Thinking about the Past
Thoughts after reading Part 2 of the Reuter's series, "Slavery's Descendants"
So, about a week ago I wrote a post (America’s “Family Secret” or Just Plain Denial?) that was prompted by part one of a Reuter’s series entitled Slavery’s Descendants: The ancestral ties to slaveholding of today’s political elite. Part two of the series, “The Slaves Built That,” is about the research one of the project’s journalists did about his own family history. I commend the piece in full, and am not going to really talk about the piece itself, save to note the following excerpt as a launching-off point.
In researching his family’s history the author, Tom Lasseter, recounts the following history of the town where his grandmother and her ancestors had lived.
In 1912, Virginia native Woodrow Wilson became the first Southerner since the U.S. Civil War to be elected president. And the white residents of a county in Georgia, where my ancestors lived, unleashed a campaign of terror that included lynchings and the dynamiting of houses that drove out all but a few dozen of the more than 1,000 Black people who lived there.
The election was covered in the classrooms of the Georgia schools I attended. If the racial cleansing of Forsyth County was mentioned, I didn’t notice.
That history explains the difficulty I had looking for the descendents of the people enslaved by my ancestor Abijah. By 1920, their families and almost every other Black person had fled the county.
They were forcibly expelled under threat of death after residents blamed a group of young Black men for killing an 18-year-old white woman in September 1912. A frenzied mob of white people pulled one of the accused from jail, a man named Rob Edwards, then brutalized his body and dragged his corpse around the town square in the county seat of Cumming. Two of the accused young Black men, both teenagers, were tried and convicted in a courtroom. They too died in public spectacle, hanged before a crowd that included thousands of white people.
There were also the night riders, white men on horseback who pulled Black people from their homes, leaving families scrambling and their houses aflame. The violence swept across the county, washing across Black enclaves not far from the farm where my ancestor, Abijah, lived at the time.
In 1910, the U.S. Census showed 1,098 Black people living in Forsyth. Ten years later, the 1920 census counted 30.
Now, what strikes me about this bit of history is the part I emphasized above. This history is one that we do not systematically talk about, despite the fact that it was not unusual. I know for certain that we did not discuss things like this when I was in school in the 70s or 80s in either Texas or California. I do not think it was in my children’s experiences in Alabama in 2000s.
Nonetheless, this was not an isolated event. The photo at the top of the post is one I took a couple of years ago at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL. It is a somber place that is one of the most fitting memorials I have ever visited. Only the Vietnam Memorial on the National Mall is anywhere in the same category. I highly recommend a visit. The website of the memorial describes it as follows:
More than 4,400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation. Until now, there has been no national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings. On a six-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery, the national lynching memorial is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy.
The reality is that this part of our history is one that we largely gloss over at best or, more likely, simply ignore altogether.
We basically teach slavery was real, it was bad (although we dilute that fact), there was there something called Reconstruction, then Jim Crow, and then then the Civil Rights movement fixed most of the problems. In my view we “yada yada” a good bit of what happened between 1865 and 1964 (and, in my view, don’t get enough into the antebellum realities).
I say that we dilute the evils of slavery because there are simply too many people running around who still extoll enslavers, who proudly fly the CSA’s battle flag, who will argue that the Civil War really wasn’t about slavery, who will rationalize that surely slave owners who treated their valued property well, so it couldn’t have been that bad, and even that the enslavers did the enslaved a favor because now their descendants live in the United States and not Africa.
It seems worth noting, too, that while some like to point out that enslavement, and forced labor as a general matter, is an ancient practice, it is worth clarifying that the African slave trade and race-based chattel slavery started in the 15th Century and was of specific significance to the Americas. It was a huge part of the economic development engine of colonizing powers in North America, the Caribbean, and portions of South America, especially what would become Brazil. Along those lines, note that “by 1860, approximately two-thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.” So, rather than just being something that people did “back then” the significance of the enslaved to the development of the United States specifically is quite high.
I have digressed back to slavery itself because it demonstrates a multi-century structure of racial hierarchy that encoded white supremacy into our culture, as was demonstrated by the way many whites behaved after the end of the war, including the use of terrorism against Blacks, as described above.
Why does any of this matter? Is it not just navel-gazing? Or, as one commenter in my previous post referred to such discussions, repeatedly and derisively, as “licking old scars”? Is it just an impractical recitation of history with no concrete solution, as was also suggested?
One would think that a clear-eyed and complete understanding of the past would be a worthy goal in and other itself. In a country in which being obsessed with past naval ships, military airplanes, genealogies, or even cosplay Civil War battles are seen as acceptable pastimes, why might it be that when someone brings up other aspects of US history there are accusations of unnecessary dwelling on the past?
Let me refocus on Forsyth, GA, and similar places. The fact that systematic violence was used against Blacks in places like Forsyth over a period of decades requires more acknowledgment and understanding than we currently provide in either school or as a general matter of the culture.
What are we taught about lynchings? Convict leasing? or about the kind of terror used in Forsyth to drive Black citizens, often landowners, away from their homes permanently? What generational effects did such actions have?
I recall knowing that lynchings were a thing and that they happened to Blacks, but in my youth and into my adulthood, my understanding was linked more to pop culture examples wherein the townspeople form a posse to hang someone accused of a crime. Usually, it was stopped by the sheriff who opposed mob justice. It is appalling to note that not only was mob “justice” not stopped by authorities in the thousands of lynchings in question, the events themselves were often social gatherings of the white population. Photos of these events were sold as postcards (a fact that feels like it can’t possibly be true, and yet it is).
