Anti-racist moments

W.E.B.DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 is the essential text for understanding why, after the promising beginning achieved by the Union defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 and the subsequent Civil Rights Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th), Black people today are still struggling to assert that Black Lives Matter. But -- Black Reconstruction is 767 pages long. I was fortunate to study the book in a 6-week group a couple of years ago. You can be so fortunate as to read Adam Server's longish article The New Reconstruction in the Atlantic magazine and discover the gist of DuBois's story -- and its implications for the present day.

To Server, the present racial reckoning, triggered by the video of the murder of George Floyd, but prepared over decades by Black struggles against employment discrimination, unequal schooling, and redlining as well as police brutality, provide a new opportunity to get it right. As in the 1860's, a majority of us are aware and outraged about the country's treatment of its Black citizens.

“For a brief period ... the majority of thinking Americans of the North believed in the equal manhood of Negroes,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935. ... These Americans believed Black lives mattered. But only for a moment.

So too today, except we've mostly learned to be explicit about the humanity of all women as well as all men.

With the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, droves of African American men went to the polls to exercise their newly recognized right to vote. Alfred R. Waud, “The First Vote,” November 1867. Library of Congress.

That awareness has historically been episodic. The Black civil rights struggle again forced another moment onto the national consciousness in the 1950s and 60s, winning formal legal equality for Black citizens where there had been only segregation and exclusion from legal citizenship, including voting rights. But that moment too faded, to be eclipsed by white grievances against perceived loss of status during rapid cultural change and painful de-industrialization.

Serwer is no cock-eyed optimist, but he dares hope that our society may be living in another moment when the demand that Black lives matter can force meaningful progress toward a more perfect polity. And it might be able to do so through very imperfect instruments.

... change is possible, even for an old hand like Biden. Ulysses S. Grant married into a slave-owning family, and inherited an enslaved person from his father-in-law. Little in his past suggested that he would crush the slave empire of the Confederacy, smash the first Ku Klux Klan, and become the first American president to champion the full citizenship of Black men. Before he signed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts as president, Senator Lyndon Johnson was a reliable segregationist. History has seen more dramatic reversals than Joe Biden becoming a committed foe of systemic racism, though not many.

If Democrats seize the moment, it will be because the determination of a new generation of activists, and the uniqueness of the party’s current makeup, has compelled them to do so. In the 1870s—and up through the 1960s—the American population was close to 90 percent white. Today it is 76 percent white. The growing diversity of the United States—and the Republican Party’s embrace of white identity politics in response—has created a large constituency in the Democratic Party with a direct stake in the achievement of racial equality. 

There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age.  

... History teaches that awakenings such as this one are rare. If a new president, and a new Congress, do not act before the American people’s demand for justice gives way to complacency or is eclipsed by backlash, the next opportunity will be long in coming. But in these moments, great strides toward the unfulfilled promises of the founding are possible. 

It would be unexpected if a demagogue wielding the power of the presidency in the name of white man’s government inspired Americans to recommit to defending the inalienable rights of their countrymen. But it would not be the first time.

It is the historical responsibility of this generation of citizens to make this so.