A
crowd participated in a candlelit vigil, “We Are One Mississippi,” at the
University of Mississippi in Oxford on Wednesday. It was in response to a
protest on campus after President Obama was re-elected.
THE
white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama’s decisive re-election
with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday
night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years
ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting
together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might
have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a
“post-racial” era.
But
while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr.
Obama’s re-election last week, it has frayed over time — and may in fact have
been weaker than we imagined to begin with. For close to the surface lies a
political racism that harks back 150 years to the time of Reconstruction, when
African-Americans won citizenship rights. Black men also won the right to vote
and contested for power where they had previously been enslaved.
How
is this so? The “birther” challenge, which galvanized so many Republican
voters, expresses a deep unease with black claims to political inclusion and
leadership that can be traced as far back as the 1860s. Then, white Southerners
(and a fair share of white Northerners) questioned the legitimacy of black
suffrage, viciously lampooned the behavior of new black officeholders and
mobilized to murder and drive off local black leaders.
Much
of the paramilitary work was done by the White League, the Ku Klux Klan and
other vigilantes, who destroyed interracial Reconstruction governments and
helped pave the road to the ferocious repression, disenfranchisement and
segregation of the Jim Crow era.
D.
W. Griffith’s 1915 film, “The Birth of a Nation,” which played to enthusiastic
audiences, including President Woodrow Wilson, gave these sensibilities wide
cultural sanction, with its depiction of Reconstruction’s democratic impulses
as a violation of white decency and its celebration of the Klan for saving the
South and reuniting the nation.
By
the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in
American political society and had no business wielding power over white
people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the
achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been
elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr.
Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and
they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts.
The
truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black
officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of
forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal
chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to
be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never
brought against any of his predecessors.
But
the coordinated efforts across the country to intimidate and suppress the votes
of racial and ethnic minorities are far more consequential. Hostile officials
regularly deploy the language of “fraud” and “corruption” to justify their
efforts much as their counterparts at the end of the 19th century did to fully
disenfranchise black voters.
Although
our present-day tactics are state-issued IDs, state-mandated harassment of
immigrants and voter-roll purges, these are not a far cry from the poll taxes,
literacy tests, residency requirements and discretionary power of local
registrars that composed the political racism of a century ago. That’s not even
counting the hours-long lines many minority voters confronted.
THE
repercussions of political racism are ever present, sometimes in subtle rather
than explicit guises. The campaigns of both parties showed an obsessive concern
with the fate of the “middle class,” an artificially homogenized category
mostly coded white, while resolutely refusing to address the deepening morass
of poverty, marginality and limited opportunity that disproportionately engulfs
African-American and Latino communities.
At the same
time, the embrace of “small business” and the retreat from public-sector
institutions as a formula for solving our economic and social crises — evident
in the policies of both parties — threaten to further erode the prospects and
living standards of racial and ethnic minorities, who are overwhelmingly wage
earners and most likely to find decent pay and stability as teachers, police
officers, firefighters and government employees.
Over the past three decades, the Democrats have surrendered so
much intellectual ground to Republican anti-statism that they have little with
which to fight back effectively. The result is that Mr. Obama, like many other
Democrats, has avoided the initiatives that could really cement his coalition —
public works projects, industrial and urban policy, support for homeowners,
comprehensive immigration reform, tougher financial regulation, stronger
protection for labor unions and national service — and yet is still branded a
“socialist” and coddler of minorities. Small wonder that the election returns
indicate a decline in overall popular turnout since 2008 and a drop in Mr.
Obama’s share of the white vote, especially the vote of white men.
But the returns also suggest intriguing possibilities for which
the past may offer us meaningful lessons. There seems little doubt that Mr.
Obama’s bailout of the auto industry helped attract support from white
working-class voters and other so-called Reagan Democrats across the Midwest
and Middle Atlantic, turning the electoral tide in his favor precisely where
the corrosions of race could have been very damaging.
The Republicans, on the other hand, failed to make inroads among
minority voters, including Asian-Americans, and are facing a formidable
generational wall. Young whites helped drive the forces of conservatism and
white supremacy during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but now most
seem ill at ease with the policies that the Republican Party brandishes: social
conservatism, anti-feminism, opposition to same-sex marriage and hostility to
racial minorities. The anti-Obama riot at Ole Miss, integrated 50 years ago by
James H. Meredith, was followed by a larger, interracial “We Are One
Mississippi” candlelight march of protest. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have an
opportunity to bridge the racial and cultural divides that have been widening
and to begin to reconfigure the country’s political landscape. Although this
has always been a difficult task and one fraught with peril, history — from
Reconstruction to Populism to the New Deal to the struggle for civil rights —
teaches us that it can happen: when different groups meet one another on more
level planes, slowly get to know and trust one another, and define objectives
that are mutually beneficial and achievable, they learn to think of themselves
as part of something larger — and they actually become something larger.
Hard work on the ground — in neighborhoods, schools, religious
institutions and workplaces — is foundational. But Mr. Obama, the biracial
community organizer, might consider starting his second term by articulating a
vision of a multicultural, multiracial and more equitable America with the same
insight and power that he once brought to an address on the singular problem of
race. If he does that, with words and then with deeds, he can strike a telling
blow against the political racism that haunts our country.
