Fear of a White Scholar
President Biden had a meeting with some historians. The horrors.
Sandhya Dirks’ NPR report “Historians advise the president. The problem? The scholars were all white.” makes an important point but frames it poorly.
When President Biden spoke on Sept. 1st, to tell the nation that democracy is in danger, his warnings echoed the words of many who have been paying attention. Especially those who study the past.
Not a month earlier, the president met with a group of handpicked historians who told him that democracy was teetering, hanging on by a thread.
After The Washington Post reported on the historians meeting, it didn’t take long for some to raise questions, not about the fact that democracy is in peril, but about the monochromatic makeup of those delivering that message.
It seemed the Biden administration had only invited white experts to advise the president — four historians and one journalist: Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, University of Virginia historian Allida Black, presidential historians Michael Beschloss and Jon Meacham, who is also an occasional speechwriter for Biden, and journalist and Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum.
Other than Black, of whom I’d never heard (more on her later), this is an august group. Offhand, I’d be more concerned with groupthink based on age and ideology than race.
But it wasn’t only the lack of diversity in that group, it was where that lack of diversity seemed to lead.
“They compared the threat facing America to the pre-Civil War era and to pro-fascist movements before World War II,” read the Post’s sub-headline.
Those comparisons leave out important parts of U.S. history that resonate today, says Kenneth Mack, a professor of law and history at Harvard.
“We don’t really have to look outside the United States, nor do we really have to look all the way back to the Civil War to think about things like voter suppression, demagoguery, and fascist tactics,” he says.
“We’ve had the death of democracy happen right here, in the United States,” says Mack. “African Americans experienced this directly.” He’s talking especially about the overthrow of Reconstruction, and all that followed, well up until the Civil Rights Movement.
Jelani Cobb, a New Yorker writer and the new dean of Columbia Journalism School, adds, “The formative experience around American authoritarianism has been the treatment of people of African descent and people of Indigenous descent.”
Cobb says the meeting missed the point.
If you don’t examine how democracy has died for people of color in this country, you might miss how freedom fades not in big bombastic moments, but in slow ongoing repression.
And if you exclude the voices of scholars and writers who understand an anti-democratic, fascist order as heritage, rather than an aberration, you might miss how democracy has before been pulled back from the brink.
“In having an all white room,” Cobb says. “you kind of replicate the kind of gaps in perspective that we’ve seen that have facilitated this problem in the first place.”
So, this is a very strong point. Except that not a single person in that room didn’t know that. Hell, I’ve known that for decades and I’m not only white but a non-historian. For that matter, I’m quite sure Joe Biden knows that. And, presumably, Kamala Harris and others were in the room as well.
The article continues in that vein:
Reconstruction was a bold plan to repair the wounds of slavery, and build out of the ashes of civil war a multiracial democracy. Rather than accept equality, it was violently overturned by Southern whites.
“At the turn of the century we lost everything,” says University of Connecticut Professor Manisha Sinha.
“It all went down the drain because of a very reactionary Supreme Court and because of state laws and local authorities who were willing to subvert elections and not allow people to vote.”
“Sounds familiar?” she asks.
There was rising white supremacist domestic terrorism, lynchings and the reign of the Ku Klux Klan, and what Sinha describes as “racist authoritarianism.”
In many ways, she says, “it’s exactly what is happening now.”
Both Sinha and Mack note that the past cannot just be grafted onto the present. But it’s important to understand how racism and white supremacy have always been at the center of threats to our democracy.
“If you talk to scholars of race, that’s the kind of perspective that you get,” Mack says.
Mack says he is glad the president is meeting with scholars to talk about the lessons of history. “The group that Biden had in was a very distinguished group,” he says.
“But the real question is, are there other people who would add to that discussion and enrich it and bring something that the people who were invited didn’t bring?
Again, I can’t imagine who in the room didn’t know this. I understood all of this before graduating high school. At some level, I understood it in 6th grade.
I’m also not sure what “scholars of race” means. Does it mean scholars, of any field, who are not white? Or does it mean scholars, of any race, who study race? Because I’d think the latter group way more valuable in this context than, say, a random Black mathematician or engineering professor.
Erica Loewe, White House Director of African American Media, told NPR in a statement: “Since day one, President Biden has regularly engaged with diverse stakeholders and community leaders who offer different perspectives on a variety of issues. As a result, he has consistently taken action to ensure personnel and policy decisions reflect the diversity of this nation.”
Of course he has.
We can not know exactly what the historians said to President Biden, or whether they talked at any length about reconstruction and the death of democracy.
