I don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw that plaque on the sidewalk that marked one corner of Fort Dearborn. I doubt that I was even 10, but I do remember feeling deeply moved that I was standing on the spot where wooden palisades once stood, and where soldiers used to march in formation. The walls of the classroom at the all-white school I attended were covered with posters celebrating Chicago’s early history. I remember the etchings of the old fort, the early settlers, and the Great Chicago Fire. There may even have been a poster celebrating Chicago’s first European settler, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, but if so, it was one of a man whose features denied his race.
The 1884 drawing of DuSable that was common in schoolbooks of the 1950s
Yes, we knew that he was black, but the fact that he was French is what was emphasized in my classroom. When I hit my late teens and early twenties I took a certain glee in shocking the bigots, with whom I often worked (it was Chicago, after all), by telling them that the city was founded by a black man. It was surprising how few of them knew, and how many argued the point with me.
The history of my city, my state, and my country has always fascinated me. It is rich, it is colorful, and it is often shameful as well as surprising. But what it has always been is racist. Sometimes we have pushed back against it, but too often we have simply turned our backs on it, ignoring its harm in exchange for its benefits.
When we wrote our Constitution we did include a ban on the importation of slaves after 1808. But we did nothing to stop the enslavement and breeding of those already at the mercy of our racist system. Our census would count them as three-fifths of a free person in order to tilt the Electoral College, as well as the House of Representatives, in favor of the slave owners of the southern states. According to Edward E. Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism:
One result was the South’s dominance of the presidency over the next seventy years. Four of the first five presidents would be Virginia slaveholders. Eight of the first dozen owned people.
Northern states outlawed the ownership of human beings, one state at a time, and they fought to limit its reach into the western lands. But there is no denying that while they outlawed it within their own state borders, they continued to profit from the legal slave labor camps of the South.
In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist traces how dependent the American economy was on the profitable labor of slaves and how essential they were to our nation’s growth.
The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.
For a while, it seemed that by fighting a war that according to current estimates may have killed as many as 750,000 to 850,000 men, we had finally ended slavery and recognized all men as equal. We amended our Constitution to grant the franchise to the former slaves. (At least to the men who had been slaves. Women would have to wait, as usual.) And the 13th Amendment ended slavery—or so we thought. The text of the amendment:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
See the loophole in Section 1? So did those who had profited so richly from slavery in the past. But for the decade after Appomattox, federal troops occupied much of the South, protecting the new rights of the former slaves. And the need for that protection was demonstrated as soon as the federal troops were pulled out of the last few states in the South in exchange for the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in the Compromise of 1877. As I wrote two years ago:
Right after promising to protect the rights of all citizens, Georgia passed a poll tax in 1877 that effectively shut out freed slaves. Other Southern states followed, adding complicated registration requirements, literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that allowed poor whites to vote because they were, or were descended from those who were able to vote prior to 1860.
But they didn’t stop with disenfranchisement. Jim Crow laws were written to keep African Americans in virtual slavery. The loophole in the 13th Amendment allowed state and local jurisdictions throughout the South to once again enslave blacks by arresting them on the thinest of pretexts. From the Introduction to Douglas A. Blackmon’s book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II:
Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men.
Once arrested, they were sold to mines, manufacturers, and plantation owners as slave labor. It wasn’t until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that the Justice Department, fearing its use in enemy propaganda, finally stepped in and began to combat this practice. But they did finally stop it. More from Blackmon:
Millions of soldiers—black and white—had witnessed the horror of racial ideology exalted to its most violent extremes in Nazi Germany. Thousands of African American men who returned as fighting men, unwilling to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that preceded the war, abandoned the South altogether or joined in the agitation that would become the civil rights movement.
…
It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities.
And for a few years, we stopped locking black men up. As many as six million African Americans left the South and moved into the northern cities where they were given jobs that no one else wanted to do and forced, by redlining, to live in areas that were perhaps more segregated than the ones they had left. From Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration:
Most colored migrants were funneled into the lowest-paying, least wanted jobs in the harshest industries— iron and steel foundries and slaughtering and meatpacking. They “only did the dirty work,” a colored steelworker said of his early days in Milwaukee , “jobs that even Poles didn’t want.”
