You would almost think we are smack in the middle of the biggest racial reckoning since the end of the Civil War. Sheepish white pols are throwing out their blackface kits. A Maryland legislator is on political life support after having uttered the n-word in a cigar bar. A member of Congress lost his committee assignments because he defended white supremacy. We may never have another Black History Month as provocative as the one that just ended, nor as shallow.
Sadly, this spectacle of superficiality shows no signs of abating. We are now into a four-day international story over whether Virginia’s first lady, Pam Northam, committed a racist act by handing raw cotton to black students during presentations on slavery. She insists she gave the cotton to students of all color. The BBC ran a piece headlined “Virginia’s First Lady in Cotton-picking Race Row.” This was only weeks after she mitigated her husband’s (Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam) self-inflicted wounds by stopping him from doing the moonwalk at a news conference where he confessed to having used blackface in a 1984 Michael Jackson dance contest.
Now comes Michael Cohen, former Trump attorney and consigliere, – and soon-to-be federal prison inmate – with scathing Congressional testimony about his former boss. Cohen said of Trump: “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.” In a day-long committee hearing, House Republicans made no attempt to defend their president on the conman and cheat charges. But Trump loyalist Rep. Mark Meadows pulled out all stops on the racist label. He had a black woman stand next to him during his televised questioning. Meadows pointed to her and said, in the tone of a Perry Mason gotcha moment, that she is a long time Trump family friend, so how could the president possibly be racist? He proudly rested his case, but not for long.
It went quickly downhill from there. A number of committee members said Meadows’s use of the woman as a prop was, in itself, racist. That sent the Congressman into an intensely emotional diatribe, protesting that he can’t be racist because he has black nieces and nephews and is very good friends with the committee chair who is black. As a child of the 1960s, I naively thought that old racist trope about “some of my best friends are black,” had gone the way of the hula hoop and segregated lunch counters.
There are two takeaways in all of this early 2019 racial news. One is that America’s infectious goiter of racism is every bit as malignant as it was 50 years ago. Regardless of how offending politicians try to frame the issue, white guys corking up in blackface is not just an ancient taboo. It’s always been wrong, but prominent white folks seem hell bent on doing it, despite the ensuing furor. A Google search for blackface produces millions of hits, a virtual who’s who of entertainers and political figures who keep right on smearing the burned cork over their white privilege (here, here and here).
Yes, there is a slightly higher risk now for politicians who partake in racist symbols, whether by blackface, use of the n-word or similar bigotry. When the Virginia blackface story first broke, there was a stampede of Democratic leaders and presidential candidates issuing calls for Northam’s resignation. A few days later, however, the situation changed dramatically. The state’s lieutenant governor, a black Democrat, was accused of sexual assault by two women. Then the attorney general, second in the line of succession for governor, also a Democrat, revealed that he, too, had done the blackface bit. If all three of them quit, the new Virginia governor would be the current speaker of the house, a Republican. Suddenly public pressure on Northam to resign all but disappeared. Polling data show that 58 percent of the state’s African Americans want him to remain in office.
Therein lies the second – and most important – object lesson. While elected leaders donning blackface or spewing blatantly racist speech are inexcusably despicable, their behavior is but a symptom of a much larger problem, one that gets far less attention than the deplorable antics that have captured recent headlines. Here’s the deal: Institutional racism is deeply baked into our culture and government, putting non-whites at an inherent structural disadvantage when it comes to virtually every aspect of life. That will change only through new laws and public policy. For the past 100 years, that aspirational transformation has been an anathema to the Republican Party.
It’s not difficult to understand why most African Americans in Virginia want to retain a Democratic governor with a penchant for blackface. The alternative is control by a party of white faces totally oblivious to their needs. And those needs cut deeply into this country’s soul, inflicting far more pain than the racist buffoonery of ignorant politicians.
Here is the real problem with America’s racism in 2019: Black households have only 10 cents in wealth for every dollar held by white households. Only 43 percent of African Americans own a home, a figure that has fallen almost every year since 2004. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than young white men. Blacks are incarcerated in state prisons at more than five times the rate of whites. Overwhelmingly white school districts receive $23 billion more than predominantly black districts, despite serving roughly the same number of children. Black people face a greater risk of death than white people at every stage of life. One study found that racial segregation caused 176,000 deaths in a year, about as many as were caused by strokes.
As depressing and distressing as it is to relive the racist tropes of the 1960s, it is far worse to assume that our deep racial divide will be healed by simply getting rid of politicians who dabbled in blackface or used the n-word. I’d like to think such a purge would be a start to dealing with the underlying evil of structural racism. But I fear it is a superficial diversion, one that may create the illusion of doing the right thing, while leaving a diabolically broken system still very broken.
Thanks for an excellent piece, Bruce. Institutional racism is so deeply ingrained in “how we do things here” that it is difficult to see for many and to change without a shift in consciousness. But when a decent and caring leader sees and feels it, he/she is changed inside of themselves immediately and forever.