In his new article, “The Color Of His Presidency”, Jonathan Chait attempts to understand and explain the impact of race and racism on contemporary American politics. The essay is worth reading, as are many of the reactions to it around the blogosphere.
In my view, one weakness of Chait’s analysis is his conclusion:
Obama is attempting to navigate the fraught, everywhere-and-yet-nowhere racial obsession that surrounds him. It’s a weird moment, but also a temporary one. The passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will likely ease the mutual suspicion. In the long run, generational changes grind inexorably away. The rising cohort of Americans holds far more liberal views than their parents and grandparents on race, and everything else (though of course what you think about “race” and what you think about “everything else” are now interchangeable). We are living through the angry pangs of a new nation not yet fully born.
Any student of the history of race in the United States can recognize the liberal fallacy—that racism diminishes over time—in that paragraph. The violent crushing of Reconstruction by the Redeemers of late 19th century South is proof enough that Emerson and King were wrong: the universe does not necessarily bend towards justice. By almost every available measure, African-Americans in 1910 lived under a more racist and oppressive regime than had existed in 1870. There’s nothing inevitable about racial progress…as those in today’s disproportionately-impoverished-by-predatory-mortgage-lenders Black middle-class and working-class can attest.<!–more–>
It’s also a historical fact that the Republican party at some point in time (say, 50 years ago at its national convention in San Francisco) decided to make a home within itself for segregationists, white supremacists and nativists. With a large percentage of European-American voters falling into those categories, there had to be at least one political party for whom they’d cast their votes. Since Democrats were choosing (slowly and painfully over the course of several decades) to become the “party of civil rights”, Republicans were the only game left in town for those voters. That history doesn’t make all Republicans racists. But it does mean that there is, in Chait’s words, a “broad connection between conservatism and white racial resentment“.
It’s good that there are heterodox liberals like Chait challenging liberal orthodoxies and trying to understand the experience of contemporary conservatives. But while paragraphs like the following from the middle of Chait’s essay offer a certain insight, they risk missing a larger and harsher truth:
Few liberals acknowledge that the ability to label a person racist represents, in 21st-century America, real and frequently terrifying power. Conservatives feel that dread viscerally. Though the liberal analytic method begins with a sound grasp of the broad connection between conservatism and white racial resentment, it almost always devolves into an open-ended license to target opponents on the basis of their ideological profile. The power is rife with abuse.
To support his case, Chait lists numerous abuses of that power by liberal print and television commentators. But if conservatives truly do “feel that dread viscerally“, then there’s a simple (though not easy) solution: Stop saying and doing things that are racist.
There’s a gripping scene near the end of the Richard Attenborough’s 1982 epic biographical movie, Gandhi. Post-independence India has descended into inter-communal (i.e., Hindu v. Muslim v. Sikh) violence and killing. The frail 77-year old Gandhi goes to Calcutta where the violence is worst and announces he will fast until the killing stops. One night a frantic man bursts past the guards and into his room:
If Republican politicians like Paul Ryan and conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly truly live in fear of being called racists, then there’s a way out of that “hell”. They can do the hard, patient, disciplined, unglamorous work—not unlike a father’s work in raising a child—of striving daily to remove the racist elements that are part of the foundation of today’s American conservative movement. They can try to be models for their followers—just as fathers strive to be models for their children—in what it means to act with honor and dignity as they chart a new course for the conservative movement: one that doesn’t rely on (and enflame) racial resentment.
Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com