I am not even sure when I become fully aware of the scope of the lynching problem–certainly not until early adulthood. Likewise, convict leasing and events like those in Forsyth. I did not learn about Tulsa Race Massacre until I was in my thirties.
When I think of my own education I was taught about segregation as a general matter and specifically about racially segregated schools, “colored” and white water fountains, and Brown v. Board of Education. But really, the lessons were that the races had been segregated, which seemed bad but wasn’t lynchings nor dynamiting houses. It was obviously wrong to separate people by color, but it was also fairly easy to fix, right?
And, moreover, once people weren’t forced to be segregated the overall problems would be soon solved and we wouldn’t have to worry about racial questions any longer, especially once the older white people who had been taught that segregation was good died off and we all became enlightened pluralists.
The End.
Right?
If it is true that racial categories don’t matter in the United States, then I guess we can just treat it all as some kind of curious past, and exactly what is taught about it may be moot. But if race does remain relevant, which means we need policy and attitudinal changes, then a better understanding of the past is central, in my view.
But, I can’t help but think of all the recent examples of Black citizens being killed by police.
Or, the White homeowner accused of shooting a Black teen who rang his doorbell because one of the examples of a lynching in the EJI report is a Black man knocking on the door of a white household.
Or, the murder of Ahmaud Arber, which sounds just like the lynchings from the past.
Indeed, how much of current gun culture is driven by “war on crime” rhetoric over the last fifty years?
Beyond any of that, it seems pretty clear that lynching and other anti-Black violence coupled with Jim Crow and other policies and social norms rather directly affected inter-generational wealth. Further, the locations of Black populations can be linked, as noted the other day in a different context, to where cotton used to be grown or, when we are talking about urban centers due to the Great Migration as well as the effects of white flight during the 1960s.
This has already become a very long post with lots of dangling threads, which I am sure some will want to pull on. But let me conclude with what I intended to be the short version.
We, in the United States, do not have a very good grasp on the difficult parts of our history. We tell the heroic parts (such as focusing on Great Men, the taming of a continent, and the winning of wars–especially WWII) and tend to only pay glancing attention to things like slavery and the conquest of the indigenous population. We still haven’t come to terms with the Civil War. Montgomery, AL, to pick on one case, still has a Robert E. Lee High School and a Jefferson Davis High School (Nikki Haley only removed the Confederate Battle Flag from the state capitol’s grounds in 2015). We ignore a lot of what happened between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era.
Maybe if we, as a country and a society, took more seriously both that past and the clear effects that past has had on Black citizens, we could better address social policy in areas like education, criminal justice, urban development, and poverty alleviation. Perhaps we could better address issues like implicit bias against Black males in particular.
At a bare minimum the fact that inter-generational wealth is a major factor in a given person’s economic success, it obviously matters if one’s ancestors were enslaved, then exploited and terrorized, were forced to migrate, had to suffer the negative effects of segregation, etc.
So, some questions to ponder (I am not necessarily asking for answers in the comment section, but feel free to do so if you like).
- Do we, as a society, really understand our own history?
- Do you think that adequately educate ourselves on these matters?
- Do you feel like you, personally, were adequately educated on these matters?
- When did you first read key founding documents of the Confederacy (e.g., Stephens’ Cornerstone speech)?
- When did you learn of convict leasing?
- When did you learn about systematic lynchings?
- When did you learn about systematic political violence in the post-Civil War period?
- When did you learn about Tulsa?
- Is it possible that if this history was better understood that it would be easier to engage in public policy to address the consequences of said history? (Granted, it could also increase reactionary backlash).
- What variables help explain the relative differences in the economic conditions of Blacks and whites in the aggregate?
Again, I am not certain about reparations, per se, so I am not arguing that issue one way or the other. But I do think that policies that improved democratic representation of all persons would help address these issues. I think criminal justice and policing reforms are part of dealing with this topic. I think that investments in urban areas, especially when addressing the ways that urban planning in the 1950s and 1960s negatively affected Black neighborhoods. Clearly, just basic wealth transfer policies can help.
In the simplest of terms: mindfulness of the way the past has structured the lives of Black citizens in the present is needed when making policy choices.
I will try and avoid overly simplistic dichotomies and note that complex social phenomena are, well, complex, but let me note that I find it very difficult to look at the history of Blacks in the British colonies and then the United States and not say that various forms of systematic racism and white supremacism aren’t the main issues. Moreover, I think that this fact requires some level of redress and clearly needs consideration in public policy choices. I think that pretending like this was all solved via legislation in 1964 and 1965 is naive at best.
And I do think that too many Americans think that Blacks are to blame for their social status (e.g., that they are lazy, violent, less intelligent than whites, etc.) and that racism continues to drive those attitudes. While I recognize that knowledge and education are no panacea, it would be helpful if we, as a country, were more honest about our own history and how it has affected different groups of people differently.
Some additional reading.
- American Psychological Association: White flight may still enforce segregation.
- The Atlantic: White Flight Never Ended.
- Brookings: The inheritance of black poverty: It’s all about the men.
- The Economist: Black Americans are over-represented in media portrayals of poverty.
- EJI: Lynching in America.
- The Harvard Gazette: How slavery still shadows health care.
- Pew Research: From police to parole, black and white Americans differ widely in their views of criminal justice system.
- PBS: Southern Violence During Reconstruction.
- SPLC: The Biggest Lie In The White Supremacist Propaganda Playbook: Unraveling The Truth About ‘Black-On-White Crime’
- Vera Institute of Justice: An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System.
- Vox: The real reason research blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor.
- WaPo: The missing pieces of America’s education.
- The Week: When pundits blamed white people for a ‘culture of poverty’.
