White Racism, Past and Present

Colbert I.
King

I for one would love to be able to say we're now living in a "post-racial" America but, alas, it just isn't so. A recent op-ed piece by Washington Post opinion writer Colbert I. King, "I used to think America would age out of racism. What was I thinking?," gives chapter and verse as to how the hope for racial equality remains unfulfilled.

King writes about:

1. The Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, followed five months later by protest walkouts by white students at several formerly all-white high schools and junior highs in Washington, DC.
2. White students and their families devoting the time remaining before the black students would arrive at their formerly all-white schools to finding a means to flee the city — "white flight," it was called.
3. The ill treatment suffered in 1956 by a young African American woman, Autherine Lucy, who was the first African-American student to attend the University of Alabama. Ms. Lucy was later expelled "under the guise of ensuring her personal safety."
4. The 1957 brouhaha over the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as Governor Orval Faubus declared that “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter the schoolhouse.

Back then, King, who was in his late teens, thought that such racism would "age out" over the course of time, as older whites ceded the spotlight to younger, more enlightened ones. But that's not what has happened. Instead (in King's words):

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator, was 21 at the time.

Holden Matthews, charged with burning three historically black churches in Louisiana a week before Easter, was 21.

John Earnest, accused of a shooting that killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., a few weeks after launching an arson attack at a San Diego County mosque, was 19.

The man charged with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead was no septuagenarian; Robert Bowers was 46.

Then there are the two ninth-grade students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda who posted an image of themselves in blackface on social media and used the n-word as they described the photo.

In an earlier op-ed, "Why is racism still thriving? Ask the enablers," King wrote about the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page that showed a photo of two young men, one in blackface and the other in Ku Klux Klan garb:

The yearbook page was that of Virginia governor Ralph Northam. Northam has publicly apologized, but he has not identified either of the two men depicted, nor has he resigned from his current post as governor.

*****

Gbenga Akinnagbe

In today's Sunday edition of the Washington Post, black actor Gbenga Akinnagbe talks, in an opinion piece, "Every night, racists kill me. Then I leave the theater for a world of danger", about his experiences playing the role of Tom Robinson in the current Broadway hit adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1960 novel, the African American Tom Robinson is accused by Mayella Ewell, a young white woman, of having raped her. The novel's protagonist is a white attorney, Atticus Finch, who undertakes to defend Robinson at his trial. The story is narrated by the younger of the widowed Atticus's two children, nicknamed Scout, who tells the tale retrospectively, as a grown woman.

The trial of Tom Robinson is one of the central features of the story. Atticus Finch is able to demonstrate that Robinson cannot have forced himself upon Mayella, owing to the fact that he as a child lost the use of his right arm in an accident with a cotton gin. It accordingly becomes clear in the courtroom that the lonely Mayella actually was the one who made sexual advances toward Tom. Though Tom is clearly innocent of committing rape, the jury convicts him anyway. Afterward, Atticus is hopeful that he can get the verdict overturned, but the distraught Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison.

A 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch tells the same story. In both the novel and the film, Tom Robinson is portrayed as an upright-but-diffident black man. Akinnagbe's portrayal in the Broadway play, on the other hand, is of a man who "has a voice and agency that the Tom of the Harper Lee book and 1962 film did not have."

Akinnagbe loves the role, he says, finding it "often cathartic." Yet he adds that "when the play is over, I am still a black man, in this racist country, still subject to its lethal systems and structures."

*****

One of the forces driving events in our upcoming 2020 election season is indeed the fact that racist attitudes, these "lethal systems and structures," still redound to the detriment of African Americans today. As a 71-year-old white man, I know that the situation of black people in this country is hugely better today than it was when To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. But "hugely better" is not the same as — to use the term bandied about when the first African American, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency in 2008 — "post-racial." Since Obama finished his second (and final) term and Donald Trump was elected to replace him, we have in fact witnessed a racist backlash. White supremacy hasn't disappeared. Indeed, it is still (to borrow Colbert King's word) "thriving."

I have been watching the skirmishing among the 20-plus Democrats who are seeking their party's nomination to run against Trump in 2020. None of them has given me reason to suspect he or she is a racist. Yet none of them seems to have emphatically called forth the enthusiastic African American support that he or she may well need to defeat Trump.

One of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in the 2016 election was that she did not do as well with black voters as Barack Obama had done in 2008 and 2012. People of color didn't come out for her in numbers as huge as those they had given to our first black president.

Almost by default, Obama's veep, Joe Biden, leads the other Democratic candidates in polls of voters of color. (The full list of candidates can be seen at "Who’s Running for President in 2020?".) According to "Black voters helped make Joe Biden the Democratic front-runner. Will they keep him there?":

In ... recent polls, Quinnipiac said Biden had 42 percent support among nonwhite Democrats. CNN put his nonwhite support at 50 percent. Biden’s closest competitor among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters of all races, Sanders, won 14 percent of the nonwhite vote in the CNN poll and 7 percent in Quinnipiac. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) each earned less than 10 percent of the nonwhite vote in these polls. The Hill/HarrisX and Harvard-Harris both have Biden leading Sanders by over 30 points with African American voters.

Keep in mind that Cory Booker is African American, and one of Kamala Harris's parents, her father, is a Jamaican of African descent. (Her mother is of Tamil Indian descent.) I can't really offer an explanation for why neither of those two candidates polls in the double-digit range among nonwhite voters.

It's not that I think a white Democrat, if elected to the post-2020 Oval Office, wouldn't be able to tamp down white racism at least to where it was before Trump took control. Rather, I worry that a white candidate wouldn't necessarily attract sufficient enthusiasm among people of color to amp up their voting in the November 2020 election — unless he or she makes a serious effort to call forth their support, starting now.