Freedom for White Men
Presumptively heterosexual, of course. Republicans would advocate resumption of slavery if they could get away with it.
My subtitle here will no doubt meet with the ill informed, pseudo clever riposte, much beloved of “conservatives” these days, that the Democrats were the Party of slavery, which they were, in 1865. Radical Republicans insisted on abolishing legal slavery and adopting two more amendments to the Constitution to try to provide a measure of equality to the newly freed slaves and their descendants, and it was mostly Democrats who ensured that such efforts failed miserably for roughly 100 years afterwards.
But, which “conservatives” are always loath to admit, change occurs, whether we like it or not. So, for many reasons, between 1948 and 1964, the Democrats took the mantle of defenders of the rights of African Americans away from the Republican Party. In doing so, the Democrats did what the Republicans now refuse to do. They alienated a large chunk of their base, and they did so solely and expressly for the purpose of enacting major legislation that had the purpose of ensuring the measure of equality for the descendants of slaves their political ancestors had fought against for one hundred years. The “white supremacist” vote was happy in the Democratic Party and made passing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act very difficult, but Democrat Lyndon Johnson persisted and found enough Republican votes to do what his Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had not done — pass major legislation that prohibits nearly every form of public discrimination against African Americans and helps them, in practical, concrete ways, to vote, such that they are better equipped to defend themselves.
Let us note in passing that this event also required what now seems quite impossible — Republican cooperation with Democrats to pass major legislation that all thinking people agree benefits the entire republic, no matter how much a revanchist minority might protest.
The “white supremacist” voters decamped from the Democratic Party, made a feeble stab at starting their own party, then joined the Republican Party, which they took over and now run. We have long known that the “white supremacists” did not give up. They still want, at a minimum, to reimpose segregation. They cannot tolerate the idea that African Americans are at all their equal. This begins to look like a mental illness. It certainly looks like obsessive compulsive disorder.
The proof is in the pudding. Republicans jumped onto the more recent issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) civil rights, which necessarily borrow their political and legal logic from African American civil rights, ginning up a fatuous religious exemption from complying with basic nondiscrimination laws because their religious beliefs somehow should allow them the freedom to discriminate. What they hope no one will notice is that any religious exemption to nondiscrimination laws must apply to all classes of people, so freedom to discriminate against queers is also, necessarily, freedom to discriminate against African Americans. Freedom to discriminate against people in both groups is their goal. Aiming at queers allows them to aim at African Americans without saying so, which is still politically unthinkable, as it should be.
Or, it was until recently. Any advance for African Americans has met with a backlash. Culture changes slowly and the “white supremacists” wield considerable cultural power that African Americans and anyone who supports them must fight against, tooth and nail. Public policy is incredibly important and it is all anyone can change quickly through deliberate action, but it cannot change culture, or it can only slightly increase the pace of cultural change. Whatever he may or may not have done concretely on behalf of African Americans, winning the presidency by Barack Obama was a huge event to the “white supremacist” set and they responded by flocking eagerly to the most overtly racist candidate they could find. In 2012, other options existed. Newt Gingrich called Obama the “food stamp president.” Rick Santorum made overtly racist claims. But the relatively moderate candidate won the Republican nomination that year and failed to go full bore racist against Obama, which likely would not have worked anyway. The basic dynamic was already set up. White people were and are closely divided, between the “white supremacist” camp and the smart people, leaving African Americans and other minorities the power to decide the outcome. They elected Obama twice. Their zeal fell off in 2016, giving Trump an opening, but returned after four years of the horror of Trump, leading to their enthusiastic embrace of Obama surrogate Joe Biden, who wisely chose a Black woman as his running mate, and they won handily.
Republicans erupted after the 2020 election into paroxysms of irrational behavior in defense of “white supremacy.” It happens that their champion of the moment, Donald Trump, is insane, so it can be difficult to sort out the insanity of Trump from the insanity of “white supremacy,” but Trump’s insanity has the marks of “white supremacy” about it. No racial or ethnic minority in the United States would be so fantastically arrogant as to spend the entire period between the election and the inauguration pursuing over sixty frivolous law suits challenging valid election outcomes in multiple states, then use the power of the office to try to disrupt the official process of counting Electoral College votes, all while bruiting at every opportunity the absurd lie that the opposing Party stole the election from him. Crazy people make choices, and they necessarily choose from the options the culture makes available to them. The “white supremacist” option is readily available to Trump and he is only too happy to avail himself of it.
It is just historical coincidence that, as we continue to struggle with Trump’s very particular display of “white supremacy,” their set also happens to have two very inviting, very high culture articulations of African Americans’ understanding of our nation’s history and culture to pick on, and pick on they have.
The 1619 Project originated as a series of stories in the New York Times about the origins of slavery and the ugly history of racism that resulted from the decision in 1619 of early British settlers in “North America” to follow their Christian brethren in “South America” and the Caribbean to buy Africans as forced labor. This is a fascinating and important project that has sparked discussion and some controversy, as such projects always do. In a fit of “white supremacy” that rivals Trump, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill in Congress for the purpose of preventing schools from using the Project to teach U.S. history courses (poor “conservatives” never quite know what to do with that pesky Constitution and its liberal rights guarantees), and, in explaining and defending his pathetic bill, described slavery as a “necessary evil,” which certainly should win some sort of prize for the most naked assertion of “white supremacy” since George Wallace ran for president.
At an even greater level of abstraction, which good “white supremacists” are ill equipped to deal with, lies Critical Race Theory, a scholarly effort, mostly growing out of law schools, to look at how the concept of “race” operates in our culture. Never much for trying to understand what they fear, good “conservatives” have decided they need to prohibit anyone from teaching about this important and fascinating intellectual production. Arkansas’ neighbor, Tennessee, has passed a bill that prohibits public schools from teaching about Critical Race Theory, even as one suspects most of the legislators voting on the bill have zero knowledge or understanding of what it is.
Except that none of this is funny, it would be mildly amusing how these white legislators at once disprove the thesis of “white supremacy” and demonstrate the very problem they would deny the existence of with their ham fisted, ill considered legislative swipes at provocative, interesting ideas. They also prove, again, the point that good “conservatives” have real difficulty accepting the principles of our distinctively liberal Constitution, which they might like better if we repealed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, but they know better than to go that far. At the moment, anyway.
Again, one can argue that overt “white supremacy” indicates mental illness by itself, but few Republicans exhibit such obvious indicators of full blown mental illness as Trump, except insofar as they choose to align themselves with him. They yet seem perfectly willing to follow his lead into increasingly overt displays of racism:
But we need not rely only on post Trump insanity to prove the point. The sober, somber, seemingly sane justices of our Supreme Court, in Shelby v. Holder, chose to eviscerate one of their Party’s signal accomplishments by striking down parts of the Voting Rights Act, in part because of that law’s “federalism costs,” which is the polite, 21st century way of saying, “states’ rights.” That phrase is a misnomer on its face. States do not have rights, they have powers, and no state should ever have the power to discriminate against its own citizens, tout court, a principle we added to the Constitution with the Fourteenth Amendment. But “white supremacists” are never so eager to assert “states’ rights,” or worry about “federalism costs,” as when the rights of African Americans are waxing.
So the Republicans on the Supreme Court were willing to attack the Fifteenth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. Can an attack on the Thirteenth Amendment be far behind?