The word “racism” is a convenient shorthand for the white supremacism which still rules our banks, corporations, real estate offices, schools, and government, along with the criminal justice system. But it carries connotations of “hate” and “prejudice” which can be misleading.
Donald Trump advertised his personal racism from the moment he descended his stupid gold escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for President in front of a cast of a few dozen extras who had been paid $50 each. He doesn’t think he’s racist because he loves being photographed with Black celebrities: Mike Tyson, Kanye West, Don King, and - of course - Omarosa Manigault. Trump even dated a Black woman in the late 90’s: a model, of course. If you want to know whether he believes African Americans to be capable of doing what he (stunningly and wrongly) believes he is capable of doing, look at the advisors he surrounds himself with. Also listen to his bizarre and tone-deaf appeals to “the Blacks.”
South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond may have hated Black people, but that didn’t stop him from raping his family’s 16-year old African American maid, Carrie Butler, when he was 22. He paid for college for their daughter Essie, a teacher in the LA Unified School District and a lifelong Delta Sigma Theta, but he never publicly acknowledged her.
Fans of the reality TV show Survivor will remember Colton from the 2012 “Survivor: One World” season. He famously called his Black tribemate “ghetto trash” and told him to get a real job. (Bill was a standup comic.) But Colton was very clear that he couldn’t be a racist because he was close to his Black housekeeper.
All of this is to remind you that, historically, the most powerful white people in America have not shunned contact with Black people… not at all. We look at the Jim Crow laws of the early 20th century and believe they were about a white distaste for physical proximity to African Americans. No. White families were happy to have Black people prepare and serve their food. They were happy to have them launder their clothes. If you think white people didn’t like to be near African Americans, you will have to explain why they were happy to have Black women nurse their babies.
The central and essential fact of white supremacist rule is power. It may be the power to exploit by underpaying employees. This was most certainly the reason for slavery, but it was also the reason for sharecropping and convict leasing. Offering disparate pay for the same work is still the practice today. And why do you suppose agricultural labor has always been exempted from minimum wage laws?
White supremacist rule may be the power to exploit employees by driving them into work that they would not otherwise choose to do. Even after the federal government passed equal opportunity legislation this was continued through exclusionary union practices. And please do not underestimate the power of immigration law - both creating special classes of work visas and denying visas to many absolutely-essential workers - to drive people into particular jobs.
White supremacy is the power to exploit people by overcharging them for rent because they are excluded from choosing to live wherever they want. It is the power to exploit people by overcharging them for goods because they have limited choices about where to shop.
Until the Civil War white supremacy was codified in the US Constitution as evidenced by the fact that a 14th Amendment had to be adopted in order to bring Constitutional protection to African Americans. In Scott v Sandford (60 US 393, 1857) the Supreme Court described “a class of people with no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That is not a hostile summary; those are the exact words of Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Court’s majority decision.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, white supremacy was carried out by terrorist attacks: assassinations of political candidates, shootings at polling places, armed coups d’etat. In Wilmington, NC, a mob led by the white business elite took rifles, shotguns, and a Gatling gun from the National Guard armory. They murdered several hundred Black political and social leaders, burned the offices and presses of the Black newspaper, seized control of the City Hall, and expelled their surviving political rivals from town. At least six members of that mob later served as North Carolina Governors; at least three as US Senators. One became Secretary of the Navy under FDR. And that is just one example.
In addition to political terrorism, white supremacy was reinforced periodically by periodic mass rituals. Lynchings were never “rough justice.” They were always spectacles meant to draw boundaries around and lift up whiteness. When 17-year old Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco, Texas in 1916 he had already been tried in a court and sentenced to death. 15,000 people came out on their lunch breaks (in a city of roughly 30,000) to see him beaten, chained, stabbed, hoisted by his neck and burned alive while the mayor and police observed. When Sam Hose was lynched in Coweta County, Georgia in 1899, two thousand people watched in a town of maybe 3500. Wannabe spectators filled trains to make the forty-mile trip from Atlanta, but they arrived late. Multiply these two examples by four thousand, because that is the number of lynchings of African Americans in the US between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. The detective who investigated the Sam Hose case concluded that the murder he was accused of was actually self-defense and that the rape simply never happened. The spectacle of lynching was calculated to show everybody - Black and white - that Black people had no rights that a white person was bound to respect. The insistence that the victims were “criminals” (regardless of the facts) will be familiar to anybody today who has seen the “he was no angel” trope that gets dragged out in every case of extrajudicial murder of an African American person in order to try the victims for their own murder. Another trope from that time which is still evident today was the bizarre stories in the local press after so many of these spectacle killings warning frightened whites about the possibility of armed African Americans coming to take revenge. The form this takes today is hysterical stories about demonstrations for justice “turning violent,” as if the actual killing wasn’t the turn to violence.
