The Post-Racial Society is Here

Recognition, Critics and the Nation-State

Wilbur C. Rich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136676598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a provocative and controversial analysis, Wilbur C. Rich's The Post-Racial Society is Here conclusively demonstrates that nation is in midst of a post-racial society. Yet many Americans are skeptical of this fundamental social transformation. The failure of recognition is related to the remnants of the previous race-based society. Recognizing the advent of a post-racial society is not to gainsay recurrent racial incidents or a denial of the socio-economic gap between the races.

Using the findings of historians and social scientists, this book outlines why the construction and deconstruction of the race-based society was such a difficult and daunting enterprise. Starting from the nation's inception, Rich examines how the nation elites used racial language, separate schools, and the media to divide Americans. After World War II, the nation used U.S. Supreme Court rulings and the Congressional passage of Civil Rights laws to dismantle the institutional support for racial segregation and discrimination. The black Civil Rights Movement facilitated and consolidated the movement toward socio-political inclusion of African Americans. Rich alerts the reader to the unprecedented progress made and why the forces of the new global economy demand that we move faster to make society more inclusive. This thought-provocking book should interest scholars of sociology, Africana Studies, American studies and African American politics.

1 Constructing the Race-Based Society: American Style

The construction of the America's race-based society took generations. When the framers of the US Constitution designed the new nation, they created something entirely new, and they made many structural and social mistakes. Allowing the states to determine the fate of slaves was a major mistake. Perhaps the plantation types who dominated the Constitutional Convention could not imagine an agrarian economy without cheap labor. The three-fifths clause compromise that allowed the South to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of legislative apportionment was just one of these mistakes. To be fair to the framers, as political scientists Charles Beard, in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,¹ and Robert Dahl, in A Preface to Democratic Theory and How Democratic Is the American Constitution?² pointed out, they were not trying to build a civil society in which all residents regardless of race, gender, country of origin and income level would be protected by the new government order. Wealthy white men were a minority that needed protection from the horde or the mob who might tyrannize them if given a chance. They felt that the nation did not owe blacks and the indigenous people anything. This is why these issues were not spelled out in the new Constitution. The idea that women and landless white males should be able to vote or to have their vote be of equal weight to that of the landed gentry never crossed the minds of the attendees. The framers were designing a set of rules that fit their political and economic times. Like all generations of Americans, their political decisions defended what they understood as their interest.

The framers' view of the future was inevitably shortsighted. They could not have conceived of life in a 21st-century postindustrial world. In their time slavery was needed because the large plantations could not function without them. Most of these otherwise thoughtful men, the framers, did not consider slaves humans. Dehumanizing slaves made it easy to exploit them. Some of the framers may not have been racists but rather good businessmen and smart politicians who thought they understood economics. Indeed, they were creating what Michael Lind called the “Anglo America.”³ This grandiose plan called for the elevation of men with British ancestry and Protestant backgrounds to the apex of society. These men would dominate the politics and economy of the new nation. The wealthy minority would rule forever. Government would serve their interests.

Not all the framers saw their interests in unitary terms. In order to get their Southern brethren to sign onto the compact, they needed to let the Southern states keep their slaves. Indeed, Edmund Randolph, a Virginian who would become the first Attorney General, moved to strike the word “slavery” from the new Constitution. One can only speculate about what type of debate led to this motion. The word “slavery” did not appear in the Constitution until the 13th Amendment (1865). Accordingly, the political reality of the framers' era led to the establishment of a race-based society. The birth of America created a tradition of unequal treatment of certain inhabitants. Although blacks could be easily identified by their phenotype, they were, as Ralph Ellison would later characterize them, “invisible.” ⁴ Despite all the 18th-century speeches and writings about all men being born equal, equality in practice never quite materialized.

The enslavement of blacks was not a part of the glorious new political discourse. The framers could have said, “We don't have a slavery problem. We have a property problem.” Quoting John Locke, the purpose of the government is to protect property. Property is the fulcrum of capitalism. Besides, this new government did not have the clout to begin its tenure by confiscating people's property.

