The abolition of racism in the USA, 1954-1965
The epistemological sleight of hand of the notion of “systemic racism”
In my commentary on October 18, I wrote the following: “The teaching of white supremacy and the practice of racial discrimination were abolished in 1964 and 1965, and they were replaced by government mandated preferential treatment in employment and university admissions. If statistics were not manipulated by pseudo radical intellectuals, it would be seen that a great part of racial inequality today is caused by historical, class, and cultural factors, not racism or white supremacy.” Some in Twitter objected to this assertion. In today’s commentary, I further explain my understanding of the question.
In the United States of America prior to the Brown decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, racial segregation was mandated by law in the U.S. South. Separate public accommodations were mandated by law, punished as a crime when violated. Separate educational facilities also were mandated by law, overruling residential proximity. Procedures in voting registration effectively denied the right to vote for most blacks in the South, overruling in practice constitutional amendments guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights to all, regardless of race or color.
The situation in the South was tolerated by the North, which practiced de facto racial discrimination and exclusion with respect to public accommodations in hotels and restaurants as well as in housing, which led to de facto segregation in education.
The African-American Movement, 1917 to 19721
The African-American Movement from 1917 to 1972 was made possible by black migration to the urban North, which was stimulated by World War I and by the collapse of the southern Jim Crow sharecropping system; and by the industrialization of the South and black urbanization in the South. The Movement was characterized by three tendencies.
(1) The predominant tendency of making demands on the white power structure for the protection of political, civil, social, and economic rights, as implied by the Declaration of Independence and required by Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This predominant strain of the Movement is most clearly represented by W.E.B. DuBois, the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It utilized tactics of mass demonstrations and protests as well as litigation in federal courts.
(2) Black separatism, black community control, and black self-help were represented by Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, A. Philip Randolph, and the black power movement of 1966 to 1972. This strain did not stress the U.S. Constitution, but neither did it reject the constitution as the juridical foundation of the nation.
(3) Identification with the anti-colonial struggles of the world, which was represented by the NAACP in the 1920s, Garvey, DuBois, Malcolm X in 1964-1965, King in 1967-1968, and the black power movement of 1966 to 1972. The strain had some tendency to reject American identity, but when doing so, it was not rooted in a pointless nihilism but on the embracing of an African identity and the African anti-colonial cause.
The period of 1917 to 1972 was characterized by a number of Movement organized events that impacted American society. They included: the March on Washington Movement of 1941-1942; rallies led by Randolph demanding the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1946; the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56; the student sit-in movement of 1960; the Freedom Rides of 1961, an intercity bus desegregation action characterized by a high level of white participation; the Birmingham campaign of 1963, which dramatically provoked the support of white civil society for Movement goals; the March on Washington of 1963, the scene of King’s “I have a dream” speech; Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, a voting rights project with strong white participation; the Selma voting rights campaign of 1965, culminating in a Selma-to-Montgomery march with high levels of white participation; the call for “black power” in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1966; the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, with white, Latino, and indigenous participation; the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control of schools in New York city in 1968, including participation by white youth; and the black political convention of 1972 in Gary, Indiana.
The African-American Movement had significant political gains in the period 1941 to 1965. They included: an Executive Order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 banning racial discrimination in defense industries and federal government employment; two executive orders by President Harry Truman in 1948, creating commissions to oversee the elimination of racial discrimination in federal government employment and the armed services; the 1954 Supreme Court decision overruling the “separate but equal doctrine,” citing the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal;” the 1956 Supreme Court decision mandating an end to racial segregation in city buses; the Civil Rights act of 1964, which prohibits racial segregation in schools and public accommodations as well as discrimination in employment; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were accompanied by clear declarations of a new legal and social order from 1963 to 1965 by presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
The gains of the period 1941 to 1965 were attained with the support of the federal government, in the form of favorable court decisions, presidential executive orders, and federal legislation. The U.S. government had a fundamental objective interest in the protection of black civil and political rights. At that time, the United States was at the height of its global hegemony. But the world-system confronted a rising tide of Third World movements of national liberation that were in the process of breaking the political dimension of colonial domination, which by and large had an orientation of non-alignment with respect to the Cold War ideological conflict, with some moving toward a degree of alignment with the Soviet Union. In this global context, the United States had a strategic interest in ending the systemic racism of Jim Crow and the ideology of white supremacy.
