Constitution as a confederation agreement among the states (similar to the Articles of Confederation it replaced), ignoring that it begins “We the People” rather than “We the States”.

Combining freedom-loving rhetoric with a positive attitude towards slavery goes back to Calhoun’s 1837 Senate speech “Slavery a Positive Good“. Slave-holding founders like Washington and Jefferson had been ambivalent about slavery, regarding it as an evil but not willing to support any of the schemes to end it. (Jefferson described slavery as holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Lincoln’s campaign platform that slavery should not be extended the territories — the cause of the South’s secession — was originally Jefferson’s idea.) But by the 1830s, abolitionism had progressed to such a point that Calhoun foresaw the slave system’s destruction unless the South full-throatedly defended it as good. Already in the first paragraph, though, he uses slavery as a vision of horror, if it should happen to white people.

[E]ncroachments must be met at the beginning, and those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves.

So Calhoun urges Southern whites to stand up to the abolitionists, lest they metaphorically become slaves of the North. But he holds literal slavery to be a good thing, when it happens to an inferior race like the Africans. That fundamental hypocrisy has been with us ever since.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (19)

Rights Are for People Like Us

April 21, 2014 – 11:53 am

Those high-flown principles put forward by the militiamen defending Cliven Bundy’s rights … do they apply to anybody else?

The best summaries I’ve seen of the conflict between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal Bureau of Land Management are from the local St. George News and the Washington Post. Cutting it down somewhat: the BLM charges that Bundy has been grazing his cattle on public land without paying grazing and tresspass fees for 20 years. (They got their first court order telling him to stop in 1998; he ignored it.) The claimed fees now amount to over $1 million, and so April 5 the BLM started seizing some of Bundy’s illegally grazing cattle.

Self-appointed defender of Freedom.

Armed militiamen who support Bundy started gathering at a camp on April 10, and on April 12 the BLM backed down after what the Las Vegas Review-Journal described as “a 20-minute standoff … [w]ith rifles pointing toward each side”. The BLM released a statement:

Based on information about conditions on the ground, and in consultation with law enforcement, we have made a decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public.

The Bundy Ranch blog described the scene like this:

The result was a group of Bundy’s family members and supporters making a slow advance on a line of armed agents who kept ordering them to halt. At one point, the protesters were even told “one more step and you’re dead,” but the group kept coming, eventually walking easily through the line of federal agents and SWAT members who obviously didn’t have the courage of their convictions. According to InfoWars, the BLM had already announced it was leaving, but the county sheriff refused Bundy’s demand to disarm the federal agents and return his cattle. Within about a half hour, the cattle were released from the federal pen.

In other words, federal agents tried to enforce the law, were met with armed resistance from a mob, and decided to temporize rather than start killing people. On the extreme Right, this was celebrated as a victory for Freedom. Bundy’s son said, “The people have the power when they unite. The war has just begun.”

And the mainstream Right went along. The Powerline blog wrote “Why You Should Be Sympathetic Toward Cliven Bundy” while admitting “legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on.” National Review‘s Kevin Williamson made “The Case for a Little Sedition“, saying

Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too

Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano described the BLM (and not the miltiamen) as “a group of thugs dressed in military uniform with loaded M16s pointed at a rancher and his family.” Fox News produced this sympathetic segment, in which National Review editor Rich Lowry described the resistance as “in the finest American tradition of civil disobedience going back to Henry David Thoreau.”

To me, the Bundy incident has captured much of the basic sickness of conservatism in America: The rhetoric is full of high principle, but it’s hard to find any actual principle that would apply to anyone other than People Like Us — people like the people who belong to the conservative fringe.

It’s tempting to characterize this kind of thing as racism. Certainly that’s what the NYT’s Timothy Egan is suggesting with:

If you changed that picture to Black Panthers surrounding a lawful eviction in the inner city, do you think right-wing media would be there cheering the outlaws?

But it’s more subtle than that. Probably a black man who behaved like a far-fringe-rightist in all other ways could become People Like Us and come to have similar “rights” recognized. But the Black Panthers are clearly not People Like Us, so it would be an absolute horror if they were to arm themselves and resist the law. Likewise, it would be a horror if a Hispanic militia decided to liberate one of Sheriff Arpaio’s detention camps for immigrants. If some miltiamen got killed in such an attempt, I doubt Fox News would lament about “government overreach”. The Occupy protesters weren’t People Like Us, so they could be thrown off public land with impunity. Imagine the outrage if Occupy had militarized Zuccotti Park!

