Race

The American Cauldron

Douglas A. Blackmon, Douglas A. Blackmon

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813940175
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In an increasingly polarized political environment, the first year of the new president's term will be especially challenging. With a fresh mandate, however, the first year also offers opportunities that may never come again. The First Year Project is a fascinating initiative by the Miller Center of the University of Virginia that brings together top scholars on the American presidency and experienced officials to explore the first twelve months of past administrations, and draw practical lessons from that history, as we inaugurate a new president in January 2017.

This project is the basis for a new series of digital shorts published as Miller Center Studies on the Presidency. Presented as specially priced collections published exclusively in an ebook format, these timely examinations recognize the experiences of past presidents as an invaluable resource that can edify and instruct the incoming president.

Contributors: Michael Eric Dyuson, Georgetown University * Elizabeth Hinton, Harvard University * Orlando Patterson, Harvard University * Douglas A. Blackmon, Georgia State University

Donald Trump, Racial Pioneer?

Unlikely as It May Seem, the New President Could Transform Racial Dialogue

Douglas A. Blackmon

Donald Trump’s presidency offers an extraordinary opportunity to advance the paralyzed national discourse on race in America, and our new chief executive can validate his campaign claims to be a racially tolerant figure working for the success of all Americans—without alienating his core supporters.

To millions of citizens, that will sound like an astounding assertion. Many Americans concerned about racial issues, immigration, and discrimination regarded Trump’s election as a bleak setback, reversing fifty years of racial progress since the era of the civil rights movement.

In November 2017, Trump received negligible support from African American voters, who recoiled at revelations of racial discrimination by his family’s New York real estate company in the 1970s, a history of coarse public comments about African Americans, caustic statements during the campaign about Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and political endorsements from white supremacist organizations and their leaders.

Indeed, Trump’s candidacy triggered more worry and commentary about his racial attitudes than any significant presidential aspirant since segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace won five southern states in the 1968 general election. President Trump’s early executive orders accelerating construction of a wall at the Mexican border and blocking entry into the United States of many Muslims only appeared to confirm the worst fears of many who did not support him.

Nonetheless, as unlikely as it may appear to his critics, President Trump is uniquely positioned to lead an epochal transformation—by bridging the historic political and economic divide between African Americans and other minority groups and his core working-class, rural white supporters. In doing so, he could become the engineer of one of the most important turning points in American race relations and reopen for the first time in a generation the possibility of more significant levels of African American political support for Republicans.

American presidents historically have had limited power over the policies that affected race and discrimination, and rarely did they use their direct influence in ways that were helpful to African Americans. For nearly two hundred years, our presidents overwhelmingly made domestic stability for the majority white population a far higher priority than ensuring civil rights or equal opportunity for nonwhites.

But presidents also have a long history of employing moral persuasion when they had no formal power over crucial issues—especially in times of crisis. Even before his inauguration, Trump himself expressed a willingness to use the soft powers of a president-elect to pressure American companies to keep jobs and factories in the United States. And in modern times, presidents have been able to dramatically—and in some cases very swiftly—help the American population constructively reimagine and reshape deeply entrenched attitudes in areas such as the rights of women, minorities, gays, and others.

To fulfill the desire he expressed on election night to be “president for all Americans,” Trump must make a national address early in his first year using his trademark “no-nonsense” style to establish four critically important symbolic messages:

• • That he understands how past economic “rising tides” that left behind millions of working-class whites also injured even higher percentages of African Americans.
• • That he acknowledges the unique economic and social barriers that African Americans and other minority groups have faced, including misconduct by the police, and that a message of restoring the “greatness” of the past reads to black citizens like a return to times of deep discrimination.
• • That he unequivocally renounces all organizations or individuals that advocate any belief in the superiority of one ethnicity over another.
• • That resolving generations of racial discord is a necessity for unlocking the full talents of the American people, rather than a favor done for African Americans.

If President Trump can persuade even a modest percentage of Americans of color that he is acting in good faith on issues of race, he would open the door for a new policy agenda around which lower-income citizens of all races could rally, while simultaneously retaining support among other conservatives. Those policies should include the following:

• • Setting a series of measurable goals and targets for narrowing income and educational disparities between races and between urban and nonurban areas, and for reducing violent encounters between police and minority civilians.
• • Making clear that his appointees to lead the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Labor, and, most of all, Education will be held accountable to those goals.
• • Continuing efforts embraced by liberals, libertarians, and many conservatives to reform the criminal justice system and eliminate overly harsh sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Those steps will dramatically aid a wide spectrum of American youth—from black children in the inner cities to working-class white kids in the suburbs and the countryside.
• • Embracing federal support for public schools with renewed vigor—even as he advances school choice initiatives—as well as increased funding for low-performing schools, and an explicit commitment to eliminate the disparities between high-achieving suburban schools and their counterparts in majority-black inner cities and in overwhelmingly white rural areas.

Were President Trump to do nothing—or very little—related to racial disparity in the United States, or acted only by using force to shut down participants in civil disturbances like those that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, and so many other cities in recent years, his record would fit easily into a long pattern of presidential ineffectiveness on issues of race

Slavery and the extended racial divisions it spawned are a vein of cruelty and immorality inextricably embedded in the bedrock of American history. George Mason, one of the principal architects of the American ideals defined in the Bill of Rights, correctly identified slavery as a “slow poison . . . daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people.”1 The challenge posed to presidents by that poisoned history has evolved profoundly through three great eras. First, there was chattel slavery from Mason’s colonial period to the Civil War, then the century of legally mandated segregation that followed, and, most briefly, the modern era, in which the civil rights of all races are acknowledged in the law but ongoing discrimination and vestiges of past conduct still deform U.S. society.

There were, of course, certain presidents remembered heroically for bold action on race: Abraham Lincoln most of all, for declaring an end to antebellum slavery and holding the nation together through the Civil War; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for opening federal jobs to African Americans in the 1940s; John F. Kennedy, for endorsing legislation to end Jim Crow segregation in 1963; and Lyndon Johnson, for fulfilling Kennedy’s vision and then extending to African Americans rights and assistance far greater than JFK could have imagined.

But over most of American history, it was astonishingly rare for presidents to take any action related to race, in the first year of their terms or any other. When presidents did act, it was overwhelmingly bad for African Americans or other minorities.

This is for a simple reason: One-third of American presidents served during the era of antebellum slavery, during which time eight chief executives personally owned slaves, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson. Overwhelming evidence today suggests that Jefferson fathered multiple children with an enslaved woman on his Virginia plantation, and it would be unsurprising if that were not the case with other founding fathers, given how common such coerced liaisons were in the period of slavery.

While Jefferson and others at times expressed reservations about the morality of slavery, the early presidents all accepted that their only legitimate role in relation to race was extraordinarily narrow. From the beginnings of the American republic to the end of the 1850s, there were no “issues” related to race beyond the fundamental question of whether the practice of slavery would expand into new territories or be abolished from all U.S. territory. Furthermore, almost every president viewed slavery less as a question of morality or a test of American principles, but primarily focused on whether the debate over slavery threatened the unity and future stability of the still young nation.

As a result, as historian Russell Riley at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center has written, even presidents who had personal doubts about the morality of slavery repeatedly took positions against abolitionist agitators, in the belief that their primary responsibility as chief executive was to preserve the Union, rather than extend freedom or justice to the enslaved.

For most of a century, when action related to race did come from a U.S. president, it almost invariably gravitated toward actions that would defeat any efforts to end slavery or moderate its most terrible dimensions. As the conflict that would ultimately trigger the Civil War in 1861 grew more sharp, presidents were more often compelled to act....