No “Buts”—Really Seeing White Supremacy in America

Prefatory note: I start more writing projects than I can finish and usually have 20 or 30 half-finished pieces that I’m waiting to complete at the right moment. This seemed the right time to finish and post this one on racial justice. There is nothing new here at all. But it seems important for white people to be talking about these issues at this moment.

My colleagues in the State Directors Racial Equity workgroup of the State Priorities Project State Directors helped me immensely with the hard thinking and personal reflection that led to this piece. Of them, I particularly want to thank James Jimenez of New Mexico, a great colleague and friend who contributed in many ways to this piece.

I’ve been part of a group of directors of organizations that parallel mine who came together to better understand how racial equity should fit into our work. And those two years of discussions, which reached one culmination in a trip we all took to Montgomery, Alabama, a year ago, have greatly changed my own understanding of our history.

At our meeting last summer, I explained the impact of that Montgomery trip to my colleagues in this way:

The impact of white supremacy on our country was well known to me—through the periods of slavery, segregation, and the post-segregation period which included the civil rights movement and the growth of mass incarceration. I’ve studied it for years. I’ve also studied the way white supremacy has distorted liberal political and social reform movements, from the New Deal to the 1950s period to the Great Society when people of color were left out of most social welfare programs and subject to the indignities of red-lining and “urban renewal” programs that destroyed their neighborhoods.

It’s been clear to me for a long time that the institutions and practices of our country—our basic political and social structures as well as our policies—have persistently been based on white supremacy and thus have stood in the way of Black freedom and well-being. It’s also been clear to me that while the growth of American capitalism—and so, the prosperity of our country in which we all share—was not just a product of slavery, it would not have grown as fast without both the labor of enslaved people and the wealth generated by financing the vast expansion of slavery through the importation of enslaved people and the internal slave trade. (And the vast internal slave trade would have been simply impossible without the dynamism of capitalism and ability of New York banks to raise the vast sums necessary to construct canals and railroads—all of which also relied on a workforce of enslaved people.)

And yet, despite all I knew, I was resistant to recognizing just how central white supremacy is to America.

I have a great love for this country, rooted in both the Enlightenment ideas enshrined in our founding documents and, as important to me, the refuge and welcome it gave to my family in the early part of the twentieth century. Without that refuge, my great grandparents and grandparents would have certainly died in the Holocaust, along with all their sisters and brothers and nephews and nieces.

So for most of my life, even as I learned more and more about the experience of people of color in this country, I was reluctant to admit how white supremacy has been central to our country at every point in our history.

And then, in Montgomery, after seeing the extraordinary museum and memorials created by the Equal Justice Initiative and discussing with my colleagues not just what we had seen there but what we had learned in all of our discussions together, something finally sunk in.

One of my colleagues of color said that his reaction to what we had seen was that the standard story of American history was “one big fucking lie.”

And instead of reacting as I might have a few years ago with a “yes, but” and talking about all the good things in this country my reaction was just “yes.”

Even as I thought of the refuge America had given my family, my thought was not just to be thankful but to note that there was something deeply wrong with a country that opened its arms to my grandparents and allowed them to become “white”—that is to have the privileges of white people—but would not do the same for people who have been on this continent as long as immigrants from Europe.

A country that claims to be based on the proposition that “all men are created equal” but that treats a substantial part of the population the way Black Americans have been treated throughout our whole history is in fact based on “one big fucking lie.”

If you really understand and take our history into account there is simply no way around that conclusion. The glaring contradiction between our ideals and the reality of the oppression of Black people in America is not a blip. It’s not a slip. It’s not an oversight. It’s not something we’ve overlooked. It’s not an accident. It’s not something we’ve been slow to getting around to fixing.

It’s just central to what America has been and who we are as a people.

If it were not central, then one would see recurrent attempts to move forward from the horror of slavery. Instead, if you look at our history, what you actually find is the staying power of racial oppression. Black people were subject to violence and terror during slavery. They were subject to violence and terror after the Civil War with the rise of lynching. They were subject to violence and terror from the opposition to the civil rights movement. They are subject to violence and terror in our prisons today and on the streets where Black lives don’t matter the way white lives do. Even as the form of violence and terror mutates, it has continued to be a leading characteristic of America’s political and social life.