One of the reasons Bundy is supposed to deserve sympathy is that “his family has been ranching on the acres at issue since the late 19th century”. You can imagine how far similar sympathy would extend if armed Native Americans were threatening to kill whites over land their people had been hunting and fishing on for thousands of years. Hispanics have been wandering back and forth across the Rio Grande for centuries, but if they do it today, we have to enforce the Rule of Law. If people get killed, well, so be it.

But not People Like Us. When we feel wronged and take up arms, everyone should sympathize, the government should show restraint, and the media should re-litigate our case to the general public.

A number of Bundy’s sympathizers are rehashing the bizarre claims he has made in court: that the federal government can’t own land inside a state, or that the federal government is itself illegitimate. Bundy repeatedly refers to the federal government’s ownership as “unconstitutional”, probably because his reading of the Constitution never got as far as Article IV:

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States

This is why we have courts, to adjudicate disputes like this. Bundy made his argument in court and lost. Most people don’t then get to appeal their case to the Court of Nuts With Guns. But People Like Us do.

Whenever Bundy supporters are given media time, I would like to see them challenged to state their position in such a way that they would support similar rights for people not at all like them and not already part of the conservative movement. And I’d like to see mainstream conservative pundits confronted with a different challenge: Are there any limits to what you will support if the people doing it are on your side?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (24)

Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor

March 31, 2014 – 10:28 am

One of the trick questions American History teachers ask their classes is: “When did slavery end?”

The answer that is both obvious and wrong is: with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which you might count either as 1862 (when it was announced) or 1863 (when it went into effect).

It’s a trick question because the Emancipation Proclamation by itself freed almost nobody. It only applied to the Confederate states (not the slave-holding border states that stayed in the Union), and those were precisely the places where no one was paying attention to President Lincoln’s proclamations. Those states had their own president, and he thought slavery was just fine.

The answer the teacher is probably looking for is: with the 13th Amendment, which (as the Lincoln movie dramatized) passed Congress in early 1865. The amendment is short and gets right to the point:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

It became part of the Constitution that December, when newly reconstructed Georgia became the 27th state to ratify it.

But in his 2008 Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Slavery by Another Name, (which in 2012 PBS made into a documentary that you can watch free online) Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Blackmon came a different conclusion:

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn’t end until 1945 — well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age.

The loophole. The reason slavery was able to last so long is that the 13th Amendment has a loophole. (Did you notice it? It went right past me.) The loophole is “except except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. So if you can rig the local laws and get the cooperation of the local law enforcement and court system, you can convict people of “crimes” pretty much whenever you want. Then they can be sentenced to hard labor, and the  state or county can auction them off to the highest bidder until their sentence (or their useful working life) is up.

That’s what happened across the South when whites regained control of state governments after Reconstruction. Vaguely worded laws created crimes like “vagrancy”, enforced almost exclusively against blacks. For other crimes like petty larceny or disorderly conduct, the say-so of a law-enforcement officer or a white “victim” was sufficient to convict, particularly after blacks were disenfranchised and banned from juries. For minor crimes, justices of the peace were empowered to assess fines without a jury, and when inflated court costs were added to a misdemeanor fine, the total was often far beyond any amount that a black worker could raise. He could then be sentenced to forced labor until the state or county recouped the debt through the “rent” paid by an employer. In this way, even a minor offense could result in months or even years of forced labor without pay, under whatever conditions the employer chose.

Instead of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure.

In the PBS documentary, Blackmon says the convict market was driven by demand, not supply:

In the fall, when it was time to pick cotton, huge numbers of black people are arrested in all of the cotton-growing counties. There are surges in arrests in counties in Alabama in the days before, coincidentally, a labor agent from the coal mines in Birmingham is coming to town that day to pick up whichever county convicts are there.

Industrial slavery. One of the arguments made by apologists for slavery — it goes back at least to John Calhoun’s 1837 speech to the Senate, “Slavery a Positive Good“, and you can still hear it occasionally today — is that the black slaves on Southern plantations were in fact treated better than the immigrant industrial workers of the North, whose bosses did not live side-by-side with them or care about them in the personal way that, say, Scarlett O’Hara cared about Mammy.

Reading Blackmon’s book, in which slaves are used in the mines and furnaces of Birmingham’s growing steel industry, you see that (to the extent that there is anything to it at all) this observation tells you more about the difference between agrarian and industrial society than about slavery. When you compare apples to apples, the evil of slavery is undiminished: Hired field hands in the North were treated better than plantation slaves in the South, and industrial slaves in the South were treated worse than free industrial workers in the North.

