Still a House Divided

Race and Politics in Obama's America

Desmond King, Rogers M. Smith

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691159621, 9780691142630
• eBook ISBN: 9781400839766
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why race remains the central political issue in America today

Why have American policies failed to reduce the racial inequalities still pervasive throughout the nation? Has President Barack Obama defined new political approaches to race that might spur unity and progress? Still a House Divided examines the enduring divisions of American racial politics and how these conflicts have been shaped by distinct political alliances and their competing race policies. Combining deep historical knowledge with a detailed exploration of such issues as housing, employment, criminal justice, multiracial census categories, immigration, voting in majority-minority districts, and school vouchers, Desmond King and Rogers Smith assess the significance of President Obama's election to the White House and the prospects for achieving constructive racial policies for America's future.

Offering a fresh perspective on the networks of governing institutions, political groups, and political actors that influence the structure of American racial politics, King and Smith identify three distinct periods of opposing racial policy coalitions in American history. The authors investigate how today's alliances pit color-blind and race-conscious approaches against one another, contributing to political polarization and distorted policymaking. Contending that President Obama has so far inadequately confronted partisan divisions over race, the authors call for all sides to recognize the need for a balance of policy measures if America is to ever cease being a nation divided.

Presenting a powerful account of American political alliances and their contending racial agendas, Still a House Divided sheds light on a policy path vital to the country's future.

PART ONE

Obama's Inheritance

Chapter 1

“That They May All Be One”
America as a House Divided

The United Church of Christ takes as its motto John 17:21, “That They May All Be One.” The UCC was created in 1957 through the union of the Congregational Christian Churches with the Evangelical and Reformed Church.¹ Its theological roots are in the Calvinism of the early New England Puritans and Congregationalists who did so much to shape American political culture. As with its Congregationalist forebears, all its local churches have autonomy in matters of doctrine and ministry, so that the UCC describes itself as a pluralistic and diverse denomination that strives to achieve “unity within its diversity.”²

The quest for such unity amidst diversity runs deeply through American history. On the birthday of the nation, July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress authorized a committee comprising John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to recommend a design for a Great Seal of the United States, then declaring their independence. The committee proposed as the seal's national motto a similar phrase: “E Pluribus Unum”—“Out of many, one.”³

The leaders of America's founding generation knew well that of all the challenges they faced, slavery and racial equality most profoundly threatened their efforts to make the aspiration expressed in the new national motto a reality. In response, many strove mightily in ensuing years to keep those issues as remote from the national agenda as possible. But four score and two years later, an Illinois lawyer with high political aspirations, Abraham Lincoln, invoked a different biblical passage, Matthew 12:25, to argue that when it came to slavery, policies of evasion and compromise could not long endure: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

After he did so, the American house did indeed break apart in a massive civil war. At its end, the United States purged slavery throughout the land by constitutional amendment. Still, convulsive issues of racial policy and racial equality remained. Nearly a century later, when the United Church of Christ was created, Congress was in the throes of passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, its first major civil rights law since the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War—thereby beginning the legislative triumphs of what some scholars call the “Second Reconstruction.” Once again, Americans hoped they were at last finding the means to create unity out of their diversity, building a nation that, at least in regard to race, would no longer be a house divided.

But over a half century later, during the historic election year of 2008, when the Democratic Party appeared to be moving toward nominating a candidate who symbolized just such change, hopes for unity on matters of race within the United Church of Christ and among all Americans were disrupted by an unlikely source. At the time of the founding of the UCC, an African American teenager known as Jerry Wright Jr. was a student at predominantly white Central High, one of the most prestigious public schools in Philadelphia, the city where the Continental Congress met in 1776. Wright had grown up in Philadelphia's Germantown section, in the neighborhoods where the American anti-slavery movement had begun with the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery; where the Continental Army had fought the British; and where twentieth-century Philadelphians had achieved one of the few examples of relatively sustained, successful racial integration in modern urban America.⁴ Wright's father was the pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Germantown. His mother was the first African American to teach at Germantown High and the Philadelphia High School for Girls. When Jerry Wright graduated from Central High in 1959, the yearbook description read, “Always ready with a kind word, Jerry is one of the most congenial members” of the class and a “model” for younger students.⁵ Wright then studied at Virginia Union University, but left to join the U.S. Marines and after two years went on to the navy, where he became a cardiopulmonary technician assigned to care for President Lyndon Johnson during his 1966 surgery. There are reports that Wright dabbled with “liquor, Islam, and black nationalism” during these years.⁶ But he returned to college in Washington and to his Christian faith, graduating from Howard University, then obtaining a master's degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and finally earning many years later a doctor of ministry degree from the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where he studied with Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.⁷

By then, Wright was the pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. When he joined the church in 1972, the congregation had only 250 members, with less than half actively involved. Under Wright's leadership, Trinity United grew to become a mega-church of over 8,000 members, the largest of the more than five thousand congregations in the United Church of Christ.⁸ And there were few that Jerry Wright, now known as Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr., touched more than another Illinois lawyer with political ambitions, one with a complex religious, national, and racial heritage and the unusual name of Barack Obama. That young man would soon make E Pluribus Unum, the nation's version of the UCC motto, the central theme of a political career that in an astonishingly short time would take him to the presidency. In his first book, Obama wrote eloquently of experiencing Reverend Wright's and Trinity Church's capacities “to hold together, if not reconcile, the conflicting strains of black experience” in support of a faith that “carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.” Those experiences led him to join the church.