Black families have been torn apart in one way or another in each of these periods. Dividing families was central to the practice of slavery. And it has continued to this day when the over-incarceration of Black people still disrupts families. And it has existed at every time between. Corruption in the justice system long predates the mass incarceration that began in the 1970s. New practices billed as “reforms” have worked toward the same end. The invention of juvenile justice by “reformers” in the 1920s, for example, led to a massive increase in the imprisonment of young people, and especially Black boys and girls.

Black people’s opportunities to receive a good education or secure a good-paying job have been stymied in each of these periods. That’s obvious during the periods of slavery and segregation. But look at the post-World War II era of economic growth and you will see the enormous gap between Black and white people with regard to educational opportunities and the way Black people were largely excluded from both GI Bill benefits and the primary sector of the economy where strong unions raised wages. They were relegated to the non-union small business secondary sector where wages grew more slowly. Even as unionization, and thus good wages in the primary economic sector have been eroded, the gap between the wages of Black and white people has actually increased, largely because of the relatively small proportion of people of color in professional/managerial positions.

At the same time redlining excluded Black people from the benefits of federal housing programs which not only forced them to live in substandard housing but denied them the ability to build capital in the only way all but the richest Americans do, through paying off a mortgage. Redlining, urban renewal programs that disrupted stable Black neighborhood, and the redirection of government resources away from the inner cities in which Black people lived was the first affront to Black economic opportunity. The second was a changing economy that made cities less attractive to industry which led to flight to the suburbs being built with huge government subsidies for roads, schools, and other infrastructure. Black people were not just unwelcome in those suburbs but were denied entry by restrictive covenants still in force and zoning rules that limited the production of housing they could afford.

And, let us be clear–the post-World War II racism of American was not just a Southern phenomenon. The policies I just wrote about were carried out by liberal governments in the North run by liberal Democratic and sometimes Republicans. There is no room for partisanship in unearthing the role of White Supremacy in our history–no party escapes it until very recently.

And, perhaps most importantly, every time our country has taken small steps to reduce the oppression of Black people, the reaction of the majority of white people has been to attack the democratic institutions through which a progressive movement has grown. Many of the features of our Constitution were designed to limit majority rule and protect “states’ rights.” And while we all can give theoretical justifications for fearing tyranny of the majority—as I have in the past—we should have known and said that it wasn’t primarily fear of the majority in general that created those features of our Constitution. It was fear that the majority would end slavery that made those institutions so critical to the Founders.

In 1860, when Southern states feared that a newly elected president might take even tepid steps to limit the spread of slavery, they chose secession over democracy. After the war, reconstruction created a small opportunity to create genuine democratic governments in the Southern states. But that opportunity was slowly eroded and the corrupt deal of 1876 ended it entirely.

Anti-democratic rules such as poll taxes and racial terror made any semblance of democratic government in the South impossible for almost one hundred years. The North was not much better. In order to limit the electoral power of both immigrants and people of color, Northern states embrace rigorous registration laws in the first half of the 19th century and then made them even more restrictive in the first two decades of the twentieth century. And since it became apparent that demographic changes in this country were going to increase the power of non-white voters, we have seen a new round of efforts to suppress the vote of Black and brown people—from voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls to closing and moving of polling places and, this year, efforts to undercut voting by mail. And now in 2021 we see every state controlled by Republicans taking steps to make it harder for Black people and people with low incomes to vote.

At each step of our history, then, we have seen white supremacy continue to limit the opportunities for Black people in every area of life, even as it has taken new forms.

White supremacy does not exist in a vacuum. From the very beginning, it has been promoted by elite white people as a way to divide those who have a common economic interest against their own. But white supremacy long ago took on a life of its own as it became embedded in everyday practices of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination in the way white and Black people interact on the street and in the workplace, and in the hearts and minds of white people. White supremacy continues to strangle the ideals that supposedly animate our country just as it strangles efforts to create multiracial coalitions that aim to create racial justice and greater equality between rich and poor.

For the sake of realizing our ideals and creating a truly just and multiracial political community, we white people need to stop saying “but what about the good things in America” when people talk about the impact of white supremacy in our country. There is no “but.” There is no good in this country that is not compromised by white supremacy.

There is only one way to put that “but” back into our language when we talk about the history of white supremacy. We have to be able to say, truthfully, this sentence: “But we finally worked together to overcome the devastating legacy of white supremacy and create a political community in which Black and white people are genuinely equal in the eyes of our society in every respect.”

And as I wrote some years ago, we can best accomplish that by adopting a policy of reparations for white supremacy in all its forms.

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