That was true even under the Confederacy, but post-Reconstruction industrial slavery was far worse: The slave was rented rather than owned, and so was treated as renters typically treat property. As historian Adam Green says in the PBS documentary: a leased convict could be “worked literally to death. … when [one] worker died, one simply had to go and get another convict.”

Green Cottenham. To give his story a face, Blackmon focuses on Green Cottenham, a Alabaman arrested for vagrancy in 1908 and sentenced to work for a subsidiary of U. S. Steel in the Pratt mines outside of Birmingham.

There he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every working hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of  other miners — many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. … Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12. Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.

Cottenham died of disease before his sentence was up and was buried in an unmarked grave near the mine.

Tip of the iceberg. It’s tempting to compare Blackmon’s 100,000-200,000 estimate to the four million slaves held at the start of the Civil War and see at least some progress. But leased convicts were just the extreme edge of a more general slavery.

Another common practice was for wealthy whites to pay the misdemeanor fines of able-bodied blacks, in exchange for a “contract” pledging to work for a specified period of time. Once “employed”, they were chained and subject to the whip. Often they were kept beyond their contract period, because they had no way to claim their freedom.

One level removed from this were the sharecroppers, who by contract could only sell their crop to their landlord, for whatever price he named. Typically they borrowed from the landlord to buy seed, and never got out of debt. Bankruptcy laws did not apply to them, and running out on a debt was illegal — and could result in being sold to work the mines in Birmingham. Similarly, if you worked as a house servant or in a shop, the name of your white employer was your only defense should the sheriff come looking for “vagrants” he could sell to U.S. Steel.

Freedom was largely an illusion, not just for the leased convicts, but for all blacks.

False dawn. All this was clearly against the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, but the Supreme Court held in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 that Congress had no authority to overrule state laws in this way. Effectively, the states could do as they liked, as long as they didn’t call it slavery.

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a U. S. attorney in Alabama who naively decided to enforce federal laws against “peonage” — slavery for debt. A federal judge took his indictments seriously, and a handful of whites were put on trial. But as it became clear that these were not isolated cases, and that truly enforcing the law would disrupt the entire economy of the South, the Justice Department lost its nerve. The attorney was re-assigned, the attorney general got another job, and the main defendant was pardoned without ever spending time in prison.

Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. entered World War II, the Franklin Roosevelt administration realized that the continued existence of involuntary servitude in the South undermined the propaganda war against the Axis. Less than a week after Pearl Harbor, Attorney General Francis Biddle issued a directive to all federal prosecutors instructing them to prosecute cases of “involuntary servitude and slavery”. Finally, the law would be enforced.

It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities.

Significance today. Taking this story seriously reframes the Civil Rights movement and the entire history of race in America. Those who marched with Martin Luther King were not just the grandchildren of slaves; some had probably been slaves themselves. Likewise, when the Supreme Court demanded the desegregation of schools in 1954 or President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the South was not a century past slavery, but only a few years.

In my previous posts about race, I have often run into comments about the long history of black crime, or comparisons to the Chinese, many of whom were also brought to America under forced-labor conditions in the 1800s. But that “long history” evaporates if the original post-slavery “crime wave” was actually instigated by whites seeking to re-enslave African Americans.

And no American race or ethnic group faced anything remotely resembling the black experience. Whatever hardships the Chinese or the Irish or any other immigrant group faced, once things turned around, they turned around. Only blacks experienced multiple false dawns, where rights were granted only to be later taken back or ignored. When today’s blacks look skeptically at authority or seem paranoid about the hidden intentions of whites, they are not reacting to the slavery experiences of great-great-grandparents they never met, but possibly of the parents who raised them.

In short: Slavery is a much fresher wound than most of us have been led to believe.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (36)

Are You Sure You’re White?

February 24, 2014 – 8:36 am

Daniel Sharfstein tells the story of three families who crossed the color line, and their descendents who forgot.

One of Dave Chappelle’s most memorable bits is his portrayal of Clayton Bigsby, a blind white supremacist who doesn’t know he’s black. Bigsby writes racist books whose readers also think he’s white. He lives in a remote area with few neighbors, and only appears in public in his KKK hood. A few white supremacist friends know the truth, but they keep the secret because “He’s too important to the movement.”

Bigsby is an exaggerated version of Mr. Oreo, a character created as a thought experiment by philosopher Charles W. Mills of Northwestern. Mr. Oreo was born to parents who identified as black and he appears black himself, but he has always thought of himself and described himself as white. At some point he goes through a medical process that alters his features, hair, and skin color so that he becomes indistinguishable from whites. Is he white? Or is there an unalterable underlying reality to his blackness?