But two of the historians appeared on TV afterword [sic-jhj] to talk about the meeting.
Both Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz and Presidential historian Michael Beschloss confirmed and reiterated the Post’s reporting on the two key moments in American history they picked to focus on — the lead up to the Civil War and the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Beschloss talked to MSNBC’s Jonathan Capeheart. “If we were living in 1940,” he said to Capeheart, who it’s important to note, is a Black man, “you and I would’ve said there’s a serious danger that America will not be a democracy.”
The “we” is telling; America at that time was already not a democracy for most Black people.
He didn’t mention that in the 1940’s many Black people already lived under authoritarian systems, like Jim Crow.
So, again, sure. And Beschloss understands that. But in the context of 1940, the United States was among the most democratic countries on the planet. Any database of world democracies considers 1940s America a democracy.
Beschloss pointed to a second reason that democracy felt perilous then, as it does now. “The Nazi Germans, the Italians, the Imperial Japanese — we’re living in a world where fascism is on the March,” he said.
But those rising fascist movements abroad borrowed heavily from America’s fascist tactics, from Jim Crow and America’s brutal treatment of Indigenous people. “A global thing,” says Manisha Sinha, “but homegrown in the United States.”
Wilentz also didn’t mention race and American history when he spoke with CNN. What he did say was the moments where democracy is at risk all have something in common — a crisis of legitimacy.
“The key to all of this is when the basic institutions of the country are being called into — the legitimacy of those institutions is being called into serious question,” he told CNN’s Michael Smerconish.
“That certainly happened before the Civil War and led to secession. The slaveholders’ rebellion in which they said, look, we don’t believe in your constitution. Your constitution is wrong.”
That was a moment when Southern whites rejected and questioned the legitimacy of the federal government. But across American history Black people and people of color have had a justified, deep distrust of American institutions.
Whose distrust and rejection of American institutions is Wilentz placing at the center of the story?
This is mostly nonsense.
First, while there are certainly some parallels between fascism and the violent resistance to racial integration after the Civil War, the roots of fascism are decidedly European and long predate that movement. Its antecedents are murky and contested but it was a fusion of many strains of anti-progressive movements that sprung up in France, Italy, and Germany long before the time of Mussolini or Hitler. The attempt retcon it as an outgrowth of American racist is absurd.
Second, while it’s again true that the current efforts to suppress Black voter turnout have parallels in the Jim Crow era, this time it’s part of a broader effort to delegitimate the entire process. Yes, there’s an argument to be made that a system where an entire race—let alone one which constituted a majority in a handful of states practicing Jim Crow—is anti-democratic, it’s one thing to attempt to stop a radical change in the understanding of American democracy (one that included all male citizens, not just whites) and quite another to reverse democratization that’s been in place for generations. Further, this time racial animus is really a sideshow: if Blacks were mostly voting Republican, the folks trying to suppress their vote would be investing heavily in trying to get them to the polls.
Third, that Blacks rightly distrust institutions that have failed them . . . really has very little to do with the current crisis.
Wilentz has a history of getting race and racism wrong, says Jelani Cobb. He points to an infamous piece, entitled “Race Man,” that Wilentz wrote in 2008. “Sean Wilentz said that Barack Obama had run the most racist campaign in modern American history,” Cobb says.
In the essay, Wilentz accused the Obama campaign of “the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton campaign ad in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadephia, Mississippi, praising states’ rights.” That announcement, just miles from where 3 civil rights workers were murdered by the KKK, was seen as a tacit nod by Reagan to white supremacists.
“Here we have this crisis which is shot through with racial elements and that’s the person in the room,” Cobb says. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”
This is pure distraction. I have no interest in litigating a March 2008 TNR essay but it’s rather clearly written in the context of the Democratic primary contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton. That any criticism of Obama was characterized as “racist” was a major talking point of the Clinton campaign.
Regardless, what in blazes does that have to do with Republicans refusing to accept election results and being willing to use violence to intimidate election officials?
Were I not blogging about it, I would have abandoned the essay before getting to this:
Scott Kurashige, executive director of the American Studies Association, says to really understand the past, and its role in the present, we must look to historians who study more than just those in power. There is value to the presidential historian who reads every scrap of paper a president wrote, he says. “But if that’s not paired with someone who’s analyzed the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the Black freedom movement, the movement of Japanese Americans for redress against incarceration,” you don’t have the full story.
It’s not enough to understand democracy is at risk, without learning from those who have borne — and still bear — the brunt of its loss.