Obama's subsequent political rise was, however, almost fatally punctured during the 2008 campaign by the words of Reverend Wright, a man whose life might otherwise be seen to embody all that has been good in regard to race in America. And Obama's much-praised response to that controversy, powerful though it was, nonetheless revealed the difficulties even this pathbreaking figure displays in defining a clear way forward toward racial progress in twenty-first-century America.

Although the United Church of Christ has always been largely white, Reverend Wright, in accord with the freedom the denomination provides its member churches, built its largest congregation among Chicago's black community. Wright drew on black liberation theology, modern Christian perspectives most elaborated by Union Theological Seminary professor James Hal Cone. Influenced by liberal Protestant theologian Paul Tillich's contention that theological insights always emerge from and reflect particular cultural contexts, Cone has long argued for interpreting Christianity in light of the experiences of African American oppression.⁹ In explicit agreement with Cone's ideas, Wright came over time to identify himself with what he termed the “prophetic tradition of the black church.” In Wright's view, that tradition traces back to Isaiah 61:1 and to the message that “the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive,” an action that also “liberates those who are holding them captive.”¹⁰ It was precisely because Obama, who was raised by a mother and grandparents who were religious skeptics, came to be persuaded of “the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change,” instead of requiring him “to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice,” that he chose to be baptized at Trinity. He then used the text of one of Reverend Wright's sermons as the title of The Audacity of Hope, the book of political positions with which he launched his presidential campaign.¹¹

But on March 13, 2008, ABC News sparked off a furor by reporting on sermons Wright gave in 2001 and 2003 that said America had supported state terrorism, so the 9/11 attacks represented America's chickens “coming home to roost,” and averring that instead of singing “God Bless America,” the sentiment should be “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”¹² Five days later, Obama responded to the controversy by delivering a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Entitled “A More Perfect Union,” the talk was his most extended discussion of race while a presidential candidate or, thus far, as president.

In his Philadelphia speech, Obama stressed that he had “brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents” and so had “seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.”¹³ He also “condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy.” But Obama went on to praise Wright's record of military and social service and religious leadership. He suggested that the fact that so many white Americans were surprised to hear Reverend Wright speaking of America like a fiery Old Testament prophet denouncing the corruption of the rich and powerful confirmed the “truism,” often identified with a 1963 statement of Martin Luther King that “the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.”¹⁴

Obama then sought to put Wright's views in the context we examine in this book: the pervasiveness of racial “inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow,” producing segregated schools that “were, and are, inferior schools” providing “inferior education” to blacks; legalized discrimination that long prevented blacks from owning property or obtaining loans or mortgages, or jobs in “unions, or the police force, or the fire departments,” thereby creating an enduring “wealth and income gap between black and white”; a “lack of economic opportunity among black men” that “may have” been worsened by “welfare policies” and that “contributed to the erosion of black families”; and a “lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods.”¹⁵ For many like Rev. Wright, Obama argued, that past and present generated an “anger and bitterness” that all too often “distracts attention from solving real problems” and “prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.” But Obama insisted that to condemn this anger “without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”¹⁶

Obama went on to express his grasp of the “similar anger” among whites who “don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race,” an anger that “helped forge the Reagan Coalition,” an anger that was often “counterproductive” but that should not be simply dismissed as “misguided or even racist.” He saw the anger and distrust on both sides, and the ways that the “anger is exploited by politicians,” as fostering “a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years.” The way “to continue on the path of a more perfect union,” Obama then argued, was for blacks to bind “our particular grievances—for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans,” and for “the white community” to recognize that “the legacy of discrimination—and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past—are real and must be addressed” by investing in schools, by “enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system,” and by providing all Americans with “ladders of opportunity.”¹⁷

This thoughtful speech—and Obama's firm distancing of himself from Reverend Wright's views, culminating in the candidate's resignation from the Trinity congregation—lifted Obama's campaign past the uproar.¹⁸ His interpretation of the polarization, misunderstanding, and mistrust between white and black Americans, leaving the nation “stuck” in “racial stalemate,” resembles in many ways the portrait we paint here—one of a modern American house still divided between what we term rival “racial policy alliances.” Yet from our perspective, Obama did not do enough, then, before, or since, to explain the conflictive, gridlocked structure of modern American racial politics or to spell out the implications of this structure for prospects of racial progress.

Obama's account stresses the understandable if often misguided popular anger and the frequently opportunistic political leadership on race among both whites and blacks in America. But by focusing on the feelings of blacks and whites, Obama failed to explain how modern American politics has come to be shaped by rival coalitions of political actors and institutions (each including some members of all races), whose members take opposed policy positions on a wide range of issues that they perceive as having racial dimensions.