According to professors who have discussed Mr. Oreo in class, students almost unanimously judge Mr. Oreo to be black. As David Livingston Smith explains in Less Than Human (his fascinating book on dehumanization, which devotes a lot of time to the belief that certain races are subhuman), our culture commonly believes that some personal traits are changeable (a weak man can go through a muscle-building process to become a strong man) while others, like race, are not.

We tend to think — perhaps in spite of ourselves — that black people constitute a natural kind, whereas weak people don’t. … We say a person has large muscles, but we say they are of a certain race. … A person can gain or lose muscle while remaining the same person, but we tend to think that if they were to change their race, it would amount to becoming an entirely different person.

Real life provides its own examples, some even more compelling than Mr. Oreo. In her 1949 autobiographical essay collection Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith recalls Janie, a white-skinned little girl taken from a poor black family newly arrived in the colored part of town. (They “must have kidnapped her”, the local whites decided.) Janie was brought to live with the Smiths, and Lillian fell into a big-sister role.

It was easy for one more to fit into our ample household and Janie was soon at home there. She roomed with me, sat next to me at the table; I found Bible verses for her to say at breakfast; she wore my clothes, played with my dolls, and followed me around from morning to night.

But in a few weeks, word came from a distant colored orphanage: Janie only appeared to be white; she was “really” black and had to return to the black family who had adopted her. At first, Lillian could not see the sense in this, but eventually she yielded to superior adult wisdom.

I was overcome with guilt. For three weeks I had done things that white children are not supposed to do. And now I knew these things had been wrong.

In The Invisible Line: a secret history of race in America, Daniel J. Sharfstein tells a more elaborate and challenging story, one that “has been hiding in plain sight” for centuries. He describes it as a “hidden migration”:

African Americans began to migrate from black to white as soon as slaves arrived on the American shore. This centuries-long migration fundamentally challenges how Americans have understood and experienced race, yet it is a history that is largely forgotten.

In earlier eras historians have acknowledged the passing-for-white phenomenon, but considered it virtually untraceable. After all, anyone motivated to pass for white was even more motivated to hide the evidence. But the genealogy boom (empowered by easy access to records over the internet and the possibility of analyzing your DNA for information about your ancestors) has unleashed thousands of amateur investigators and turned up many new cases. Lots of Americans are not as white as they think they are, and some are starting to find out.

Sharfstein traces three families who crossed the color line at different points in American history.

The Gibsons. Prior to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, race was not nearly as significant in Virginia as it later became. White indentured servants had more in common with the black slaves than with their upper-class masters, and mixed-race children were not unusual. The law classed a child as belonging to the same race as its mother. Gibby and Hubbard Gibson were mixed-race children of a white mother, and so were free. They moved inland, cleared land, and intermarried with the other frontier property-owning families.

As racial standards tightened generation-by-generation, the Gibsons stayed just on the favored side of the color line, and just far enough away from the race-conscious coastal cities that few cared enough to make an issue of their darker-than-average skin. They moved to North Carolina, and then to the wild western side of South Carolina. By the time they reached Kentucky and Louisiana in the 1800s, no one remembered that the family’s race had ever been an issue.

Gibson boys became officers in the Confederate Army, and Yale-educated Senator Randall Gibson of Louisiana played a key role in the negotiations that resolved the contested 1876 presidential election by trading Southern electoral votes for President Hayes’ promise to end Reconstruction. Randall also was a major player in the founding of Tulane University, convincing Paul Tulane to revise his bequest from “serve young men in the City of New Orleans” to “serve young white men in the City of New Orleans”.

A later generation married into the Marshall Field family of Chicago. As curator of the Field Museum of Natural History, Henry Field commissioned a series of sculptures illustrating over a hundred separate “races” for the Hall of Races of Mankind that opened in 1933. He had no clue he was anything but 100% European.

If anyone out there has media connections, I think The Gibsons would make a fabulous miniseries.

The Walls. Stephen Wall was a North Carolina plantation owner who never married, but fathered several children with his female slaves. In the 1830s he appeared to be selling his children to a plantation in Alabama, but in fact this was a ruse. Instead, a family friend delivered the Wall children to a Quaker settlement in Indiana, where Stephen provided resources for them to be raised and educated.

One of those children, O.S.B. Wall, was instrumental in convincing the Ohio governor to field a black regiment in the Civil War. He recruited black soldiers across the state and became a captain, though he arrived at the front too late to see combat. After the war, Wall moved to Washington, D.C., where he became part of a budding freedman aristocracy and held several positions in the local political machine.