“The people who’ve studied exclusion and people who’ve studied the struggle for civil rights and democracy for oppressed peoples have the biggest insights into how fragile democracy can be,” he says. They also have insight into something else, “What it takes to build a movement — what type of struggle, what type of sacrifice, what type of courage and determination it takes to obtain, and preserve democracy.”
I’m not absolutely sure I agree with this. But it’s a much, much stronger argument that “too many whiteys in the room.”
It’s perfectly reasonable to say that the middle-aged-and-older historians that constantly appear on television aren’t necessarily the best folks to consult on a given crisis. Most of these folks are generalists and presidential historians rather than social-cultural historians. Applebaum, who is a journalist rather than a historian, at least has some genuine expertise in authoritarian movements but, yes, it’s focused on the former Soviet space.
Which brings me back to UVA’s Allida Black. She’s most noteworthy as a biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, having written multiple books about her, but her expertise is more far-ranging. She has written “a variety of articles on women, politics, and human rights policy; led workshops around the world on human rights, conflict resolution, and women’s and girls’ empowerment.” Surely she’d be an asset in the conversation at hand?
Because if we have ample examples in our historical DNA for the death of democracy, we also have a blueprint for its protection, and rebirth. There were abolitionists who fought against the horrors of slavery in America. Then, after the failures of reconstruction and the imposition of a brutal system of Jim Crow, came the long fight for Civil Rights.
“It took lots of people, activists on the ground, working daily to reintroduce democracy in those parts of the United States where it had been taken away,” historian Kenneth Mack says. “And it was only reintroduced within my lifetime.”
The 1960’s struggle for equal rights was a massive movement led by Black people and people of color — people who maintained a stubborn belief in America’s promise as they pushed for a second attempt at reconstruction.
“I think it’s really important for us to remember that even as ordinary American citizens, you can actually push the pendulum of history,” says historian Manisha Sinha.
So, again, everyone in the room, including Biden, understands that. Let’s grant that Black scholars and those who specialize in the study of the civil rights struggle would have that more top-of-mind in their analysis. But here’s the thing: so what?
Biden is President of the United States. He’s trying to figure out how to respond to an existing crisis. One that could easily result in a more unified attempt to steal elections this coming November—two months from now—and certainly the next presidential election—two years and two months from now. Lessons from social movements that took decades to unfold may not be all that useful to him.
Whether his conversations with that particular group of white historians and journalists were of any use is a fair question. But I don’t see how recriminations over past racist struggles would be useful. Indeed:
People must push, Sinha says, but those in power must act. “The only time American democracy has been protected has been when the federal government has responded in forceful ways,” she says.
Biden has to act. Act . . . how?
The August historians meeting was not the only time President Biden hosted experts to learn from the past. Earlier this year he met with another group that included Annette Gordon-Reed, a Black scholar who studies race, law and history at Harvard. In previous speeches, Biden has compared today’s threats to voting rights to Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America.
But Jelani Cobb says it’s still concerning that this meeting of all white historians happened at all. Especially at the same time that there is a movement by Republican politicians to sensor and silence the histories of Black people and people of color across the United States.
The campaign to outlaw the teaching of America’s racist — and anti-democratic — past is not a coincidence, says Cobb. The same politicians who are pushing history into the shadows, are also pushing and promoting voter suppression laws pulled directly from that past. “What they are doing is effectively turning off the light switch,” at the moment we most need to be able to see, Cobb says.
Again, this is just absurd. Biden’s 2020 primary campaign was centered on the Black vote. He’s met with other groups of scholars, including Black scholars. One could argue that he should be prioritizing election reform efforts more than other policy initiatives but he’s certainly shone a light on the issue. The notion that a single meeting with a small group of white intellectuals somehow undoes all of that is, to say the least, baffling.
History after all, can be read like a map.
“There’s a map that will help us understand the moment we’re in, and we are plunging ourselves into complete darkness at that moment.”
History is a map, and an incomplete one at that, of the past. While it certainly has lessons to teach us about the present and future, it’s by no means a “map.”
Beyond that, Biden called the meeting in the first place because he already thinks there’s a crisis! While I’m quite sure that there are plenty of Black and other non-white intellectuals out there who could give him some good advice, he doesn’t need anyone to tell him that American democracy is in peril. He was the guy they were trying to steal the election from!
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Breaking news–
President Biden pays visit to zoo. While there, he only feeds white polar bears.
Good vs perfect. Biden has been the most inclusive President in history, by far.
It’s the kind of complaint that makes independents shake their heads (if they are paying attention). Yes, diversity and race is important, but it is one of many important subjects and considerations. This also makes me wonder what size of meeting requires a “quota,” because yeah, even my own white cis male self would notice if it was a dozen white men.