The civil rights movement sprang from these roots, and the Democratic Party lost its racist claim to southern votes when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Once again, it appeared that progress was being made as the Justice Department was tasked with approving voting laws in states that had a proven track record of racial discrimination.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs which was almost exclusively fought in those neighborhoods where African Americans lived. As a result, our prison population, which was a mere 300,000 three decades ago, exploded to more than 2 million.
Michelle Alexander calls this the new Jim Crow in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The War on Drugs, which was started under Ronald Reagan, enhanced under Bill Clinton, and continued under every president since, has resulted in "an enormous population of predominately black and brown people who, because of the drug war, are denied basic rights and privileges of American citizenship and are permanently relegated to an inferior status."
Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living “free” in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow. Those released from prison on parole can be stopped and searched by the police for any reason— or no reason at all— and returned to prison for the most minor of infractions, such as failing to attend a meeting with a parole officer. Even when released from the system’s formal control, the stigma of criminality lingers. Police supervision, monitoring, and harassment are facts of life not only for all those labeled criminals, but for all those who “look like” criminals. Lynch mobs may be long gone, but the threat of police violence is ever present. A wrong move or sudden gesture could mean massive retaliation by the police. A wallet could be mistaken for a gun. The “whites only” signs may be gone, but new signs have gone up—notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses, informing the general public that “felons” are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind—discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those labeled criminals can even be denied the right to vote.
But in 2008 we elected our first black president. He, recognizing the injustice in the war on drugs, has taken steps to help alleviate the problem, including the 2014 Clemency Initiative. So far he has commuted the sentences of more than 1,000 victims of the war on drugs and the Justice Department is reviewing an additional 6,300 petitions.
In 2013, claiming that it was no longer needed, John Roberts’ Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which determined which states were required to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department when they changed their voting laws. Chief Justice Roberts wrote:
Nearly fifty years later, things have changed dramatically. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, “[v]oter turnout and registration rates” in covered jurisdictions “now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.”
From the New York Times report on the ruling:
Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval.
If Roberts knew anything about American history and the Compromise of 1877 he would have expected that outcome. It was inevitable.
This latest election reflects the effective efforts to restrict the ability of people of color to cast votes. It also reflects the inherent racism of our nation. Yes, we need to address issues of economic inequality, but our history is one of a continuous battle over race. We just give it different names. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, incarceration, war on drugs—today it goes by the moniker “alt-right,” which is no more that the Klan under a different sheet. They are the same racists we have been fighting for hundreds of years.
Here’s the secret: We have been winning.
It may not appear that way today, but every time we make up our minds to put up a fight against racism, we progress. And in fighting racism, progress is victory. We were simply not prepared for the racist backlash that resulted in the election of a shallow, thin-skinned, lying, greedy, sadistic monster to the highest office in the land. And let us not confuse populism with racism. They are not the same—one has merely been used to disguise the other by the Republicans.
Hillary Clinton ran on a true populist platform. Beneath the baying of the scandal-driven media and the nasty primary attacks on her integrity was a political platform that gave the white working class everything they wanted—with the exception of racism. Economic inequality? She covered that, with plans to increase taxes on the wealthy. Loss of jobs due to firms relocating? She proposed claw-backs and penalties. College for their kids? She wanted it to be debt-free.
Granted, she was a woman and she considered people of color to be as American as people whose skin was white. Currently, she is approaching a lead of 2.7 million votes, which means that most of America is willing to do the same. The Electoral College, established to protect the rights of Southern slave owners, has granted this temporary victory to their intellectual heirs.
But the war isn’t over, and those of us protected by our white privilege need to step up and use that privilege to shelter the vulnerable, whether they be immigrants who practice a different religion, members of the LGBTQ community, people of color, or women. We need to speak out against hate wherever we see it. We need to call our elected representatives to make sure that none of the proposals of the new administration become laws. We must also be vigilant at the state and local levels, where some of the most hateful legislation occurs.
We must identify, call out, and ostracize or boycott those who would allow the doctrine of white supremacy to become normalized in our democracy. And that includes our media.
We are the majority. We need to act like it.