It irks me when people (southerners and southern sympathizers) insist that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. Of course it was. Just read South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession. The “state’s right” they wanted to keep was the right to own slaves.
P.S. The photo is wonderful.
A really good post, Steven.
To me, understanding of racism in America is impossible because its perpetrators do not exist. I read something recently along the lines of: all history begins with geography. First you create a map of where things happened.
Well, official American history has been mapped out so that there’s no place for actual racism to exist. There’s a study which says that black people in Chicago in the 50s lost between 3-4 billion of wealth due to predatory lending practices. There’s no space in Chicago’s history for the banks and the white middle-class who did this to exist. Only the victims exist, not the perps. Nobody tells stories about how they ripped off a black family. Nobody remembers dad going off to work and providing for the family by scamming black people. And yet that happened, and the only record of it is the aftermath, which the same people who pretend that if there’s a blank in history then nothing happened then blame on black people and their ‘pathologies’.
Thank you for the food for thought. I’ll answer one question. I was not aware of the term “convict leasing” until today although I’m vaguely aware of the practice from literature where it is an element of the corruption of penal officials and considered an aberration rather than a practice or policy.
@CSK: Most of Stevens bullet items for “when did you learn this” for me date back about 15 years is all. That includes the SC Articles of Secession. Yeah, I endorse the understanding that the Civil War was about slavery. The business about “it was about states rights” isn’t wrong, but when I heard it, it was always from someone wanting to portray themselves as having more in-depth knowledge of it and it was offered as an “instead of”, rather than “how some of the actors saw it”. Which latter is accurate.
There’s sort of a built-in paradox to the Confederate Army in that pretty much none of the rank and file soldiers owned slaves or would ever own slaves. They even referred to their situation as “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”. I expect most of them took the attitude of “why don’t you Yankees just leave us alone”.
And that’s true even though a major motivator for the Federal side was the Fugitive Slave Act, which bound non-slave states to deploy resources to round up slaves and return them to their owners even though that state might have outlawed slavery decades ago. Kind of not a “mind your own business”. But I see that as the result of some really good propaganda put forward by the monied interests of the Confederacy.
Ta Nahesi Coates opened my eyes up about how much economic injustice and outright theft directly impacting people alive today. And it still goes on. Much of the major developments in Atlanta, from highways to ballparks, have been deliberately used to degrade the value of black home and business owners or to throw them out on the street with a pittance in compensation. Same is true all over the country. Garbage dumps, trash incinerators or prisons are located taking advantage of the roads, electricity and sewage systems that poor communities got later than everyone else only to find the infrastructure being repurposed and the value riven from the homes and businesses that existed there. Without knowing this history as well as the present day behavior, we cannot truly understand what is going on.
And while I think it is right and just to try to measure the harm and make amends, I don’t think it should be tied to one ethnic group but rather to the injustices and thefts themselves. Native Americans and Hispanics are two groups that receive the brunt, and the poor Asians working the meat packing plants in the Midwest are but the latest.
@Jay L Gischer:
Most wars are poor men’s fights, aren’t they? Vietnam was, at least in my neck of the woods.
My point about “states’ rights” was about was that the right to keep slaves was the only right that mattered. Everything else was just window dressing.
The problem is not so much that we don’t understand our history, or even that we don’t know it, as it is that we think we know a lot more than we actually do. As Mark Twain apparently never said, but should have, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” At least in my time and place, we grew up knowing an awful lot of things that just weren’t so. It’s hard to understand something you don’t know anything about, but it’s almost impossible to understand something when you think you know about it but really don’t.
I was raised on Josie Wales, not Eric Foner, and I can say from experience that Josie goes down easier than Eric does. It took me a lot of unlearning before I could start actually learning, and despite being a Civil War buff as a kid the process of really learning about these issues didn’t start until I was well into adulthood.
I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, less than 200 miles from Tulsa, but I was a grown man with kids of my own before I learned about the Tulsa Massacre. But then, I was also grown before I learned about the lynching and burning of three black men (two of whom were almost certainly innocent) in Springfield on the day before Easter in 1906. My grandfather, who lived a few miles outside of town, was ten years old when the Springfield lynching occurred, and certainly knew about it, but I never heard a word about it from him.
I’ve seen photos of the Springfield lynch mob—men and boys, many dressed in suits. It’s hard not to wonder how many wore the same suits to Easter services the next day, assuming they could get the smell of the smoke out of them.
The connection of having a family member I remember who could well have been at the Springfield lynching makes it seem close and personal to me—it seems obvious that those attitudes still play a role today. But, of course, 1906 is ancient history to most people so I don’t expect it to affect them the same way it affects me.
This isn’t so much about understanding as about one’s willingness to understand – which is a far more intractable problem.
@MarkedMan:
TNC’s time at the Atlantic educated me more on these issues than anything up to that point in my life. The most important part of the education was not learning any particular fact, but coming to realized the blinders I wore when looking at the whole subject.
One piece particularly stands out: TNC had a post where he quoted Faulkner’s line that “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…,” before pointing out that Faulkner was simply erasing millions of black boys, who spent no time conjuring images of charging up the hill at Gettysburg with Pickett. I was 52 years old when I read that, but it had never even occurred to me how many southern boys Faulkner’s line was writing out of history .
A lot of people didn’t learn about it until the TV show Watchmen came out, and even with that a lot thought it was part of the fictional universe with superheroes and squid rain because it doesn’t seem to be a part of the world we (white people) have grown up learning about.
I kind of wish the producers of the show broke the fourth wall, interrupted the flow of the show, and just had a couple of historians explain that the Tulsa Massacre happened in real life, and where to go for more information.