Great points, minor quibble – next election is 2 years away, not 4! [Fixed! – jj]
Every meeting has to have a black person? Kamala was there? So we need to have the right kind of black person? Seems a bit much. If we are going to insist that every meeting have 12% blacks, 17% Hispanics, 5% Asians, 1% Native Americans and the rest white (or whatever the current percentages might be) you arent going to have many meetings and sometimes that mix will be wrong.
Steve
White seems to be a stand-in for mediocre and middlebrow–just basically death of the establishment types. I don’t know anything about Allida Black, but the other four are just not useful. What Applebaum understand about American history she picked up after two drinks at a DC dinner party, Beschloss and Meacham are actually the same person, and Wilentz seems to be a boring Clinton-era crank.
They could have brought in Mike Davis, Adolph Reed, and Eric Foner and they would have told Biden something he wouldn’t have learned from a student doing well in AP History.
Let me note that while I think meeting with historians is good and all, but whether it is meetings like this or on TV chat shows, it irks me that historians are used when they really ought to be talking to political scientists as well (and more frequently). There is a weird tendency in America to treat historians like they are political experts (like the fact that a lot of states have students preparing to teach American civics take a bunch of HIS courses, but very little POL). I 100% agree that studying the past is important, and I am not saying they aren’t relevant, but they tend not to study the kinds of problems we currently have. (It often ends up being a weird rough analogy discussion, as noted in the OP).
Further, while I respect the work they have done, people like Michael Beschloss and Jon Meacham aren’t actually trained historians. They are authors who write histories for popular audiences.
Beschloss’ highest degree is an MBA. Meacham’s is BA in English lit.
@Modulo Myself:
Indeed.
@steve: Which stems from the ridiculous woke theory that every institution and endeavor must “look like” America. I just watched an exciting weekend of college football—it didn’t look like America. We don’t want it to look like America, we want it to entertain us and provide and environment for our testosterone heavy young men to grow productively.
With only 13% of the population there are not enough Adult working black people to make everything “look like” America. If anything it makes my case that we’ve had too many of our best and brightest stacked in sports and entertainment spheres and not actual spheres of power. That is changing but change is slow.
@Steven L. Taylor:
The people who end up on television are talking about history as narrative. Interesting academic historians do not. They bring in process, structure, and class–but these are just not considered a good idea to write about if you want your book to end up available in an airport. Overall, there are at least 300 people with podcasts who have a better idea of how to think about history than some journalists studying the lives of presidents, but the journalists end up on television because they’ve always ended up on television, and thus what they do is the public face of history.
@Jim Brown 32:
Well, football has changed drastically in the past 20 years, and there aren’t bitter-enders clinging to the power I and the stable 4 -3 defense because that’s what Woody Hayes was comfortable with and we aren’t hearing about how the woke are telling you it makes sense to go for it 4th and 4 in first half on your own 48.
@Steven L. Taylor:
While I definitely don’t think you need to have a PhD to be a public scholar, I do find the inclusion of two public scholars a little odd in this group. I do think that does support some of the critiques about the makeup of this panel.
Also 100% about the lack of a poli-sci (or other social scientists) in the room.
Also, James, in general, I agree with the thrust of the article. I do think that this passage in particular:
Obviously, she would be.
And her scholarship and the perspective it brings–which appear tied in part to her experiences/identity as a woman have most likely influenced her focus and the interpretive lens she applies–also demonstrates why having a Black or scholar from another minority group in the room would have been a good idea.
We all have analytical blind spots, getting folks from a variety of backgrounds can definitely assist with that. And the reality is while a scholar’s personal intersectionality isn’t all there is to that scholar (just like it isn’t all there is to anyone) it definitely has an influence (especially in the social sciences… and if you buy into Kuhn, the hard sciences as well).
@Jim Brown 32: Years ago I saw a poll that asked people what percentage each racial group occupied in the US. Everyone got the percentage of African Americans wrong. I’m stretching my memory here but I think whites thought blacks were about a quarter of the population and blacks thought they were a third.
Seems to me that everyone ignores the other major influence in American history: the role of religion, especially Christianity. There are lots of historical vectors to consider. So complaining just about race is just as blind.
@Modulo Myself: Exactly. Usually “historians” on TV and in meetings like this aren’t historians, but rather are writers who write about the past.
It isn’t the same thing.
@Matt Bernius:
To be clear, I agree.
I just have long-term frustration with the notion that someone like Doris Kearns-Goodwin is the go-to person (to pick a similar example) to explain contemporary politics. Tim Russert loved to put her on MTP so she could tell us all how Lincoln or FDR ran their cabinet as if that really tells us much about 21st-century governance. It just drives me a bit batty.