In addition, the white urban commercial class in the South had an interest in ending Jim Crow. This class was ascending on the basis of the increasing industrialization of the South, and the structures of Jim Crow, out of sync with emerging tendencies in the world, constituted an obstacle to its plans. In critical movements of racial conflict in the South from 1955 to 1965, the white business community attempted to mediate settlements between the Movement and city officials, who were under the control of the planter class.
Thus, the old racist structures were brought down by an effective alliance among the African-American Movement, the federal government, white commercial interests, and white liberals. Powerful political forces were not simply making concessions to street demonstrators in order to attain civil peace; they were recognizing that the maintenance of U.S. prestige and power in the world required a fundamental change in law and society with respect to the protection of the political and civil rights of all, regardless of race or color. That fundamental change became real.
The protection of social and economic rights was another matter. And in this matter as well, the power elite was free of racism, in that it was indifferent to the social and economic rights and needs of the people, regardless of race or color. Seeing this, King tried to mobilize a multi-racial alliance in defense of the social and economic rights of all, with limited success, ended by his assassination.
The post-Jim Crow arrangement of protecting political and civil rights combined with indifference to social and economic rights was consistent with the neocolonial world order, in which the right of nations to sovereignty was proclaimed in law and custom, but the right of nations and peoples to development was not. As the world-system increasingly fell into sustained structural crisis, the neocolonial powers, and especially the United States, turned to a violation of the sovereignty of nations in practice in pursuit of its particular economic interests, thus deepening the obstacles for nations in development. When those in authority violate in desperation the norms that they themselves have proclaimed, it can be considered decadence.
The African-American movement was brought to an end in the period 1970 to 1972 by the repression of black power and black nationalist organizations by local, state, and federal governments and by the incapacity of the left to unify on the basis of a multi-racial program addressing class and historic racial inequalities, as had been advocated by King in the period 1966 to 1968. The issues that these movement organizations were raising were not on the agenda for the United States in the context of the neocolonial world order.
The post-1965 racial reality
The racial legal reforms of 1964 and 1965 profoundly affected the racial practices and attitudes of American society. Previously segregated public spaces and services were integrated, a phenomenon that was strikingly visible for all to see and experience.
Black presence in the television and film industries and in sports and entertainment greatly increased. The content of films and television program was completely transformed, as black heroes of the past were remembered and celebrated before nation-wide audiences.
The number of black elected officials dramatically increased. Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there were fewer than 300 black elected officials in the United States. By 1970, the number of black elected officials had risen to 1,469l; and by 1980, it reached 4,912. At the same time, economic conditions dramatically improved for educated blacks in the professions and in government employment in the 1970s.
All of this had a dramatic effect on the attitudes of white society. The pre-1965 racist structures of legal segregation and economic exploitation had the effect that most whites had little contact with black people, except in certain service roles. So whites were not accustomed to seeing black professionals, black leaders, or black political analysts or commentators. That changed after 1965, and the broadened experience for white society completely debunked the concept of white supremacy. It was self-evident that there were numerous black people who possessed intelligence and conversational capacity and other desirable human qualities.
I taught in two colleges in the South from 1984 to 2011. Most of my students were white middle-class southerners. I never heard any of them express a view even remotely close to the notion that black people are inferior to white people, even in informal settings. Perhaps they simply didn’t express such views to me, sensing that they would not be well received. But even if this were true, what was occurring was a civil acceptance of a new racial reality. No one was proposing that we should go backs to the day when blacks were excluded from the colleges in which I was teaching.
These dramatic changes in racial customs and attitudes were reinforced by affirmative action programs. The colleges where I taught were mandated by federal government guidelines to take affirmative action to employ black people and women. Hiring committees identified black and women candidates, and if a white male were hired, it had to be shown that the white male had superior qualifications than the female and “minority” candidates. Without doubt, this introduced a definitive advantage to women and blacks in the generally chaotic and undisciplined hiring process.
