Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
yet another program, “My Brother’s Keeper.” None of these has solved the “Negro Problem.” They are highly visible gestures designed to “do something” while generating publicity.
Reckoning with Race investigates five key periods of the African American experience. In each there have been failures, whole or partial, in the assimilation process that is necessary for full participation in the economic mainstream. There have perhaps been missed opportunities, but major discriminatory obstacles have also been at work except for during the last period.
In the first period, from the signing of the Constitution in 1787 to the end of the Civil War in 1865, I consider the frequently overlooked situation of free blacks in the North. In confronting the black experience in America, all roads lead to the well-charted territory of race-based slavery. But Northern attitudes toward free blacks in the years before the Civil War form an indispensable guide to the African American experience after the war. If blacks, a tiny 2 percent of the Northern population, could not be successfully absorbed, the postwar acceptance of large numbers in the North, after Emancipation, would be impossible. American historians usually omit a critical distinction between the attitude of white Northerners toward race-based slavery and what they thought about free blacks. White Northerners were for the most part vehemently anti-black and obsessively feared a black migration north.
In the second period, from 1865 to World War I, the white North began during Reconstruction (1865–1877) with total control over an utterly defeated adversary before reconciling with the white South. The result was a rejection of any plan to disperse blacks in the North and a direct and indirect containment policy for keeping blacks in the Southern cotton fields. The black population of the North remained at about 2 percent while millions of white European immigrants poured into the country. Historians now seek to view the Reconstruction years as a successful biracial experience. But the small number of temporary white teachers, the black office holders, and the short-term impact of black suffrage did little to advance the newly freed slaves toward equality.
In the third period, from roughly World War I until the 1960s, occurred the Great Migration of blacks north. War-induced labor shortages, not racial tolerance, led blacks to a false promised land of wages, voting rights, and the beginning of a middle and upper middle class but also to the debilitating environment of an urban ghetto and consequent race riots.
The next two stages brought the end of overt legal segregation and the first possibility that blacks might enter the economic mainstream en masse. The fourth period was marked by civil rights legislation, violence, the advent of black militancy, resistance to integration in both North and South, and massive programs to assist blacks in the transformation to economic prosperity. The detailed Kerner Report, a reaction to the devastating race riots of the 1960s, outlined for blacks the path to full membership in American society.
In the fifth chapter I recount events of the past fifty years—the structural flaws of black life in America, the real and imagined discriminatory impediments, the evergreen topic of racial difficulties, and a recognition of the only solution: a broad-based effort within black society to truly prepare—a word used by the civil rights giants of the 1960s—for the future.
In the process of this investigation I encounter a number of myths that need to be busted. For one, both whites and blacks have viewed the South as the exclusive and durable scapegoat in America’s racial ordeal. This singular focus on the South may be soothing to white Northern consciences, but it has also provided an escape from the reality of the North’s own unenlightened racial world. In fact, the race problem in America has always been a national problem, not exclusively Southern. It is a mistake to think otherwise and leads to flawed responses to the problem. Hence, after the Great Migration and after overt legal segregation in the South disappeared, no racial utopia emerged.
White Northerners reflexively cite odious Southern phenomena—lynchings, legal school segregation, “colored only” signs, and “back of the bus” status. They ignore school segregation in their own communities, race riots, and the large black underclass in Northern as well as Southern cities. Civil Rights museums proliferate in the South while the North predominantly memorializes episodes of racial tolerance. Civil Rights courses generally study the South almost exclusively. Altogether the narrative is scarcely objective. Upon visiting the North, the white Southerner invariably finds a subtle, and not so subtle, racial hypocrisy with an overlay of self-righteousness. Ample evidence, which I present, shows that white Northerners, in the words of one black abolitionist, “best like the colored person at a distance.”
I also attempt to clarify the damaging misuse of the term “people of color.” Martin Luther King Jr. had some choice words in 1968 about conflating black Americans with foreign “people of color”; he thought some young black militants “are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything not colored is condemned.” In his speeches King accepted color-consciousness in American society, though in his “I Have a Dream” speech he famously yearned for colorblindness. The attempt to combine the experiences of various Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American ethnicities under the umbrella of a nonwhite brotherhood flouts cultural, economic, and societal distinctions.
In another questionable association, current racial issues are likened to those of the 1960s as a way of cloaking today’s problems with the aura of the civil rights movement. In fact, the closest parallel is to the separatist ideologies of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, both of whom have recently gained prestige. Many of the great leaders of the civil rights era, in contrast to black leaders today, understood the need to prepare blacks to enter a competitive world and to recognize and deal with their own “shortcomings.”
In the twenty-first century most black spokesmen avoid individual and group self-examination. Instead the black community has developed an immunity to self-criticism that seriously impairs accountability and corrective measures. Black activists have become apologists. They defend black behavior as if it were religious dogma. As an example, the astounding incidence of single-parent families within the black community is viewed as a product of incarceration and poverty or rationalized as an acceptable norm. Destructive black-on-black crime is no longer discussed. The individual has thus become not only a member of a group but subservient to the group. Free will has become subordinate to the legacy of slavery, past injustice, and the current environment. But if historians are correct that even slaves never lost their agency, and if race-based slavery could not eliminate free will, why do blacks wish to surrender their individual self-determination?
In the age of political correctness, hypersensitivity to perceived disrespect has been met by protest rather than objectivity and reliance on the legal system. Separatism is encouraged under the guise of an exaggerated form of multiculturalism. This aberrant strain dominates campus curricula and politics. An appropriate multiethnic approach asks what we have in common; today’s iteration dwells on what makes us different. The separatist implications lead to what Marcus Hanson in The Immigrant in American History would have pejoratively dubbed a disunited “patchwork nation.” The governing political system for this unwieldy collection would necessarily be an autocracy, not a democratic republic.
Does the black community have a vision of the proper level of its integration into American society? Studies indicate that the performance of blacks in schools and the military improves in a racially mixed environment. But blacks cannot agree on how much integration is too much, and the courts now suggest confusing racial percentages—the discredited quota system—in disputed cases of ethnic apportionment. The muddle continues. The requisite concessions to assimilation, which is now labeled a loaded word, are made even more difficult to achieve.
If education is essential to economic advancement, the color-neutral middle-class behavioral norms that I discuss are critical to building a successful educational experience for black children. The results of fifty years of educational and social programs on all levels, from elementary school