One coalition contends that laws and policies should be crafted in as “color-blind” fashion as possible, treating people as individuals without reference to their racial identities. The other coalition insists that laws and policies should be made with constant, conscious concern to reduce severe racial inequalities in different arenas of American life.

Because Obama did not refer to these policy choices, much less the arguments for and against them, he left much unclear. He did not make it evident to white Americans how and why a man like Reverend Jeremiah Wright—a man who had in many ways experienced American race relations at their best, a man who had given his nation extended military service and who had gone on to extraordinary achievements and recognition in the nation's oldest, in many respects most quintessentially American, and predominantly white denomination—could see an America espousing color-blind policies as one that continues to impose obstacles to racial progress. Obama also did not explain to African Americans why many whites, in turn, perceived an anti-American and anti-white “reverse racism” in the race-conscious rhetoric of a man that many black Christians saw as carrying forward the historical social justice ministry of their religious traditions.

Most importantly, Obama's advice to what he termed the nation's African American and white communities offered few clues about how the modern philosophical and policy conflicts over race should be resolved—though his call to black Americans to link their grievances to those of “all Americans,” along with his exhortation to whites to accept public investment, enforcement of civil rights laws, and fairness in the criminal justice system, leaned rhetorically toward the color-blind camp. Given the structure of contemporary American racial politics that we document in this book, probably no serious candidate for national office could be expected to do much differently, least of all one commonly identified and self-identified as black—for color-blind positions are far more popular than race-conscious ones among the nation's still predominantly white electorate. But understandable as Obama's stance was, it contained few insights into the policy challenges racial inequalities pose in modern America, and it offered few clues about the political guidance needed to move further toward their resolution.

We undertook this book in order to understand those challenges and to analyze how they might be better addressed. In this opening chapter, we first sketch the main lessons we have learned. Then we elaborate our core concept of rival racial policy alliances. Finally, we explain how the subsequent chapters use the idea of alliances to analyze the evolution of American racial politics historically, and the ways today's racial alliances shape and often distort decision making across a wide range of modern policy arenas.

OVERVIEW: THE STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN
RACIAL POLITICS AND WHY IT MATTERS

The first lesson we draw is an empirical one. American racial politics has historically been structured via three evolving systems of opposed “racial policy alliances”—coalitions of leading political figures, governing institutions they have occupied, and other politically active groups—competing against each other in multiple arenas for the support of the broader political community in resolving the great “battleground” issues that have defined three eras of American racial history. From the Revolutionary era through the Civil War, the “slavery era,” pro-slavery and anti-slavery alliances confronted each other, initially with the coalition favoring slavery greatly in the ascendant, but with anti-slavery support gathering over time—sufficient to spark the South's secession after Lincoln's election. The ensuing war led to the final resolution of the slavery issue by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. The new battleground issue then became the civic status of newly freed African Americans. After a transitional period of struggle extending through the late nineteenth century, one in which racial egalitarians at first won some major constitutional and statutory victories and white supremacists lacked a clear program, the egalitarians lost ground. A rival racial policy alliance that favored a new, thinly veiled form of institutionalized white supremacy—Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement laws—prevailed. Battles between pro-segregation and anti-segregation racial policy alliances continued through the resulting “Jim Crow era” up to the mid-1960s, this time with anti-segregation forces gradually gaining power.

These forces gathered sufficient strength, expressed first in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, then the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and then the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to repudiate Jim Crow policies of segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement definitively.¹⁹ Yet soon, new racial issues emerged once again. Over the next decade, those issues came to center on whether policymaking should be as color-blind as possible, or whether measures should be designed and implemented with specific goals of racial equality in view. The resulting clash of rival “color-blind” and “race-conscious” racial policy alliances has produced what we term the modern “race-conscious” era in American racial politics. Many scholars and citizens might describe it as the “affirmative action” era, but we will see that quarrels over how “race-conscious” policies should be extend well beyond conflicts over affirmative action programs. Indeed, some modern civil rights activists who sharply criticize color-blind approaches and urge that we “pay careful attention to the impact of our laws, policies, and practices on racial and ethnic groups” criticize reliance on formal affirmative action programs without attention to the racial consequences of other policies.²⁰

Both sides of this debate have long presented themselves as the true heirs of the preceding, triumphant civil rights movement. Color-blind advocates contend that they stand for judging people not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. called for in his 1963 “I have a dream” speech that culminated the March on Washington. Race-conscious proponents maintain that they stand for cashing America's “promissory note” to give the nation's racial minorities “the riches of freedom and the security of justice,” as King also called for in that speech.²¹ We believe that this modern rivalry between color-blind and race-conscious policy alliances emerged fully by roughly 1978, the time of the Supreme Court's University of California Board of Regents v. Bakke ruling on race-conscious admissions policies in higher education, which came in mutually reinforcing tandem with the anti-tax uprisings in California and other states that year, movements fueled in part by perceptions that public funds were being directed to undeserving nonwhites.²² Contests between these two opposed racial policy alliances have had sweeping effects, some obvious, but many less apparent, on American politics ever since. It is t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Obama's Inheritance
• Part Two: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Hierarchies
• Part Three: The Trajectory of Racial Alliances
• Part Four: America's Inheritance
• Notes
• Index