White society by and large accepted affirmative action. To be sure, they expressed opposition to it with far greater frequency than blacks in opinion polls, and a few of them filed lawsuits against it. But there was not mass movement to end it, as occurred, for example, in Cuba in the 1980s, when Cuban women who were candidates to medical school successfully protested an affirmative action program in support of men that had intended to attain gender equity in the medical profession. In general, whites in the United States accepted affirmative action, in spite of reservations concerning its fairness or wisdom. The great majority viewed it as no big deal in the overall scheme of things, in a world in which almost nothing was completely fair and entirely wise.
However, the black middle class that benefitted from the new racial order did not constitute the majority of the black population, and in some ways, the greater opportunities for the black middle class had unintended negative consequences for the black lower class. Blacks with economic resources were able to move out of traditional black neighborhoods to which the race had been confined and into adjacent white areas, provoking white flight and thus the creation of middle-class black neighborhoods. These dynamics created residential class segregation within urban black society. In the 1980s, the African-American sociologist William J. Wilson maintained that the out-migration of the black middle class caused the social isolation of the black poor and the social deterioration of the traditional black neighborhoods, due to the absence of positive middle-class role models. The result, Wilson maintained, was high-levels welfare dependency, youth joblessness, male joblessness, street crime, violence, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and female-headed families. Black activists at the time noted that in this phenomenon, there were not racist and violent whites in Ku Klux Klan hoods circulating in the black community. I myself wondered what had happened to Malcolm X’s call in 1964 for black control of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the black community. (See “The black middle class defends its interests,” April 20, 2021).
In a recent Heritage Foundation program, three black intellectuals/activists (Glen Loury, Ian Rowe, and Robert Woodson) noted that the income gap between blacks and whites had declined in the 1950s and 1960s, during the Jim Crow era; but the racial income gap increased in the 1960s and 1970s, following the civil rights reforms and the adoption of government policies to reduce poverty. The reasons for the racial gap, they maintain, are the rise of single-parent families, a decline in family stability and functionality, the declining influence of the church, the prevailing belief that the government is responsible for rectifying social problems, and the emergence of a narrative that stresses black victimization. They noted that the consequences of the racial income gap today are most fully experienced by the black lower class. See “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022.
Loury maintained that the source of the racial income gap is not white racism. He argues that U.S. society today, in essence, is open, fair, and free with respect to race. The government has created equality of opportunity, non-discrimination, voting rights, and equal access. But the government cannot make families stay together, and it cannot raise children. The government cannot influence a culture that may encourage counterproductive behavior. He maintained that African Americans have our work cut out for us in educating our children and taking care of our own business. In this vein, Rowe declared that it is necessary to break from the model that insists that racial disparity must be a consequence of racial discrimination, in order that the true causal factors within the black community can be identified and addressed.
Loury, Rowe, and Woodson maintained that in the era of segregation, African Americans advanced significantly with respect to education, employment, and income, in spite of the prevailing pattern of discrimination and denial of political and civil rights. And they built strong neighborhoods characterized by family stability, active churches, and street safety.
Racism continued after 1965, but it took a different form. Blatant racist attitudes were greatly reduced, but the economic consequences of historic racism continued to have an impact on black society. For the most part, racism after 1965 was subtle, characterized by an ethnocentric indifference to the needs of black society or African-American history and culture. But in this indifference to the needs of others, the great majority of whites were similar to the great majority of persons in the modern era, including blacks who migrated out of the traditional black neighborhoods, with little attention being paid to the consequences with respect to the development of the historic black community. (See “The causes of racial inequality in USA: A look at historic, economic, and cultural factors,” January 14, 2022).
Taking these dynamics into account, how can it be that many leftists today describe American society today as characterized by “systemic racism?” If a phenomenon is systemic, this has to mean that it is characterized by support for it in all the institutions of the society and in the norms and values that sustain them. How can it be said that racism is systemic, when it had become socially unacceptable, and there were enforced laws against it? When political, corporate, and religious leaders regularly expressed opposition to it?