Some of the nation's leading figures of the times, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Charles Pinckney, had slaves on their large plantations. Many of the early foundational presidents from George Washington to Civil War hero Ulysses Grant owned slaves. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan were exceptions. None of the foundational presidents made their careers as abolitionists. Washington, Jefferson and Madison owned slaves while in the presidency. These men were role models. They were literate and wealthy. And if slavery was okay with them, how could an illiterate majority disagree? These distinguished and learned gentlemen never said publicly that owning human beings was immoral. They apparently thought it was okay to pay their black workers no wages, whip runaways, feed slaves inferior food, sell their children and keep them in bad housing. Everyone was doing it, so how could it be wrong? This is not to say all the leaders were convinced that the race-based society could work.

Yet Jefferson's attempt to put a reference to slavery into the Declaration of Independence was not accepted and never made it to the final draft. In the early draft, Jefferson accused King George III of imposing slavery on the colonies.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.⁵

Given Thomas Jefferson's history as a major slave owner, one does not know whether he believed this or whether he was overtaken by the need for hyperbole against the crown. The Southern delegates recognized the potential problem that such a reference would have on those who were opposed to slavery. Obviously, debate over this passage is not what school children are told about Thomas Jefferson. Neither are they told that the third president had doubts about the future of a two-race nation. He was first of a line of presidents who entertained the idea of colonization. Sending slaves to Africa to solve the two-race nation problem remained a lively discussion among American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln.⁶ President James Monroe tried to carry out his mentor Jefferson's colonization scheme by establishing Liberia. However, colonization never really became overall racial policy as the South needed the free labor. As the black population grew, the South emerged as the region of political interest. The region's labor needs kept the nation in moral bondage. Placating Southern politicians would remain a preoccupation of several pre– and post–Civil War presidents.

Throughout the early years of the nation, few white preachers condemned the institution of slavery or the violent acts of men who owned slaves. The learned men (e.g., academics, journalists) of the time were not out on the street protesting or writing about the treatment of these human beings. For some of them, slaves did not have emotions or feel pain. It was as if slaves' only value was to work and to give birth to future slaves. Indeed, some female slaves had children with the so-called master. Because white males were allowed to have sex with slave women, there were a variety of skin colors on the plantation. (One wonders how many incest lines were crossed when the victim was classified as black.) Indeed some of the so-called founding fathers were not spared from rumors of such affairs: George Washington and Venus, James Madison and Coreen and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming.

It does not matter whether these rumors are true or not; slaves were abused. Although human rights were violated and crimes were committed, few records were kept and no one was prosecuted. Yet the society allowed all law-abiding, upstanding Christian white gentlemen to avoid the subject. More important, slaves were the keys to the Southern agrarian miniempires. This is, in part, why Jefferson wanted less government. He thought, “America's best hope lay in an agrarian future (including the necessary evil of slavery).”⁷ In 1837 John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a man who served as vice president twice, said as much on the floor of the US Senate. His “slavery was a positive good” speech suggested that all societies had hierarchies between elites and the less fortunate. For Calhoun this was just the nature of the world. In effect, he was saying to his fellow Southerners that slavery was more than a necessary evil. In 1858 South Carolina senator and governor James H. Hammond continued this view in his articulation of the so-called mudsill theory of society. The mudsill is the lowest level that can support the foundation of a building. Blacks were needed to do the menial work so that the white aristocracy could advance civilization. A year later Abraham Lincoln, in defense of the Free Soilers, condemned the mudsill theory.

Academics disagree about the institution of slavery. Ulrich B. Phillips thought slaves were treated well, but slavery was an inefficient economic system.⁸ The so-called cliometricians Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engleman in their book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Nero Slavery also disputed traditional views about the evils of slavery. ⁹ They found that slavery was efficient and blacks were not badly treated. For them, slavery made good economic sense. Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution refutes the notion that that slavery was a benign institution. Blacks were not accepting, submissive and loyal. They rebelled against the so-called masters. ¹⁰

The debate over the saliency of slavery went on for decades. Of course, the decision to allow the states to keep humans in bondage came back to haunt the nation's leaders in the mid-19th century since the issue of slavery triggered the Civil War. It is unclear whether the defeat of the South changed many minds about race, but the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited slavery.

