Given our country’s long and difficult history with inclusiveness, Jean decided to sit down and write out her thoughts – during this year’s Black History Month.
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A THREE-PART THOUGHT PIECE ABOUT THE LONG JOURNEY Given our country’s long and difficult history with inclusiveness, Jean decided to sit down and write out her thoughts – during this year’s Black History Month – on how we got here (this week’s Part 1) and where we go next (Parts 2 and 3 in the next blogs). |
I remember my shock in 2020 when repeated protests after George Floyd’s gruesome murder played to an international audience. What shocked – and delighted me, as I wrote in a blog post – was seeing how many White people turned out in support of racial and social justice.
I had no idea that their concerns about racial divides had been simmering beneath the surface, waiting for ignition.
A year later I wrote my first blog post, sharing how amazed I was that so many White people were still engaged.1
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To my total surprise, the furor has NOT died down. The protests are now in the 12th day as of this writing. As of today, the protests have morphed into an uprising and the uprising has led to a call for fundamental change. Corporations, local governments, nonprofits are responding fast and furious, implementing policy changes and trainings to help their employees have a real dialogue about the sea change we are all experiencing. |
For reasons I will explain later, I had expected the fervor to die down. But when, a year later, it had not, I was shocked again that racial and social justice was still active in the nation’s conscience.
And now, it’s 2024, and what I had anticipated 3-4 years ago is now happening: The post-George Floyd era, widely spoken of as the time of racial reckoning, was now on the wane.
Whitney Alise’s painful article, “In 2020, Black People were asked to lead. A few years later, we are now being fired for it,” expressed our collective dismay.2
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2020 felt like the beginning of the long awaited, much fought for change the US needed. The overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations in defense of Black life erupted not just across the nation, but the globe. Chants of “I can’t breathe” and “say their names”. Books about race, Black history, racism, and structural inequality, flew from the shelves. It felt like everyone from everyday people to stars to politicians were saying Black Lives Matter. It felt like a true racial awakening. Organizations took note, making their own shifts, many choosing to open their own Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices and hiring for those positions exploded. Less than a few years later, many of those efforts have disintegrated. The feelings of a national shift deteriorated to a painful reality: that alleged racial reckoning did not really reckon like it was supposed to reckon. DEI offices or positions, many of which were relatively new and ready to effect change in the organizations that created them dissolved, leaving those called to those positions bewildered, but not surprised. |
Retrenchment is setting in across the country. The Supreme Court has all but banned affirmative action. Corporations that greatly expanded their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are cutting back. Friends across the country are calling and texting me that they are so discouraged, and one or two are considering leaving the U.S.
Again and again I’ve been asked: how do I maintain hope in such a retrograde environment?
I have an advantage that many don’t. I am looking at what has happened across decades, actually centuries, so I know the march toward greater social justice is continuous, punctuated by periods of backlash and disillusionment.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously declared, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
This is not my first rodeo. I have lived through several setbacks and retrenchments. I was raised on stories of my ancestors and what they had to go through to develop livable futures for themselves, their children, and grandchildren – which now includes me and mine.
How to understand today’s backlash: It helps me to look at the trajectory of racial progress the way traders view stocks. They track the market into two trends: a bear market (stocks trending downward, retrenchment) or a bull market (stocks going up, progressive). The pendulum swings between the two.
Day traders who look at minute by minute or even day by day fluctuations die a thousand deaths as stocks fluctuate wildly. The smart money goes to those who look at longer term trends.
Similarly, I look at the period of time since slavery as either trending upward toward racial and social justice (emphasis on public interests, structural opportunities for advancement) or trending downward (emphasis on private interests and individual responsibility). The pendulum swings here, too.
To illustrate, I use this chart in my classes and workshops.
Chattel slavery was widely regarded as a private interest, with slaves having monetary value to their individual owners. The Civil War disrupted that stance as more and more abolitionists argued that human beings could not be private property and emancipation was in the public interest.
After the Civil War, an intense but brief period of Reconstruction occurred where the federal government invested in preparing the newly freed slaves for citizenship and economic independence.