I was the only one of my friend group who knew it was real, and not even particularly exaggerated. And I had only learned about it a few years earlier.
Lynching was barely covered in my school (northeast, white suburb of Rochester, NY), and only because we read To Kill A Mockingbird.
We barely covered the extermination of the Native Americans (there was a 6th grade teacher who had us re-enact the Trail of Tears on a football field with people lying down to be dead) and what we learned about them was very much “they were a bunch of tribes” rather than “these were nations”. At least we got the noble savage variation rather than the godless savages variation.
Slavery was a southern thing, and it was peculiar that so many of our founding fathers spoke of equality while owning people, but it was the fashion of the times and you can’t really judge them on that any more than you can judge them for wearing an onion on their belt.
And the civil rights movement? History ended after WW2, and then there was one speech by MLK and then everything was fine.
We need to teach history better, but we also need a founding myth that inspires us to be better than our history. And I think that part of the omissions and lies is that desire for a founding myth that is hopeful, patriotic and something you can feel pride in.
If you just teach the atrocities of white men you will get a surprisingly accurate view of American history, but there’s not much room for pride. The conservatives who say white children are being taught to be ashamed when any of this comes up in school are not entirely wrong.
Hiatory in schools is going to be simplified, but for every atrocity by white supremacists taught we also need to teach of the white men who fought against it, and make those latter people and their heroism the legacy that white Americans should aspire to.
Teach about the brown people being heroic too, but a gentle whitewashing focus to try to steer white kids away from white supremacist leanings, because people will latch onto whoever is telling them that they are good.
I want white kids more comfortable with identifying with the white folks who went down south to register black voters than the guy telling them that things were better before everyone started bringing up race in everything, back when people knew their place.
Our simplified historical myth shouldn’t be of Founding Fathers creating a perfect nation on nearly pristine shores and how we should revere that. It should be of flawed men with a vision of equality that they didn’t live up to, and which each successive generation gets a bit closer to.
ETA: wow, I really am procrastinating washing out that litter box.
@Roger: Ta Nehisi Coates seems to have faded into the background these days while Jamelle Bouie has become the Black Pundit White Liberals Listen To.
No offense to Mr. Bouie, but TNC was better. He connects at an emotional level, with greater passion. Bouie is great, and I love him as a White Liberal should, but… I look forward to the day when White Liberals can have more than one Black Pundit.
People also don’t generally know the details of the lynchings. They think they were just hangings like they saw on cowboy shows when they caught the rustlers. Some of them were but at many of them the people lynched were tortured before hanging then cut into pieces and those pieces were kept or even sold as prizes.
Steve
Nice meaty post Steven.
I will try to avoid nitpicking and try to look at the big picture.
If we’re talking about K-12 education then I think the reality is that most US history is glossed over. There is too much history to teach and so most stuff is at a pretty high level.
And because there is so much history to teach, it becomes a question of whether the curriculum will prioritize or deep dive into certain periods or subjects (and which ones merit that) and skip over other subjects. Or, alternatively, skip over fewer things but not be able to do much in-depth in any one area. Or dedicate more time to history, which would come with a tradeoff of less time in another subject, or a longer school year.
And, of course, state governments control these decisions, and some give state districts broad guidelines while others are much more specific.
I don’t have much objection to altering the educational curriculum here in the US as long as everyone understands the tradeoffs that comes with. If there is going to more instruction and more time spent on certain subjects or topics, then that means less time on others.
In addition to American history, all the school districts that me (Colorado) and my kids (Ohio, Florida and Colorado) have been in also teach state history. In Florida and Ohio, there was a big emphasis on the Civil War, in Colorado (which became a state a decade after the war ended), there was a much bigger emphasis on Native Americans and, in particular, the Sand Creek Massacre.
I think we are of similar ages, and I still remember watching Roots with the rest of my family. I looked up the numbers, and approximately half of US households watched all or most of it (140 million), and 85% of households watched at least some of it. As a boy of about 10 years old, it was certainly a watershed moment for me and probably many others in our generation.
and
Well, this is where the disconnect is for me.
– It’s not clear what it means in practice to take the past more seriously. You also mentioned that we have not come to terms with the Civil War. I don’t know what those statements mean in practice. How do I, as an individual, know if I’ve come to terms with the Civil War or take the past seriously enough? By what standard can we judge whether society as a whole has lived up to the standard you’d like to see?
– I do not see how taking the past more seriously in the way you describe helps solve problems that exist today. Knowing the details of Tulsa, Forsyth or anything else doesn’t give me any insight into how to ameliorate poverty, broken families, and gang violence – just to name three significant problems. The main issue, in my view, is that these are very difficult, intractable problems.
Finally, I don’t think that the lack of national introspection – which is how I’d paraphrase the theme of your post – is unique to the US. Every country tends to take a glass-full view of its own history. Even Germany – which might be the biggest exception to that – is having a right-wing resurgence despite all the various legal and educational steps they’ve taken, far beyond what the US could do. For example, the AfD is now polling about 20%.
That said, I think it’s always good to think about and debate this stuff.
Do we, as a society, really understand our own history?
No. Of course it’s relative to whom? But still, no.
Do you think that adequately educate ourselves on these matters?
See above.
Do you feel like you, personally, were adequately educated on these matters?
Yes, but I’m self-educated and find history interesting.
When did you first read key founding documents of the Confederacy (e.g., Stephens’ Cornerstone speech)?
As a consequence of an online debate, probably 15 years ago?
When did you learn of convict leasing?
Just that it was a thing, no time cue. But as an adult.
When did you learn about systematic lynchings?
Same.
When did you learn about systematic political violence in the post-Civil War period?