But D. C. became one of the first places to disenfranchise blacks after the war. When the city ran into financial difficulties in the Panic of 1873, the federal government took direct authority over local affairs, shunting local elected officials aside for decades. When Democrats (who at the time openly identified themselves as “the white man’s party”) came to power with Grover Cleveland in 1884, white supremacy followed.

Captain Wall married a light-skinned woman, and his children found that they were frequently mistaken for white. His son Stephen married a white woman, but continued to identify as the son of a prominent leader in the black community, for all the good it did him. He was repeatedly let go from his job in the government printing office without cause, only to be rehired later. The final straw came when his indistinguishable-from-white daughter was barred from the public school in his suburban neighborhood, and he lost a series of court cases to have her reinstated, despite being legally in the right. (By prevailing definitions, Isabel’s black ancestry was sufficiently diluted that she should have been considered white. But whatever the text said, the spirit of the law was to protect white families from “falling” into the black community due to the discovery of an unexpected dark ancestor, not to allow a Negro man to marry a white woman and launch his children into white society.)

The family moved, changed its name to Gates, and began passing for white. Two generations later, Thomas Murphy (a “white” Georgian with considerable prejudice against blacks) got a nasty shock from his genealogy research. “You can’t call me a racist because I is one of you,” he told his black co-workers at the Atlanta airport.

The Spencers. Freed slaves had a hard time finding a place for themselves. Slave-owners viewed freedom as a contagious notion, so they didn’t want the freedmen around, and no state wanted to advertise itself as a destination for other states’ former slaves. For many, the solution was to go someplace without a lot of neighbors.

George Freeman and Jordan Spencer (who might been his son) were mixed-race freed slaves (of the white Spencer family) who settled in the hill country of eastern Kentucky in the early 1800s. They married sisters from a white family that passed through and left their daughters behind. When they ran into legal trouble from the local whites, Freeman stayed and hired a lawyer, but Spencer moved deeper into the wilderness. After he arrived in Johnson County, Kentucky, he didn’t exactly proclaim himself a white man, but he just started acting like one. White men, for example, were required to muster with the local militia and drill, while black men were forbidden to have weapons. Spencer showed up for drills, and nobody took it on themselves to tell him he shouldn’t.

At the time, even the South Carolina Supreme Court was recognizing the extent to which race was socially constructed. In an 1835 case, Justice William Harper wrote:

The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man. But his admission to these privileges, regulated by the public opinion of the community in which he lives, will very much depend on his own character and conduct; and it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.

The hill country was more focused on clans than on races, and over time the Spencers became just another clan, darker than most, but respectable in their way. Jordan’s children intermarried with other clans — some of whom were not too clear about their own ancestry — who then found it convenient to describe the Spencers as white, if they were forced to describe them at all.

Two generations later, slavery was gone and Jim Crow had begun. Suddenly, one provable drop of “black blood” might be all it took to find yourself on the wrong side of the color line. George Spencer had moved across the border to the hill country of western Virginia, where he was doing fine until a feud started with a wealthier family, who started spreading rumors that the Spencers were “God damned negroes”. A slander trial ensued, with detectives going back to Kentucky to interview old people about where Jordan Spencer might have come from and whether he anyone had ever suggested he might not be white. A jury found against the Spencers, but the Virginia Supreme Court threw the verdict out and the case was never retried. That was enough for the locals to go on treating the Spencers as white, maybe with an occasional wink or nod.

Summing up. We look back on American history and say that people (including our own ancestors) were “white” or “black” as if those words had some natural meaning that remained constant through time and space. But in fact, the lines between the races have fluctuated, and even the apparent rules have applied differently to one family than to another. Sometimes all you had to do to cross the color line was move somewhere new and let people make assumptions about you.

At all times in American history, being considered white has brought certain advantages, and in every generation there have been light-skinned people who didn’t see why they or their children shouldn’t have those advantages. Both sides of the racial divide have had reason to minimize this phenomenon. For whites, the fact that the color line was fluid and permeable undermined the whole concept of white superiority. For blacks, those who forsook their black heritage lent credence to the notion that African ancestry was something to be ashamed of. And those who crossed over had reason to hope no one would ever find out, including, perhaps, their own children.

But reclaiming the “hidden migration” has a role to play in ending racism and healing the racial divide. Not only is racial purity an unworthy goal, it is a myth. We have never had racial purity in America. We are a lot closer to being one big family than most of us ever suspected.

BTW, I thought I’d head off an obvious comment: I realize that this post’s title assumes the reader is white (or thinks s/he is). I ask the indulgence and forgiveness of the Sift’s non-white readers. No inclusive title I could think of brought the issue to a head quite so sharply.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (8)