After President Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson installed as president, Johnson took the stance that the federal government had no interest in the concerns of those emancipated and withdrew federal support. Freed of federal constraint, the former slaveholders rapidly began instituting Jim Crow laws and acts of intimidation, such as riots and lynching, to “keep the Negroes in their place” and maximize their profits through sharecropping and legal slavery in the prison system.
During that period, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass eloquently described how the sharecropping system worked to keep the freedmen in de facto bondage.3
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Now let us sum up some of the points in the situation of the freedmen. You will have seen how he is paid for his labor, how a full-grown man gets only $8 a month for his labor, out of which he has to feed, clothe, and educate his children. You have seen how even this sum is reduced by the infamous truck system of payment [where the laborers were paid in goods or credit to be used at a company store owned by their employers]. You have seen how easily he may be charged with one third more than the value of the goods that he buys. You have seen how easily he may be compelled to receive the poorest commodities at the highest prices. You have seen how he is never allowed to see or handle a dollar. You have seen how impossible it is for him to accumulate money or property. You have seen how completely he is chained to the locality in which he lives. |
Note that Douglass alludes to the disdain and blame placed upon the freedman for not flourishing in their newfound “freedom,” even while the Jim Crow system was stealthily designed to keep them in bondage.
Jim Crow was briefly disrupted by World War I and the Great Depression, which allowed President Franklin Roosevelt to institute the New Deal and recognize unions. Notably, the newly formed unions were allowed to discriminate, so although the New Deal brought economic advancement to White workers, people of color and specifically Black people were legally denied union representation in most White-led shops.
Meanwhile, the arc of the moral universe s-l-o-w-l-y continued to bend toward justice as lawyers and organizers steadily launched lawsuits in local jurisdictions to overturn the segregation laws.
1955 shocked the nation as the news media showed the mutilated, lynched body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy accused of whistling at a White woman in Mississippi. His mother famously demanded an open casket, saying, “I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till."4
Public outrage laid the groundwork for the widespread protests against segregation and racial oppression in the late 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in several civil rights laws ending legal segregation and supporting voter rights among other progressive acts.
The War on Poverty, introduced by President Lyndon Johnson, followed closely after the Kerner Commission warned we were living in two nations, one White and one Black.5
The War on Poverty was intended to address systemic issues such as lack of education, training, medical care, and housing. The initiative was a response to the societal failure to provide fair opportunities for all citizens to develop their potential and live in decent communities. It was intended as a significant step towards combating poverty and promoting economic and social justice in the United States.
While some people now question its effects – since obviously poverty did not end – it opened the doors for many. I am one of the beneficiaries – the War on Poverty funded my masters and doctorate degrees. Grantees were selected as potential leaders who would devote our professional lives to eradicating social and economic injustice.
The pendulum began swinging in the opposite direction as Supreme Court decisions gradually eroded affirmative action and again emphasized private interests, individualism, and disregard for systemic factors.
People were viewed as solely the cause of their circumstances: The “just say no” campaign to allegedly end drug use6 was built on the premise that weak-minded people allowed themselves to get hooked. The “welfare queen” and other mythologies propagated the belief that the poor were lazy, manipulative takers who were exploitative of government handouts. The federal government was widely demonized as the problem.
As the demography of the country became browner, the economic crash of 2009 led mainstream America to believe that perhaps the federal government had a role to play after all. President Obama was elected on a campaign of hope and “Yes we can.”
Obama leaving office signaled a pendulum shift away from structural solutions and back toward individualism. A new presidential administration – then four years later, George Floyd’s agonizing murder – shocked the nation into a racial reckoning.
And now, the backlash is setting in – yet again.
Yet some progress has been made. Public attitudes have shifted; more people recognize that structural and personal racism persist, some student debt has been canceled, Ketanji Brown Jackson was named to the Supreme Court, Confederate monuments have been removed and buildings renamed, police reforms and reparation initiatives are taking root in scattered places.