Learned a little about Reconstruction, saw Jim Crow in action because I’m old.
When did you learn about Tulsa?
Probably a decade ago? I used it was backstory for FRONT LINES.
Is it possible that if this history was better understood that it would be easier to engage in public policy to address the consequences of said history? (Granted, it could also increase reactionary backlash).
Education is inherently good, truth is preferable to lies, etc… But there are intellectual and cultural problems with that. Progress is slow.
What variables help explain the relative differences in the economic conditions of Blacks and whites in the aggregate?
The power differential. White people had and have power that Black people don’t. Power corrupts. The group able to push the other down, generally does. Because an unfortunately large percentage of humans are assholes.
@Gustopher:
Nailed it! Good observation!
I do not see how taking the past more seriously in the way you describe helps solve problems that exist today. Knowing the details of Tulsa, Forsyth or anything else doesn’t give me any insight into how to ameliorate poverty, broken families, and gang violence – just to name three significant problems. The main issue, in my view, is that these are very difficult, intractable problems.
He’s trying to spell out that the actual history of this country would reframe how we think about the causes of poverty, broken families (which means what exactly?), and ‘gang’ violence. What’s interesting is that minds have been changed by being exposed to this history. We call it being woke, basically. Your argument is what? You are arguing at the precipice of narrowness in which nothing beyond your perspective even registers as having taken place. It’s really something, and not really even an argument so much as a confession of faith.
@Andy: The average voter can’t name the three branches of the Federal government. It’s unrealistic to ask them to know this history. Know the cause of the Civil War? Most HS history teachers would be happy if their students could date the Civil War between the Revolution and WWI, or even that WWI was before WWII.
What would make a difference would be if people like John Roberts, BA History summa cum laude Harvard and JD Harvard, would stop pretending to not understand this history.
As a native of Los Angeles, I also have only belatedly learned that racism of the type we associate with the South existed all over America, even places we think of as progressive.
Los Angeles was, and still is to this day, a highly segregated place. A lot of conservative commenters have pointed out that much of what passes for liberalism is really just a paper thin veneer of performative piety based on this segregation, of seeing minorities as abstractions, rather than real people we experience every day.
For me, the best way to grapple with racism is to think of it as any other moral failure, sin if you want to call it that. The way we are aware that ugly vicious behavior like gossip and exclusion and cruelty are things that never leave us, that we can never truly conquer, but only keep at bay and wrestle with every day.
And re: Roots, this is Ronald Reagan on the show: “Very frankly, I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”
In all my life I have never ever seen a decent Republican ever try to deal with what it means that in 1980 this 100% stone-cold racist was President, later beloved. Not once. Repression and not being able to speak up for oneself are actually a bigger problem than single moms, who happen to actually love their kids, and vice versa. It’s why we have Trump, MAGA, and anti-vaxxers.
The lack of curiosity is pretty telling. By and large people don’t want to admit/know that if their dad/mom worshipped Reagan and all his government gave us, it’s because they were 100% stone-cold racists who thought the same.
BTW, to echo many above, a really excellent piece @Steven, I was frustrated having read it this AM then spent the day driving.
@Andy:
Well, if events like Tulsa and Forsyth, which are just examples of a far broader phenomenon are part of the causes of things like poverty, then they seem pretty relevant to me.
The part of your position that I find highly problematic is that you don’t seem to see (or, at least, wish to fully acknowledge) how the past clearly has led to the present.
If you segregate all the Blacks in one part of town (after having driven many of them out of their rural homes) and then condemn a bunch of houses and businesses to put the interstate through town, all the while providing less funding to education and using the criminal justice system in a way that is more likely to target Black men, is it any wonder that there might be poverty and gang violence in some of those places?
It seems clear that the lack of ability for Blacks to build any level of inter-generational wealth is a major reason for a lot of the problems we see.
Moreover, I think that things like understanding lynchings (and Forsyth and Tulsa) illuminate why it might be the case that Black men are more likely to be incarcerated, and why people like George Floyd end up dead. The attitudes we can see in that history link directly to contemporary myths about Black men in particular.
None of this has happened or is happening, in a vacuum.
@Michael Reynolds: Gracias!
@Andy:
BTW, let’s consider what might have happened to create a Black middle class in Tulsa, OK had those events not happened.
Moreover, it is harder to make the argument, that many people do, that Blacks are less intelligent and more violent than whites as means of explaining their poverty rates when this history is better understood.
@Gustopher:
When I saw Watchmen I thought that the part where they dropped explosives from airplanes was an embellishment. Ends up, nope, it happened!
Somewhat relatedly, I’ve been astonished to see growing ignorance in America about its participation in the Vietnam War. For example a survey in 2018 found that 22% of Americans under 50 thought the US “did the right thing” in Vietnam, 47% disagreed, and a massive 31% didn’t know. Corresponding figures for the over 50s were 21%/57%/22%. If ever there was a “teachable moment” about America’s capacity to wreak unimaginable human suffering for supposedly virtuous reasons, it was the disastrous intervention in Vietnam, yet it appears many Americans borne since the war ended have never learned about it.
And I wonder if this too is because the Vietnam War featured extensive racial conflict within the American military (see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/racism-vietnam-war.html), so white educators have preferred to treat the whole conflict as water under the bridge, look forward not backward etc.
@Andy:
Yes, we’ve noticed that. We’re all rooting for you, though. You can do it.
I grew up in a household with subscriptions to Ebony, Jet, and Essence magazines regularly teaching me about aspects of black popular culture. I attended an all-black elementary school in the 1970s where we had “black history class” once per week. (In junior high, my school system ended up under a desegregation order. One of the changes that came from desegregating the schools is that black history classes ended). And yet I didn’t learn of any of the things listed in question 3 until I was an adult.
