Charles M. Blow is a bright spot at the New York Times. Unflinching in his views on race relations, his writing is compelling, well-researched, and pulls no punches about the persistence of racism in the United States.
Blow fears that we are in danger of entering a new era of oppression in the United States. He outlined his case in the Times this week, offering many historical examples that mirror our current situation.
Blow writes:
I am fascinated, and alarmed, by the swiftness with which periods of backlash take shape after surges of Black progress, and I believe that we have entered another such period.
Much of my inquiry on the matter has focused on the period after Reconstruction was allowed to fail and that saw Jim Crow begin to rise. Much of this was embodied by the state of Mississippi, which in 1870 was majority Black. White supremacists in the state developed the Mississippi Plan in advance of the state’s 1875 elections to use fraud and the intimidation of Black voters, including through violence, to retake state power from progressives.
The plan worked. As the historian Jason Phillips wrote for the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, “Democratic candidates committed to white supremacy replaced every Republican incumbent in the 1875 elections.”
The racists took control of the state’s legislature and judiciary, impeached the Republican governor and installed a replacement of their liking.
Blow goes on to mention the Compromise of 1877, in which the disputed election of 1876 was settled when Rutherford Hayes was allowed to take the Oval Office in exchange for withdrawing federal troops who kept confederates in check and gave protection to Black Southerners. This opened the floodgates of hate and enabled Jim Crow to take a foothold. He then mentioned Red Summer, a response to the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to northern cities in search of a better life. Red Summer was a series of deadly riots aimed at Black Americans, and hundreds were murdered. That this occurred in 1919, and in many cases targeted Black veterans who just a year prior were fighting for their country, is uniquely loathsome in only the way American racism can be.
Blow goes on to discuss how the blowback against civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr. began well before he was assassinated, and Nixon’s racism. I would add Reagan kicking off his general election campaign in 1980 with a speech on state’s rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an extremely dark move by a candidate that would not be out of place in a Stephen Miller/Steve Bannon campaign plan.
Then, Blow notes what has happened in this decade. He points out how swiftly support for civil rights disintegrated in 2020 after the George Floyd murder.
I now believe that we are in the early phase of yet another backlash, with the dismantling of affirmative action, governmental attacks on the teaching of Black history and the full-court press on the political right to get rid of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.
The symbolic alignment of a cross-section of Americans, particularly the young, with Black liberty and Black lives after the murder of George Floyd and the wave of protests that it brought forth, retreated with the speed of the tide before the advance of the tsunami.
The results for this era could be wide-reaching, altering the composition of student bodies and corporate workforces, locking in and perpetuating privilege and disadvantage for a generation. And as with previous backlashes, some liberals have grown weary, distracted or disaffected, and their allyship has withered and fallen away.
We are seeing it now. The attacks on DEI are not about true equality or improving product/service quality (the insinuation that corporate diversity initiatives caused the panel to come off the Boeing plane near Portland is an example that code words are out, open racism is in). Nor are the right-wing book bannings about protecting kids from seeing sex words. Blow notes that newly reported FBI data revealed that hate crimes in schools nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022, and Black students were the most frequent victims. This was also true in hate crimes outside of school, once again, Black people were the most frequent victim.
This was news to me, mainly because it’s barely reported in the news. I can write an entire series on how too many in the news media enable this backlash.
As the case historian Perniel E. Joseph makes in his book “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century,” we are in another period of resistance and reversal of progress that happens when Black Americans make progress towards creating an America that lives up to its alleged ideals. The first was the one we know, after the Civil War. But Joseph notes a second one happened soon after MLK was murdered, and a third started after the election of Barack Obama. We are in that now, and I believe that is extremely difficult to honestly deny.
And it is not so much the hate and racism of the American right and the Republican Party that is alarming, even though that is bad enough. It is, as Blow notes, the abandoning of allyship by some liberals, which echoes the “regrettable conclusion” that King came to in Letter from Birmingham Jail that the white moderate of the early 1960s was failing the cause, being an even greater roadblock in the road to justice than the “White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner.” I still encounter people who labor under the delusion that things are just peachy and not anywhere close to “how it was,” as if there is no large-scale effort to return the United States to “how it was.”
As we begin another Black History Month, it’s a good idea to not turn our heads but look at what happened in our past, so we can better see it happening now and do our best to stop it.
The last word goes to Mavis Staples.
Every February I learn something new about historical events and persons who for some reason have been overlooked in the stories we tell about and to ourselves. And it isn’t even from the dim dark past of Red Summer. For example, in 2020, during the Floyd George protests the Trump administration waged de facto war on various cities.
In Portland, days of peaceful protest were routinely turned into police riots as federal troops faced off against demonstrators, with beatings and tear gas attacks. Citizens were snatched off the streets into unmarked police vans and hundreds were arrested for exercising their First Amendment right.
In one instance, Michael Reinoehl who identified as an antifa partisan, was executed by a federal death squad after he had a lethal encounter with Patriot Prayer goon Aaron Danielson.
The photo at the top of your post speaks volumes. Although I saw it when it first came out it a very powerful image.