Racism, Intentional and Unintentional

Monday, in his powerful indictment of George Bush, Al Gore drew a parallel between FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King in the sixties and the current NSA surveillance program. He said, "Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably
leads to gross mistakes and abuses. That is part of human nature. In
the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes.
Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded."

As Josh Marshall points out, Gore highlighted an important logical connection: "Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each
other. It’s a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies
point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for
giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this."

Katrina—the man-made disaster that followed the hurricane, that is—was also a good example of the racism implicit in Bush’s manner of governing. While his authoritarian, incompetent administration is normally able to mask its racism with code words like "tax cuts" and "small government," Katrina ripped away the mask and revealed unmistakably the intentional oppression American blacks continue to suffer.

The origins of that racism during the centuries of slavery are well known, and 143 years after the Emancipation Proclamation the virus of racism remains endemic among many whites, especially in the South. But there was a time when it might have been nearly wiped out, a time when the ideal of equality began to be realized. The few years of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, when the federal government enforced equal treatment of blacks with military power, briefly turned the old order of the South upside down. Unfortunately, as Eric Foner details in his new book Forever Free, Reconstruction was cut short, the old plantation elite reassumed positions of power, and another century was to pass before the civil rights movement again achieved some modicum of equality.

Since the 1970s, however, even this renewed promise has been cut short. Nixon and Reagan campaigned on coded racism to gain Republican power in the South,
and today Bush identifies himself subtly but completely with the history and authoritarian ethos of the ex-slaveholding class. We are, in some ways, back to the bad old days of blatant discrimination, not outright slavery but too much like the era of Jim Crow, when politicians justified racial inequality with appeals to natural law and narrow religion.

In his review of Foner’s book in Salon, Andrew O’Hehir draws a parallel between the America of 1865 and the America of 2005:

In both cases, we see a society so sharply divided along
racial and
cultural lines that it encompasses opposing and indeed incompatible
worldviews. Undoubtedly it’s simplistic to reduce the now trite
"red-vs.-blue" division of the 21st century to an extended Civil War
hangover, but it’s not completely misguided either.

The age of emancipation and Reconstruction saw an explosive collision
between federal and state power, and between Congress and the White
House. It saw the federal government intervene in local affairs to
serve as the protector of a persecuted minority group’s civil rights,
and saw local regimes of low taxation and limited government used as a
smokescreen for reestablishing white supremacy and traditional
oligarchy. Along the way, it remade the landscape of electoral
politics, shaping both major political parties into recognizable
precursors of their modern selves. And as Du Bois tried to remind the
20th century, it asked still-unanswered questions about whether freedom
for African-Americans — or any other Americans — signified more than
the freedom to sell their labor rather than have it beaten out of them.

Whatever else it was, the period of a dozen or so years after the Civil
War was one of incredible political drama, unlike anything else in our
history. Four million newly minted United States citizens, who had been
other men’s chattel months earlier, were thrust into the historical and
political limelight. In alliance with both the "radical Republicans" of
the North and a surprising array of Southern whites, they tried to
build a biracial democracy on the ruins of a slave society. The legacy
of this revolutionary experiment — more revolutionary than any social
change ever effected in the U.S., before or after — has been debated
ever since. Indeed, it was debated extensively at the time, and its
participants were aware that it cast the notion of American freedom
into sharp relief. In the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation, the former slaves were to be "then, thenceforward, and
forever free." But what did that mean?

Freedom did not automatically confer equality, even in the narrow
legal sense. And the homegrown terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan enforced
white supremacy: the Klan, writes Foner, murdered 1,300 people during
the campaign of 1868 alone. Reconstruction failed, not (as many of us
are taught in school) because blacks were incapable or because Northern
carpetbaggers hated the South, but because the US government caved in
to the pressure of Southern whites and allowed the old order to rise
again.

The old order today runs the country, and one way Bush and his cronies express their racism is by their lack of
interest in running the government competently, in a way that
would protect or help those who need it. Tom Engelhardt calls it FEMAtization:

You could almost offer a guarantee that no major problem is likely to
arise this year, domestic or foreign, that [the Bush administration] will not be quite
incapable of handling reasonably, efficiently, or thoughtfully — to
hell with compassionately (for anyone who still remembers that
museum-piece label, "compassionate conservative," from the Bush version
of the Neolithic era).

But racism can be expressed in unintentional ways, too. As Molly McClure writes in "Solidarity Not Charity,"
even whites who want to help blacks—for example by providing healthcare
in post-Katrina Louisiana—are faced with the vexed question of  "how
power and privilege
play out in our own lives, and … our role in
relation to the state and system that helped engineer this disaster."
The bitter history of American race relations leaves a toxic residue
even on those with the best of intentions, and we must work to remove
the stain.