Black history class in elementary school consisted of lessons about famous people, so we learned about Rosa Parks, MLK, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, Louis Armstrong, etc. Many of their lives, obviously, dealt with the types of atrocities and injustices you named. But maybe because it was elementary school, we didn’t dwell too deeply upon it.
I do recall reading as a kid about Harriet Tubman getting hit in the head by her master with an iron weight as a child, and how it caused her to have severe headaches and dizzy spells throughout life. I remember reading about Frederick Douglass bribing the poor white boys in his Maryland neighborhood with sandwiches so they’d teach him how to read. He was enslaved, but lived in an urban household that had food to spare. The white boys had little food, but were allowed to go to school. It still took me until adulthood to piece it all together.
@Andy:
How much of poverty, broken families and gang violence comes back to race?
Even white poverty is impacted by the desire to tear down the social safety net to prevent black people from using it, just as surely as they filled community swimming pools with cement rather than let black people swim alongside whites.
Understanding racism in America is important for understanding what motivates the political class and understanding the tools that the political class uses.
College tuition at state schools jumped when Black kids started going, and funding for state schools was cut. Coincidence? Maybe! But with the history of our country, are you willing to take that as a simple coincidence?
How many middle class white kids are getting caught up in the consequences of white supremacy?
I could go on about the interstates, or Robert Moses, or the war on drugs, or even the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Racism is alive and well, using the same tools as ever, creating problems for all Americans. Take a problem, scratch below the surface, and more often than not you will find racism setting up the structures that caused the problems and limiting the solutions.
Do you need to know that they were dropping bombs from airplanes in Tulsa? Or that they were dropping bombs from helicopters in Philadelphia’s MOVE bombing? Or what role Philadelphia, MS had in the civil rights era or the Reagan campaign? Probably not, as there’s so much that it all becomes a blur. But you should know the details about a few, and the same few as everyone else, so there’s a common frame of reference and so it doesn’t get glossed over as “bad things happened once, but that was long ago and things are fine now because MLK gave a speech”
@Modulo Myself:
My argument is that what you and he describes doesn’t actually help solve those problems of help us as a society solve those problems. “Reframing” does what, exactly? Please be specific. What do you expect that to do in the real world, exactly? No one here has explained how this greater understanding of history, wokeness, reframing or whatever you want to call it, helps people today and in the future.
@gVOR10:
Yeah, that’s basically my point but said much better – desiring most Americans to have a nuanced view of any part of US history isn’t realistic. So if one’s strategy for changing America relies on that, it’s probably doomed to fail.
@Steven L. Taylor:
History is important, and it is a major influence on the way things are now, regardless of context. This isn’t something I’ve ever denied. What I don’t agree with is historical determinism.
Considering historic counterfactuals doesn’t do anything to help people today. We can’t change the past, and spending time wondering what might have been does nothing to address problems that are happening now.
What does that do to guide us moving forward?
Similarly, we can’t do anything about the historical acts of intentional and unintentional genocide against Native Americans. Some arbitrary level of understanding about the details of that doesn’t tell us what, if anything, we should do today, beyond the obvious of not committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
What is the link between what you say is the problem of not understanding history to the real world today and in the future? You’ve yet to explain that, much less really define where you think the country should be. What does it mean for the country to come to terms with the Civil War? What would that look like? Across two threads I’ve asked a variation of that multiple times and no one has answered. And what will happen today – in the present, and in the future – should the country ever come to terms according to whatever your definition is?
@Gustopher:
I don’t know, do you?
What does that even mean?
I know more details than most Americans probably – as a history and civics nerd. And I’ve never said that things are “fine” now, so that is a strawman.
@Andy:
But we can change the present!
It tells us why we should want to change the present in a particular way. That’s part of any policy proposal, no? An explanation of why we ought to do something?
“Because it is just” is a good answer, no?
But now that this question has been answered, you will undoubtedly come up with something else that should prevent us from wanting to undo some of the present consequences of past injustices.
In the previous thread it was “But we can’t be fully certain that there isn’t some other completely unspecified reason for black social deprivation.”
In this thread, you came up with:
These are all, without exception, variations of “What you propose doesn’t immediately solve everything, therefore we must do nothing at all.”
Is that also your attitude when it comes to the federal budget deficit? Or confronting China?
Shorter Andy: “All problems that I don’t want addressed, very coincidentally can’t be addressed even a little.”
It’s pretty transparent, you know.
What’s weird is that, even though I’m a little older than you and started elementary school in Houston and finished junior and high school in El Paso and Alabama, I feel like I learned much of this in those days (1972-1984). And it may well be because I did 4th-7th grade on US military base schools in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (4) and Kaiserslautern, West Germany (5-7).
Certainly, not in the level of detail I know it now. But in as much detail as I learned just about anything else in social studies and history classes. I certainly learned about the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, white flight, etc.
[Edited to add: I would say, though, that a key flaw of the way I was taught/absorbed history is that everything seemed linear. That is: things were horrible but then we had school desegregation in 1954, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. I was born in 1965. So, clearly, the problems had been solved. And, from the perspective of a 12-year-old in 1977, 1954—and even 1964—was practically prehistoric.]
Generally speaking, though, our history education continues to be rather weak. I don’t know if that’s a function of textbooks and curricula being subject to approval by elected school boards, the way we educate the teachers, or what.
@Gustopher: In fairness, TNC has been on hiatus from punditry for more than five years now. He’s been writing comic books, novels, teaching, and exploring various other creative outlets.