The sources of today’s so-called “systemic racism”
The term “systemic racism” is rooted in the post-modern turn of the academy, which began to be expressed in the 1980s, especially among white feminist scholars at elite universities.
As I wrote in my August 30, 2022 commentary, “The Anti-Marxist Left,” post-modernism is not a threat to the elite, because post-modern epistemological assumptions send the people into a bewildering morass of conflicting subjectivities, thus rendering them powerless to defend their interests. At the same time, with the people reduced to babble, the capacity for advances in human civilization is undermined.
For post-modernists, reality is not reflected in political-economic dynamics, such as the changing customs with respect to race in the USA after 1965, described above. Rather, reality is defined by words, by discourse, by the way people speak. What is more, the true meaning of words is discerned by specialists, who are able to discern a racist meaning that was not necessarily intended by the speaker. In this way, the idea has been disseminated that white society is racist, not so much in its political-economic practices or social customs, but in its language, which is pervasive, or systemic.
As Abigail Favale has observed, postmodernism is “a worldview that sees reality in terms of narratives that are created by human beings, rather than an order of objective truths that can be discovered by human beings.”2 For postmodernists, she writes, there is no objective truth. This view, she maintains, contrasts with common-sense understanding and with numerous philosophical traditions, according to which reality exists prior to our naming it, and in which our language is true and meaningful when it corresponds to what exists in reality.
Post-modernists, Favale maintains, ostensibly are critiquing the claims of the powerful as nothing more than social constructions. But the postmodernists are engaging in power games of their own, calling upon all who feel oppressed to advance their version of the truth. This leads to “a postmodern political praxis, in which language is intentionally manipulated to institutionalize these ‘new modes of reality.’” This is why there is such an emphasis on policing speech, involving “a concerted effort to enforce a new social truth-script through an exercise of power.” There is “an underlying preoccupation with power,” in which “claiming an oppressed identity itself becomes a mode or power.”
As I note in my commentary on “The Anti-Marxist Left,” those who claim that that the USA today is characterized by “systemic racism” often use a leapfrog rhetorical maneuver. That is, they leapfrog from slavery times or the era of Jim Crow to some incidents of the present day, disdaining any effort to understand the racial political-economic system today and the dynamics of its evolution since 1965. The leapfrog maneuver reflects the post-modern tendency to forge truth on the basis of one’s personal truth, feelings, and lived experiences, rather than seeking to understand objective reality. (For more discussion of the impact of post-modern thinking on U.S. political culture, see “The need for consensus in the USA: An appeal from a patriotic American,” June 24, 2022).
The transfer of truth from objective reality to the terrain of discourse is an epistemological sleight of hand, which has the consequence of obscuring the actual and significant gains that were made in the political-economic and social reality. And it was supplemented by the less than honest use of statistics, such as presenting differences in income in a form that leaves aside class or income differences. Such a device is encouraged in the post-modern epistemological world, where manipulating facts and data is fair game, because in the final analysis, there is no objective truth, only the truth that is in tune with one’s subjectivity.
The manipulation of data is illustrated with respect to the issue of fatal police shootings, as was reported by Glenn Loury in a 2021 article in Quillette, “Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America.” He notes that of the approximately 1200 fatal shootings by police each year, 300 of them, or 25%, are African American, which is approximately double the black proportion of the population, but it also is less than the number of whites, expressed in absolute numbers. Moreover, the black disproportionality could be explained by the large concentrated urban areas where many black people live, in which there are constant police interactions with citizens, involving tens of thousands of arrests each day. In addition, the 300 black persons killed by police each year is low in comparison with the 17,000 homicides each year, nearly half of which involve black perpetrators, in which the great majority of the victims are black. Therefore, Loury declares, blacks are 25 times more likely to the killed by another black than to be killed by a police officer. The issue, Loury concludes, is framed in a way that directs the conversation toward the agenda of the anti-racist ideology.
So, the overall effect of the post-modern scholarship with respect to race has been to create the myth that whites continue to be racist, just as they have been since slavery times.