The other mass ritual of white supremacy was the so-called “race riot.” These were often urban phenomena in which mobs of white people invaded Black neighborhoods, with the cooperation of the police, to murder, burn, rob, beat, and rape. Frequently these pogroms1 followed propaganda campaigns in the local press about “crime waves.” That was coded language because the crimes referred to were those by Black people. Perhaps the largest such mass attack was in the rural countryside of the Arkansas Delta in 1919 where the white mobs - assisted by federal troops - killed hundreds of African Americans. Then they indicted 100 more in the courts and sentenced 12 to death by hanging. That massacre was triggered by the formation of a sharecroppers’ union to collectively seek fair settlements with landlords. The press campaign we are seeing right now about “lawlessness” (meaning gangland shootings in Chicago, demonstrations in Portland, and a tick up in the historically-low murder rate in New York) is directly analogous. Today, of course, anti-Black violence has been largely professionalized and assigned to uniformed agents instead of to mobs
In the first half of the 20th century, white supremacy was once again codified in the laws, although it had to be done by subterfuge. States incorporated poll taxes, literacy tests, and complicated rules for voting (eight-box laws) with the understanding that county clerks would enforce these in such a way as to selectively disfranchise Black voters.
You cannot understand this if you think a white majority discriminated against a Black minority. Most of the people in the states of Mississippi and South Carolina were African American until well into the 20th century. Twenty-six Mississippi counties, mostly in the Delta, are still mostly black; twelve in South Carolina, both in the Low Country and the Piedmont. The eighteen counties of the Alabama Black Belt remain majority-Black today. Seventeen counties in central Georgia have an African American majority. You get the picture. The white elite was disfranchising a Black majority. 90% of African Americans in the United States lived in the South until 1910. So the Jim Crow South was much more comparable to apartheid South Africa than most people are willing to acknowledge.
Control of elections was the essential backstop to all the other systems of social control. As I show above, the segregation laws were not there because white people didn’t want to be near Black people, they were meant to enforce a hierarchy placing all white people above all Black people. And segregation could neither be implemented or enforced in majority-Black communities without controlling the election of judges, sheriffs, and town councils. Those white courts and cops also made it possible for white people to cheat their Black employees, customers, and tenants with complete impunity. They made it possible to round up young men, charge them with spurious crimes, and put them to work for free on the roads, or rent them to farmers and mine operators.
That is why Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten nearly to death by police and prisoners under police orders in Winona, Mississippi. She had not only beaten a stacked deck by registering to vote; she was encouraging others to do the same. That is why Representative John Lewis was beaten nearly to death in Selma, Alabama. He had brought young people from all over to help with a forty-year long effort to register Black voters in Dallas County. That is why the Alabama State Police shot Deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson to death in Marion, Alabama. He was leading a march for voter registration in Perry County when the police clubbed his grandfather and his mother.2
The murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge gave enough attention to the issue of disfranchisement that Congress passed a bipartisan Voting Rights Act only five months later. It was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and cleared the filibuster attempts of its (bipartisan) opponents.
By 2013 both the political landscape and the Supreme Court had changed. In Shelby County v. Holder (570 US 529) the Court ruled that the law was based on forty-year old facts and declared it, therefore, to be an unconstitutional inference with the states’ administration of their own elections. But the swift and immediate introduction of new laws for voter suppression as soon as the Court announced its decision proved the exact opposite. Over one thousand polling places were closed in the next five years, mostly in Black-majority counties. Texas, Mississippi, and both Carolinas quickly passed voter ID laws, designed to discourage Black (and, in Texas, Mexican-American) voters. Racial gerrymandering is back, although it often masquerades as partisan gerrymandering because that is not illegal. Opportunities to register to vote have been eliminated in predominantly Black counties.
244 years after the Declaration of Independence, the US is still trying to suppress Black political power. Not everyone recognizes how that document already enshrined white supremacy, because it doesn’t actually mention Black people or slaves. But look closely. The main body of the Declaration is a bill of particulars against King George III for all the ways in which he was tyrannizing the signers. The last of these is relevant to this discussion. It begins, “He Has Excited Domestic Insurrections Amongst Us.” This is euphemistic language. Congress is actually complaining here that the King was inciting Black people to revolt. Immediately after the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, had the gunpowder moved from the armory in Williamsburg to HMS Magdalen in the James River. A series of crowds gathered at the Governor’s Palace to demand its return. He was initially able to reassure them that he had taken it to keep it out of the hands of rebellious slaves. When they realized that he was just saying the one thing that would frighten them more than disarming their militia, he threatened that if they tried to harm him he would “declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.” Representatives to the Continental Congress from Georgia and South Carolina expressed their fear of the same thing. Why couldn’t they just come out and say so? Maybe they were ashamed after their bold opening statement about “all men are created equal. Maybe they were reluctant to admit how much of their rebellion was about defending their ownership (and trade in) people.
1. The word “pogrom” originated in Russia (погро́м) in the early 1880’s to describe similar attacks on Jewish neighborhoods there. It was commonly used in the Black press at the turn of the 20th century to describe these “race riots” in the US.
2. It should surprise no one that State Trooper James Fowler claimed self-defense, saying he thought Deacon Jackson was “going for his gun.” It should surprise no one that he was not charged with Jackson’s murder until forty-two years later, and was sentenced to only six months, of which he served five. It should surprise no one that a year after murdering Deacon Jackson he murdered another Black man, this time inside a police station. It should surprise no one that Fowler again claimed self-defense, this time saying that Nathan Johnson “went for his baton.” It may surprise the reader, though, to discover that James Fowler served five years in a Thai prison for heroin trafficking.
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