@Andy:
Let me try this: it is discovered that using a certain pesticide was a significant factor in a number of persons contracting cancer. Is it historical revisionism to decide that the chemical in question was a cause of the cancer? Is using that information as a means of preventing future cancer a good idea?
Do we not treat the exiting cancer because it was something that happened in the past?
@Andy:
I have tried to be very specific. You seem to be ignoring that. You also are, in my view, utterly eliding the core issues by an insistence on specificity (of an unspecific nature) or, in the other thread,, the answering of questions.
@Andy: How about this: any attempts to address these issues will take both societal and fiscal action. Getting the broader population to be willing to change attitudes and to spend tax dollars (and to engage in policies) requires an acceptance of the need to engage in those activities. Understanding how we got where we are is vital to achieving those goals.
And again, if the real causes aren’t understood then people will come up with their own explanations, likely to include the assumption that the problem is not us, it’s them. And given that we know that there are plenty of racist notions in the broader population, blaming Black for being flawed is an easy route for many people.
@James Joyner:
I definitely learned about white flight (and I witnessed it in Dallas as a child, not knowing what it was at the time). I knew about the Klan. I expect that I knew lynchings were a thing. I am talking about scale on that topic. I certainly didn’t know that whole Black populations were driven out of towns.
@James Joyner:
Exactly.
@Andy:
How does knowing more about the forces that caused the present even help the present? Yeah, that’s a real riddle wrapped up in an enigma.
There are policies from reparations to training teachers to understand the implicit racist bias which leads black kids than non-black kids to be punished more severely for identical behaviors than non-black kids. I don’t know even what you want to hear. The odd thing is that you aren’t invested in solving these problems. The people invested in these problems are the ones who take seriously what you do not. They’re not the ones who need convincing. You’re like a used car salesman who wanders into a convention of marine biologists. The marine biologists have been working to deal with marine biology. You have questions, many of them. But when they gave you answers, you ask angrily why are they bothering with marine biology. Then you are escorted out.
Steven wrote:
And most of us still don’t know the complete story. I’m currently on a team working in Tulsa on this topic. As a result, I only just learned that Black Wall Street/Greenwood was rebuilt after the initial race massacre and by the 50’s had started to thrive again. And then it was destroyed for a second time when local officials decided to route the Federal Highway Project through it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/black-wall-streets-second-destruction-180977871/
I think this is a really critical story for understanding the Black experience in many places in the US. Through various intentional and unintentional attacks (dare I say systemic racism) communities are setback/destroyed, rebuilt, and then setback/destroyed again. I’m not sure there is another racial or ethnic group that has gone through this pattern in the same way.
Also, I 100% second Steven’s recommendation of the EJI’s The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I think it’s the most striking and somber monument I have visited. If you are also in Montgomery I also highly recommend the EJI museum on the journey from Slavery to Mass Incarceration.
I would add the question: Have you researched your family history to learn if and how your family relied upon enslavement for economic well-being?
The purpose of the question is not to assume guilt for the decisions and behavior of one’s ancestors, but to understand that one’s place in the world largely depends upon the welcome mat of those born to white parents and the welcome mat of those who were born to parents of color.
A little self-awareness in the department of knowing your family’s history is very enlightening.
My sister is a Vietnamese immigrant who is married to a Black American man with children who look black. Even so, she actually believes that it was a good thing for Africans to be enslaved and brought to America. Her husband is a libertarian who believes that nothing matters but low to non-existent taxes, so he will always vote Republican. Nothing I say can penetrate their thinking – I’m just the “soft-headed liberal who doesn’t know the real world.”
@drj:
Which has been my point all along and which I’ve mentioned several times.
In my view, we already know the why. The more important and difficult question is the how.
Well, no. If you go back in read what I’ve actually written, you’ll see that I strongly prioritize dealing with modern problems over debates about history.
@Steven L. Taylor:
And in my view, it’s useless to obsess about the details of what caused the cancer rather than get to treating it. It’s enough to know that someone has cancer and what kind it is. Relaying the history of every possible pesticide exposure to a doctor only delays treatment.
That’s how k-12 is taught. As noted before, there isn’t time to get into details or do deep dives. A linear view is both logical and understandable to students at this level. A majority of Americans don’t get college degrees so this is the education a majority of Americans will get.
And finally we get somewhere:
Thank you – that is exactly what I was asking for. This is the answer to the “why it matters” question that closes the loop as to why you think this historical retrospective matters today.
I don’t necessarily agree that this approach is or would be a successful one, but that is a debate for another day. In short, I don’t think ignorance about the details of slavery, etc. are what prevents more action, but that is certainly a debatable point.
@Modulo Myself:
To paraphrase Steven’s example above, if someone has lung cancer, you don’t need a detailed log of every time they smoked a cigarette before you can devise a treatment plan.
And we can adequately discuss and evaluate those policies without a major foray into historical determinism first.
My view from the beginning is that this entire discussion about how the US doesn’t sufficiently understand the details of its history while consistently promoting a historical determinist worldview avoids discussing those policies and is an unnecessary prelude to discussing those policies.
@Andy:
First, it is possible to identify a cause without “obsess[ing]” over it. Indeed, I think you are making that verb do an awful lot of work insofar as you are suggesting that all of this is just obsessing over the past. Finding out the root cause of a problem is essential for solving that problem. It is not “obsess[ing]” to do so.
Second, if it is known that a given pesticide likely causes cancer, wouldn’t one of the solutions be stopping the cause of the cancer so that there wouldn’t be future cancers to treat?
I mean, TBH, this feels like you are so dug in on your position that you are doubling down in a kind of absurd way.