Who would create such a myth, and to what purpose? Black conservative scholars have done excellent work in exposing the game. They note that it is in the interests of the black middle class, especially in the context of an American economy that has passed its historic stage of expansion, because it ensures continued preferential treatment in the competition for admission to exclusive universities and in employment. “Race hustlers” among politician, activists, and academics have emerged, whose careers feed upon racial injustices, real or not; creating new opportunities for black professionals and the black middle class, especially in an expanding diversity sensitivity industry. See “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022; “Free Black Thought,” May 11, 2021; “Rescuing American History from Race Hustlers: An alternative theory and practice,” June 4, 2021.
There are those who claim to a special epistemological status, a special capacity to understand, by virtue of being descended from an oppressed people, a claim that is made on the basis of an entirely arbitrary definition of what constitutes a historically oppressed people. In today’s anti-racist ideology, it does not include, for example, the Irish, who were conquered and colonized by the English beginning in the twelfth century, including English appropriation of Irish land during the seventeenth century; followed by economic laws that led to impoverishment, famine, and emigration during the nineteenth century, accompanied by repression of the Irish liberation movement (a phenomenon studied by Engels and Marx). Nor does the arbitrary definition of historically oppressed peoples include Poles and other Eastern European peoples, whose economies were peripheralized during the first stage of the development of the modern world-economy in the sixteenth century, their peoples reduced to coerced cash crop laborers, observed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Nor does it usually apply to European Jews, who suffered from exclusion and racial hatred for centuries, as is universally known. All of these peoples of Europe, overwhelmingly peasants, constituted the great bulk of the European migrants to the United States in the period of 1865 to 1925, fleeing the hardships of their own lands, excepting the Irish, who began to arrive in great numbers during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the population of Ireland was reduced in half by emigration, pushed by superexploitation, famine, and repression. No one knows, but it would not be surprising if the great majority of whites in the USA today are descendants of one or more of these oppressed peoples, but none of them has the right to claim that they are descendants of an historically oppressed people.
There is a sector of white society, primarily in academia, which feels a certain level of guilt concerning their unearned privileges, that is, their relatively good material lifestyle that did not require a Herculean effort to attain. Not possessing a thorough understanding of the African-American Movement from 1917 to 1972, they were not intellectually prepared to understand and dismiss the epistemological sleight of hand of the race hustlers.
At the same time, the corporate elite has an interest in supporting the anti-racist post-modern ideology, because it divides the people and distracts them away from reflection on the dead-end street on which the elite has led the nation since World War II, and especially since 1980. See “Racism, Ideology, Elite Interests, and the Nation,” May 7, 2021; “Identity politics crashes; the elite-supported woke comes to the rescue,” April 30, 2021; “From institutional to systemic racism: The notion of systemic racism is a historic error,” January 7, 2022.
Conclusion
We need to discredit the post-modern anti-racist ideology as historically and empirically inaccurate, divisive, anti-social, and unpatriotic. We need to stop telling our people that they ought to confess to sins they never committed and to racist thoughts they didn’t know that they had. We need a national narrative that celebrates the founding principles of the American Republic and appreciates the Constitution as a sound juridical foundation for free expression seeking national consensus in a large ethnically and ideologically diverse society.
All who believe that a more just world is possible ought to unite to form an alternative third political party that redefines by its example what a political party ought to be. I can imagine, for example, an American Communist People’s Party that seeks to take political power in twenty-five years through electoral victories in congressional districts throughout the nation; a political party committed to the self-education of its members and the patient education of the people, through study of pamphlets generated by the party in history, political theory and ideology, political-economy, and culture. A party that models respectful and reasoned discourse and debate. A party that promises to the people that when it takes political power it will direct the state toward the construction of socialism with American characteristics, guided by the science of Marxism-Leninism and the examples of Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia. A state that rejects the Big Government of liberals as well as the weak and limited state of conservatives; an active state that acts decisively with measures designed to increase the productivity of the economy and to protect the social and economic rights of the people. A government with an anti-imperialist foreign policy dedicated to cooperation with other nations in the development of a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system. A government that renews the American Republic.
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In writing this section, I consulted my book, The African-American Movement: From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition, published in 1994.
Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2022).