Despite these changes, the promise of movement towards greater political equality seems tenuous, and economic equality seems all but impossible. In the words of journalist Perry Bacon, we have “wokeness without works.”7
What has happened particularly over this year or two is predictable. Just as during the long, cold decades of Jim Crow, legions of attorneys filed lawsuits to dismantle segregation laws, so now in the last decades, countervailing forces have been at work. During the Obama era, well-funded private interest attorneys filed lawsuits making their way through the courts to overturn laws that did not consider the individual as solely responsible for their circumstances.
This brings us to January 6, 2021, which stands on its own as testimonial to overwhelming backlash and anti-Federal government action.
Here’s where we are now: Across the country, state legislators have implemented a series of voter suppression laws, reflective of post-Reconstruction laws in the late 1870s. Claims of election fraud have gained currency, and there is widespread concern that democratic institutions themselves are under assault and susceptible to becoming vastly weakened by authoritarians. Gerrymandering has enabled politicians to guarantee their own elections, supported by Supreme Court rulings.
The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industry is under attack, with claims that efforts to diversify the workforce or educational institutions amount to “reverse racism” against the White dominant group. Companies and colleges are figuring out how to avoid lawsuits while still reaping the benefits of diversity and inclusion.
Let’s just compare Reconstruction after slavery and today’s racial reckoning. What are the commonalities?
So now the critical question: How did those of us who favor public interest lose the fight in each instance?
What happened to undercut Reconstruction?
It is easy to claim a bunch of racists or indifferent White people did us in.
On a recent podcast, Charles Blow gave a variation of this argument. His latest book advocates for Black people to take over a southern state where we will have an electoral majority.8 He explained his rationale like this:
Unless we take over a state, we are at the mercy of White supremacy. You are at the mercy of begging and pleading and demanding that someone with the power see and recognize your equality. What we have seen throughout history is that liberals in the country vacillate on this all the time. Sometimes they engage and then they get tired and they say there is another bigger thing and then they move on and they say you’re griping too much and we try. And that’s literally from Reconstruction on.9 |
I totally agree with his premise that there has been vacillation since Reconstruction. Yet his claim that the reason for the vacillation is “they get tired and there is another big thing” gives me pause. I think this begs the full picture of what pushes them away.
If you’ve been following me, by now you know that I believe we need to look squarely at our own culpability if we are to make changes and create the society we want to have.
Yes, we have faced recalcitrance since the slave trade began. But focusing solely on what others are not doing removes our agency. As controversial as some might see it, I believe we do have agency, we can make a difference, all is not lost.
We honor those who came before us by picking ourselves up and rising yet again to figure out how we can do better in promoting lasting change.
As I read history, during all the periods of regression from public to private interests, a precipitating factor was that mainstream America thought special interests were gaining ascendancy, causing the mainstream to lose political power and economic resources.
In other words, they were motivated by a solid belief in a zero-sum game10 – belief that one group’s gains means their loss. They felt threatened and excluded.
I remember being in my segregated elementary school reading about the carpetbaggers: Northerners who came down to rule over the poor beleaguered South and give unfair advantages to what my textbooks portrayed as uneducated, biologically inferior former slaves. This is my childhood memory of how we were portrayed, and I remember cringing in my seat as I read this narrative in our history books.
The truth is something different. Carpetbaggers at the time were former state soldiers from middle-class families who went South to earn a living. They were viewed with hostility because they upheld the civil and political rights of the newly freed Blacks.11
Yet the image of the manipulative, self-serving carpetbagger was allowed to pervade the national subconscious then, just as the welfare queen and Black thug pervaded the national consciousness during the regressive 1970s.
And now the narrative of the exploitative, self-serving DEI industry is becoming widespread, shifting poll numbers away from public interests and slowing the arc of the moral universe’s march toward social justice yet again.
Is there anything we can do? Do we need to wait for another gruesome murder to go viral and catch public attention?
If it was all about what regressive forces have or have not done, then the only choice would be to wait. But I think we can be more proactive than that if we can look fearlessly at what we as progressives did to feed into the backlash narratives.
I’ll say more in Part 2, a special issue of this blog next week.
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