I have changed my mind: It isn't yet time to stop remediating racial discrimination.
There are problems with "reverse discrimination." Those problems are what I saw. But there are problems without it. I see that better now.
I was too optimistic about the state of the country.
Here is what I wrote back on May 2:
It is OK to recognize that Americans dislike race-based preferences in everything: college admissions, hiring, promotions, and voting. Yes, voting, too. The MLK formulation that people should be judged by character, not skin color, is better principle, better policy, and better politics. Carving out congressional and state "black districts" probably made sense 50 years ago, but now is creating a backlash bigger than its purpose of encouraging fair representation.
I wrote that shaping districts with a majority of minority residents fuels White resentment against "reverse discrimination" and removes the likelihood that a White politician in the South has electoral reason to care about Black voters. Maybe, I wrote, if there were mixed-race districts with a White majority but a substantial number of Blacks, the White politicians would need to moderate on issues important to Black constituents to get votes in a contested election.
I had my eye on the current rise of "White Power" as a reason to stop creating Black-majority districts. White people saw that there was advantage to identity consciousness for Blacks, women, and other identities. Instead of thinking of White people as the neutral, default, status-quo group, Whites, and especially White men, began defining themselves as their own aggrieved underdog group. Trump was brilliant in making this a point of grievance and political mobilization. Democrats ignored the growing White and male backlash, and made it easy for Trump.
I thought it was better to stop competing over victimhood. I still agree with that sentiment, but I was naive, too. I ignored history and practice.
Historically, the South's successful effort to keep Black people from voting was about maintaining political control in a White-on-top society. When necessary to be deceptive about it, politicians did it with pretense and subterfuge: grandfather clauses, poll taxes, discriminatory exams, discriminatory policing, and informally sanctioned intimidation. It worked for them. Very few Black people in the South could vote, as recently as 1964.
The purpose was partisan control by the "White" party, i.e., Democrats until about 1966-1968, then the crossover realignment to Republicans as the party protecting White political power.
This Supreme Court protects freedom -- the freedom to speak and act on feelings of racial and religious prejudice. It is a freedom-of-conscience right, even if it is unlovely and contradicts our country's founding documents and creed. But the Court is asymmetric. They do not protect, as the 15th Amendment directs, the freedom to be protected against those acts. This gives Trump and the current GOP the power they need to return to the historic pattern of suppression of Black political influence.
So I was wrong. We have the 15th Amendment but we need to enforce it.
Trump understood the country better than I do. He panders to prejudices, and he found his constituency. It isn't everyone, but it is enough.
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16 comments:
Kudos to you for seeing something that has been obvious to me and many others since Trump’s rise in 2015: the modern GOP is blatantly and hideously white supremacist, and isn't remotely interested in quaint things like "playing by the rules", or "fairness" or any of those other namby-pamby woke liberal nonsense.
Considering the disaster that Trump’s Iran war has been and the fact that prices of gas and food are likely to skyrocket this summer, it is likely that Trump would be facing a massive loss in the midterms under normal circumstances. However these aren't normal circumstances and Trump and his supporters don't accept losses. We can basically be certain that Trump will attempt to overturn the will of the voters this fall and steal the election in whatever way possible.
We *cannot* let that happen under any circumstances
Ditto what Woke Guy said. The fact that Republicans made the biggest blabbermouth in the racist “birther movement” their Supreme Leader lays to rest any doubt that racism remains a big issue in the U.S.
Tribal politics beget tribal politics. Making politics into a zero-sum game creates winners and losers. Doing it on the basis of race makes white people the losers.
Liberals have been saying to white people, "everyone gets a thumb on the scale, but you. You get to pay the price for what other people did in the past who just happened to have the same skin color as you."
Liberals turned this country into the war of the tribes, but expected white people not to become tribal. That worked for a while, but it is not working anymore. Significant numbers of white people are now saying, "if you turn this country into the war of the tribes, I am going to fight on the side of my tribe."
I was always against tribal politics. I was always against identity politics. I was always against affirmative action and DEI. I was always in favor of treating everyone as an individual.
But the liberals insisted on going tribal. They sowed the wind with it, and what they reaped was Donald Trump. It's too bad for the country, but it serves them right.
The book Roots is now banned in at least some public schools in Knox County, Tennessee. Parts of the book would upset children. I think that means white children. If Blacks couldn't vote in school board elections, Roots wouldn't have gotten into the public schools to begin with; I'm pretty sure about that.
On the contrary: Republicans chose Trump to be their leader because, as a greedy racist whose stock-in-trade was fear, anger and hatred, he best represented their values.
I understand your point of view Michael. Please consider your point of view is both narrow, from your percieved treatment, and self-serving.
To JF:
Every other tribe is serving themselves, somehow my tribe ended up on the plate, and I am supposed to accept it? Sorry, that would take a lack of self-respect that I am not capable of.
I never wanted this country to go tribal. I have fought that tendency all my life. I was totally in support of the original civil rights movement when it was, “black and white together, we shall not be moved.“ But when it morphed into “f*** you whitey” and tribal politics, I got off the bus.
As if the Republicans' "Southern Strategy" wasn't tribal! Golly, I was never told f*** you whitey." Maybe it was something you said.
No, the Black Power movement was saying it publicly in the late 1960s. You were either too young to remember or too ideologically blinded to notice.
The Republicans were being tribal back then; that was wrong. But it doesn’t provide a justification for the Democrats to go tribal in the other direction.
MLK wanted his daughters to be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That was right on. It’s too bad that the Democrats and liberals chose to abandon that valuable principle and go tribal instead.
If indeed voting is a strict or nearly strict function of race identity, perhaps a parliamentary system would accordingly be our best bet.
Parliamentary systems have problems all their own. I don’t think there is any problem-free version of democracy.
It's too bad the only MLK quote you seem to know is one that white nationalists and right-wing extremists like to cherry-pick as an excuse to roll back civil rights laws. In fact, we've never had and still don't have a "color blind" society, as is evident by our 'birther movement' president hobnobbing with notorious racists like Nick Fuentes.
Sometimes even white nationalists and right-wing extremists say things that are true. Liking that particular quote by MLK does not make me either one of those, despite the fact that they might use that quote for entirely different purposes.
My use of that quote also has nothing to do with whatever weird craziness Trump has been involved with.
We need a colorblind society if we are ever going to get past racial divisiveness. We need to overcome both the right’s and the left’s attachment to racial identity politics.
You’re correct, of course. I was just being facetious, imagining various Race Party coalitions. Turnout would be everything, since choice is pre-locked.
That's right, we need a colorblind society that's free of prejudice against the race, religion, gender or sexual preference of others. Until we do, we need laws that steer us in that direction, such as affirmative action, DEI, etc.
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