@Andy:
No, but it sure would be a good idea to create no-smoking environments, engage in public health education, make it more difficult for children to access cigarettes, etc.
It is called looking at causes and past behaviors and devising policies to ameliorate the problems that past behavior caused.
If we only treated the results (the lung cancer) without changing the behaviors that caused the cancer in the first place, we just be treating all the more lung cancer in the future.
Fewer people smoke now than when I was a child. There is less cigarette-related lung cancer now. We looked at the past and changed.
@Andy:
One more comment: you keep saying that, but I am not sure what it means in this context.
I mean, is it historical determinism that part of the reason I was able to go to college is because my parents had the financial means to pay for my education (or that they could afford to by houses in good school districts)?
To paraphrase Steven’s example above, if someone has lung cancer, you don’t need a detailed log of every time they smoked a cigarette before you can devise a treatment plan.
The government banned cigarette companies from advertising on tv and radio. You can't get more 'historical deterministic' than that, man. You are simply trying to argue that there's a reason not to take into account the active history of discrimination in this country when thinking about how to deal with the effects of discrimination. The only reason we have is that it upsets people like you. But you can't say that, so you invent this absurd of chain of reasoning which nobody who ever thinks about a problem would ever follow if they actually wanted to solve it. I.e, your example with smoking.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I was trying to decide whether to comment on that or not. “Historical determinism” is a term of art in philosophy, and usually a pejorative one. It refers specifically to a belief in the inevitability of history, not merely an attribution of past causes and effects. I can’t tell whether Andy is intending that sense or not, but it’s clearly an inaccurate characterization of any of the views that have been presented in this discussion.
Question for @Andy:
Returning to a statement of mine that you called “an interesting comment on multiple levels”, let’s see if we can pinpoint where we disagree. Which of these statements do you think is false?
1. Black culture in America evolved as a response to and a coping mechanism for intense oppression over centuries.
2. White America created the environment and constrained the responses. The result is their responsibility.
3. Any other position requires you to blame black America for not managing to deal even better with their horrific treatment than they actually did.
4. Blaming the victim is pretty much always wrong.
I’m genuinely curious to know which of those you would not agree with.
@DrDaveT: This is my understanding of the term as well.
I’ve been travelling and am just getting back to this thread.
Quickly, and this will be my last word until this subject comes up again in the future:
@Steven L. Taylor:
Ok, obsessing is not a fair characterization on my part. I do think you are overly-focused on the need to “come to terms” and the others phrases you’ve used. As an academic project for historians this is real and important work. In terms of politics and policies and individual Americans, I do not think it is nearly as critical as you seemingly do.
Yes, and to the extent that racism exists today, it should be combated and stomped out. But you’re not talking about contemporary racism in these two posts, but the effects of past racism, correct?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Historical determinism in this context is the idea that the history of slavery and discrimination in this country has determined the outcomes that we see today. If that’s an unfair reading of what you’ve said, then I apologize, but it seems to me you’ve consistently posited this history in a very deterministic way.
@Modulo Myself:
At this point, you’re just being obtuse or dishonest. I’ve NEVER said that we shouldn’t take history into account. My view is that it isn’t the ONLY thing we should take into account and that it’s not necessary for America to deep dive into history to take action.
@DrDaveT:
1. That is a novel theory for me, so at this point, I don’t know. But I do disagree with what I see as the deterministic assumption in the question, that the development of black culture had no other factors (or important factors).
2 – 4. IMO, you’ve created a series of questions and assumptions that lead to a false binary choice – one that, conveniently, is a choice between agreeing with your view with the only alternative being to “blame the victim.” IMO this is a dishonest framing. I don’t really have time to deconstruct the flaws in this now – perhaps another time. But I would suggest thinking through the implications it – to me, this line of argument (and it’s not the first time I’ve seen them) is a kind “white savior” narrative where black people are the helpless victims of history who can only be rescued by white people taking responsibility for historic injustice. Indeed, I think it is a very historical deterministic worldview.
@DrDaveT:
Oh, and one more thing. I haven’t read McWorter’s book that you linked in the previous thread, but I did read this essay from him written a few years after publication and what he says seems to me to be basically the opposite of what you’ve been talking about, and your binary construct.
@Andy: Thanks for engaging.
To be continued, no doubt.
@Andy:
This (unfortunately) brings us back to the question of what other factors could be important, given the overwhelming scale and immediacy of slavery/Jim Crow/segregation/etc. We are still waiting for you to suggest even one.
If I break your legs, it’s going to affect your ability to get around and get on with your life. If I repeatedly break your legs every time you seem to be recovering, I think it’s safe to say that this becomes the dominant factor in your life, and that everything else about your life can be fairly seen as either a consequence of having your legs repeatedly broken or a response to having your legs repeatedly broken.
It seems obvious to me that the history of treatment of Blacks in America is pretty much on a par with that scenario. At which point, “other factors” become at best problematic, and at worst silly. The joke whose punchline is “But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” springs to mind. It’s not that the particular Black culture that developed was inevitable; it’s that it was inevitable that whatever culture evolved would be a response to the dominant reality of what it meant to be Black in America. And it was always likely that some of that response would be dysfunctional and counterproductive — but to say that Black America should have avoided those negative outcomes is (again) to blame the victims. It’s very much like accusing PTSD sufferers of cowardice.
@Andy:
I think it’s apples and oranges. McWhorter believes (perhaps rightly) that a culture of victimhood is an impediment to Black America taking steps to overcome its current situation. His audience there is Black Americans. I’m not talking to Black America; I’m talking to privileged white America about whether we owe Black America some serious compensation for past harms.
Just because it needs to be said, although no one may see it: establishing causation/causal links is not “determinism.”