And yes: more social scientists of all stripes.
Everyone seems to be forgetting the needs of the student – in this case, Joe Biden. The student has very limited available time, and the student is not an academic. So the vast array of possible teachers is irrelevant. Biden needs it simple and easily-communicated. You know who does that well? The people actually chosen.
As to race, if the number of scholars was ten then and you had a single Black and a single Hispanic scholar, then by the numbers you have slightly too many Black and slightly too few Hispanic scholars. If the number is five, then you could argue for one Hispanic, but no more than that, and no Blacks, unless of course the Black scholar could also cover Asians, South Asians and Native Americans. I wonder if there would be any objections to that?
Then we have your different genders, different classes, different generations, different sexual orientations. . .
I guess if you want proper representation for all groups Biden is going to have to assemble about a hundred scholars to drone on endlessly about their own particular hobby horses. I hope he doesn’t have anything else going on. It’s gonna take a few years.
Or, here’s a thought: he could assemble a handful of popularizers who can give him an easily-digestible, consensus view and everyone else could STFU, stop grievance-mining and do something useful.
OK, fuck you edit. Yes, I know one piece of math is off, but the idea is correct.
Who cares?
After all the breathless, overwrought, establishmentarian handwringing about Biden being “partisan” and breaking primetime address norms while calling out MAGA Republicans, surely we’re just not going to skip over Trump proving Biden’s point witb his unhinged, semi-fascist Pennsylvania speech calling law enforcement “vicious monsters” to overwrought hangwringing about some rando’s obscure NPR piece?
Sure, Trump’s divisive calls for violence are going to get at least as much tut-tutting, finger wagging, and spilled ink from those who fetishize bipartisanship. Right? Right?!
@DK: a divisive post on divisiveness does seem a bit passive-aggressive.
If you want to learn about oppression, the methods of oppression and the motivations of oppression, then you need to talk to people who oppress on a daily basis — white men.
@Matt Bernius:
Is there some evidence that he hasn’t had any meetings with any political scientists during his tenure? I wouldn’t honestly know, but from my layperson sort-of-view, it seems like this particular meeting may have been for a particular point-of-view, not every point-of-view.
@Michael Reynolds: Points understood. I assure you, we’ve never concerned ourselves with your self-professed lack of math skills 🙂
@Steven L. Taylor:
You know how people with expertise in one field claim expertise in other fields?
Historians learn about many different political systems over time. Some may feel they know more about politics than political scientists based on that alone.
Now, I’m sure political scientists also study the histories of several political systems. Some of them might claim to know more about history than historians.
@Franklin:
It’s hard to be concerned for something which quite clearly does not exist. Like Jethro Bodine, my math ends at the gazintas.
I’ma show my cracker ignance right now by noting that, having read both the original post and the collected wisdom of the commentariat, I’m still not persuaded that the meeting wasn’t an exercise in collecting “serious” people who would tell Biden what he wanted to hear in advance of a nationwide
campaign speech* address.*About a serious and troubling issue? Absolutely. Still, nothing the President ever says in public is divorced from political content and study of the affects it will have on the campaign. Nothing. Ever.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes, this, please. And while we are at it, more anthropology experts as advisors when analyzing other cultures and how they will react to US policy. Imagine if there were a few anthropologists in the room when discussing the likely reaction of the people when we were thinking about invading Afghanistan / Iraq.
This is the kind of observation/criticism from the left that gets Republicans and MAGA’s elected.
Seriously, who in that room, in that meeting, does not understand the stakes? No one, nobody.
@Rick DeMent:
As the resident anthropologist on the blog, I nominate this for comment of the day.
And the anthropologists at the time did have a lot to say about this. Unfortunately, the bigger issue was that folks in the White House knew all the potential issues (Cheney famously raised them in a talk about eight years before) and ignored them.
@al Ameda:
That’s all it takes? Random comments from a nobody historian?
Yet blacks and gays have faced years of bashing and oppression, yet still somehow manage not to vote for forced birth, climate change denial, and semi-fascism. Go figure.
Republican and MAGA voters must be super duper fragile.
@Steven L. Taylor: You are correct about the credentials of Messrs. Beschloss and Meacham, but as a one-time PhD candidate in history, and later a teacher at a community college, crafting a clear and comprehensible narrative is indispensable to helping others come to a deeper understanding of the past.
@DK:
I’m not sure that Jelani Cobb, a guy who appears often is published in the NYT Op-Ed pages, is just another random historian