FREE BUT SEPARATE

After the Civil War there was a public outcry to punish the political leaders and generals of the Confederacy. The assassination of President Lincoln and the Reconstruction bumbling of Andrew Johnson pushed the issue of the status of blacks off the table. President Rutherford Hayes, who became president with the Compromise of 1877, ended the military occupation of the South and left new freedmen to the mercy of the sons of the Confederacy. Reconstruction failed and the South was able, with the assistance of the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), to enact a complicated set of segregation laws that clearly defined Negroes as second-class citizens. It was not exactly what Justice Roger B. Taney had suggested—that Negroes “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—but it was close. ¹¹ The Jim Crow laws forbade racial mixing between blacks and whites in most public places and private spaces. Such laws gave whites a competitive advantage in all things economic and bounded the economic transactions of blacks.

Disparate treatment of blacks was not only the norm but was sanctioned by law. Under such laws the nation allowed injustice to flourish among Southern states. The police and other law enforcement agencies allowed white hoodlums and vigilantes to undermine the legal rights and security of all black residents. Sharecropping and other financial scams such as convict leasing and peonage were rampant in the South. ¹² Schools for blacks were grossly inadequate. Entire generations of blacks were allowed to remain functionally illiterate. An added correlate of these laws was the hysteria regarding sex between black men and white women. In 1900 Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman asserted that the Southern white man “will not submit to [the black man] gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” ¹³ The big black buck chasing white women was a subtext that was captured in films such as Birth of a Nation.¹⁴ Protecting white womanhood became the mantra of paralegal groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. This hysteria served to motivate the white working-class men to join the effort to suppress blacks. Unfortunately, the 1930 trials of Scottsboro boys, with all of its misrepresentation and obvious injustice did not end this hysteria. The racial scam was in its full elaboration.

THE CONTEXT OF THE RACE-BASED SOCIETY

The construction of the race-based society took many centuries and a significant amount of political energy. It had heroes, theorists, supporting scholars and fellow travelers. More important, highly respected social institutions such as public schools and churches supported the white domination of society. This was especially true for the churches as many religious leaders, either implicitly or explicitly, supported the separation of the races. Blacks were not welcome in white congregations and were encouraged to build their own churches.

Language is critical to any religion. In the 18th century the Great Awakening movement encouraged believers to seek personal revelation, not rituals and ceremonies, to achieve a Christian life. Blacks were introduced to Christianity during slavery. Slave ownership was implicitly endorsed in the Bible. Slaves were allowed to practice the religion because many owners were devout Christians and supported their slaves' yearning for spirituality. Christian eschatology varied along the lines of millennial rule, not the ethic of owning fellow Christians. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America was, after all, building a Christian nation.

Church attendance allowed for a type of self-expression unavailable to slaves in other public spaces. This was why it was so important to slaves to accept Christianity and build their own houses of worship. In 1816 free blacks split from the white Methodist church and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Richard Allen, the founder of AME, became the first black bishop. In 1880 black Baptists formed the Foreign Mission Commission that became the National Baptist Convention; in 1895 Reverend E. C. Morris became its first president. In 1906 William J. Seymour started the black wing of the Pentecostal Church. Seymour had been a student of Charles F. Parham, the white founder of the Pentecostal Church and a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer. The black wing became the Church of God in Christ; the white wing became the Assemblies of God. White leaders of the church supported these separations. The separate church movement worked because churches were places that were safe from discrimination, provided opportunities for social status and facilitated the development of a black leadership class. Yet there was little deviation from the theology of the original or mother church. In some cases the ministry was a matter of style and emphasis. White church leaders ventriloquized their message of white superiority and racial separation through black church leaders. Black church leaders unwittingly became a relatively pliant religious leadership class. Obviously, there have been exceptions throughout history. Indeed, this class of leaders became the liaisons to the white political elites.

In white churches, few white people challenged the metanarrative that blacks were inferior to whites. The idea was so seductive to whites. White Americans felt lucky to be white. They had won a birth lottery. Blacks, on the other hand, had mixed feelings about the lottery, some negative and some positive. They were both black and American. William Edward Burghardt Dubois would later call it “double consciousness.” ¹⁵ Life in America was a situation that they inherited and could do little about. Thei...