Ellis Cose - Race and Reckoning: From Founding Fathers to Todays Disruptors

Its a monumental challenge few Americans saw coming. This undeclared war on our democracy, on the very idea of an egalitarian multicultural society, would have been unfathomable a few years back. But that was before a conquered president refused to concede defeat and instead used angry propaganda, preposterous lawsuits, and the full weight of the presidency to try to stay in power. That was before a mob of hooligans who brought death and destruction to the US Capitol was praised by the leaders of the defeated presidents party. That was before some nineteen states passed thirty laws targeting fictional voter fraud, potentially denying countless fully qualified Americans the right to vote.

What accounts for this assault on the machinery of our democracy? Why, a full year after the election, did 52 percent of Republicans (according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll) insist that Donald Trump had rightfully won and 28 percent of all respondents attribute Joe Bidens victory to illegal voting or election rigging? Why have so many Americans become so unwilling to accept the legitimacy of our own political process?

Part of the answer lies in the chaos of the Donald Trump presidencyand in the values Trump promoted. He was not only dedicated to breaking norms but opposed to the rule of law itself. He surrounded himself with cronies and crooks, more than a dozen of whom had been indicted or faced criminal charges by the time he ran for reelection. And after losing, he unleashed attacks unlike any previously seen on the integrity of the vote and the democratic system.

That contempt for democratic customs coupled with an unprecedented assault on the machinery of democracy left many of Trumps followers suspicious of the election process and hostile to anyone deemed complicit in stealing the presidential election.

Still, Trump is only a man. His actions would never have had the impact they didin fact, would not even have been possiblewithout the willing participation of other politicians, officials he appointed, and a large swath of the American electorate.

How we got to where we are today has a lot to do with our rich and conflicted history. There are things in the American experience that made many of us extremely susceptible to the appeal of a person such as Trump.

A lot of people would prefer to simply forget that historyespecially in regard to race. Lets just pretend that those troubling things never happened, they say in effect; lets let bygones be bygones, embrace our common humanity, and get on with our collective lives.

It would be great if life were so simple. But obviously our past affects our present. No one, after all, would argue for trying to solve the problem of pollution by ignoring all the pollution that occurred in the past and focusing only on the pollution occurring right now. In order to solve pollution, we have to deal with all the garbage, all the pollutants that have been building up for generations. By the same token, its impossible to rationally discuss ending inequality without acknowledging the impact of racial discrimination in the past, beginning with our legacy of enslavement and the racial hierarchy that stemmed from it.

Instead of acknowledging that simple truth, some political advocates, particularly on the right, equate being reminded of the sins of the past with attacking or promoting ill will toward Whites. So we have to listen to wacky arguments condemning such things as critical race theory, an arcane field of legal scholarship that is not even taught to young children, when what the aggrieved activists really want is to shut down discussion of Americas racial past, period.

Rather than acknowledge that reality, certain critics prefer to ravage the entire field of scholarship on race, which they insist is nothing more than catering to Black and Brown racial grievance. It is better, they believe, to accept the narrative that the battle of the Alamo was all about libertywhile ignoring the fact that it was also a battle about keeping Blacks enslaved. By the same alchemy, the war against the Union becomes a noble effort to protect southern customs and defend states rights, not a desperate effort to keep millions of people forever subjugated.

In December 2021, The Washington Post ran a poignant and disturbing profile of a White teacher in rural Kingsport, Tennessee, who had been fired for suggesting to his overwhelming White students that White privilege was a reality. In articulating such a notion, the teacher had violated a recently passed Tennessee law. At least eleven Republican-led states, noted the Post, had passed laws or approved policies effectively banning the teaching of concepts or ideas about race that were scorned by many conservatives; and more states were considering such laws.

Even a novel by the acclaimed author Toni Morrison came under attack by advocates of historical ignorance. The novel, Beloved, is based, in part, on the true story of a women who fled slavery and killed her own child rather than subject her anew to enslavement.

A political activist wanted the book removed from the curriculum because it gave nightmares to her adolescent son. The mother essentially argued that it was better to suppress the woeful story than to expose vulnerable students to Beloved. Never mind that such exposure might provide valuable insights into why human bondage is so unspeakably horrible, and into how it spawned a culture of victim-blaming, defiance, and denial among its perpetrators and defenders.

The problem with such a whitewashing of history is that it leaves no meaningful context for understanding the political behavior we witness today. To understand the current efforts to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters, you have to understand what happened at the end of Reconstruction.

The idea that certain votes should not countor, to be more precise, that certain Americans were more entitled to the vote than othersis as old as the idea of America itself. For that reason, it was easy for White southerners to convince themselves, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the Union had made a mistake. Despite the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted Black freedmen the right to vote, White southerners passed an array of measures designed to deny that right. And in those less racially enlightened times, they were not shy about taking credit for doing so.

In his inaugural address in December 1890, South Carolina governor-elect Benjamin Tillman praised the White effort to block Blacks from voting, thereby ensuring the triumph of Democracy and White supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy, of civilization over barbarism. Even our colored fellow citizens, he insisted, were thrilled with the outcome, which was why they had absolutely refused to be led to the polls by their bosses. As a result, he maintained, there is less prejudice and more kindly feeling between the white man and the black man in South Carolina than has existed at any time since 1868. That racial harmony is enhanced by Black marginalization remains a popular argument among those pushing for regressive policies.

In an 1898 interview with the Los Angeles Times, William McCorkle, a former governor of West Virginia, explained that Black political empowerment had led to political, financial, and moral ruin, forcing Whites to agree without regard to politics... that the negro rule should then and there cease.

In 1899, the Atlanta Constitution congratulated Mississippi for solving the Black voter problem. The solution involved requiring payment of a poll tax as well as proof that prospective voters could read and understand any section of the Constitution chosen by the examiner. The Mississippi Plan had worked so well, reported the newspaper, that South Carolina had followed it almost to the letter. Louisiana, North Carolina, and Alabama had other elements to contend with but expected to achieve the same objective through a somewhat different method.