Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018 for April 29: History of a white racist symbol

Bill Black tells the story of how a persistent anti-black racist symbol came to be in How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope Vox 12/08/2014:

... the stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

He traces the use of watermelon as a symbol of contempt to "the early modern European imagination" in which "the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant." when transplanted to North America, this hostile image took on a more particular racial aspect:

These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves. ...

This may be surprising given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans’ lives. Slave owners often let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. ...

But Southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. Slaves were usually careful to enjoy watermelon according to the code of behavior established by whites. When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

Black closes his piece with this useful observation:

It may seem silly to attribute so much meaning to a fruit. And the truth is that there is nothing inherently racist about watermelons. But cultural symbols have the power to shape how we see our world and the people in it, such as when police officer Darren Wilson saw Michael Brown as a superhuman “demon.” These symbols have roots in real historical struggles—specifically, in the case of the watermelon, white people’s fear of the emancipated black body. Whites used the stereotype to denigrate black people—to take something they were using to further their own freedom, and make it an object of ridicule. It ultimately does not matter if someone means to offend when they tap into the racist watermelon stereotype, because the stereotype has a life of its own.

A much longer version of Black's article appears in How Watermelons Became Black: Emancipation and the Origins of a Racist Trope Journal of the Civil War Era (March 2018)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 24: Slavery and white racism

I always appreciate irreverent observances of Confederate "heritage" days:

In the real world, white Unionists in the free states largely shared basic white supremacist ideas with Southern slaveholders and their supporters. Although the dominant propaganda justification for slavery in the South in 1860 was a more intense and toxic version that held black people to be permanently suited only for slavery. And the rejection of democratic principles that implied was leading the slave states farther and farther away from democracy for whites, as well.

But slavery was a distinct issue. And by the end of the Civil War, many Union soldiers had not only seen the horrors of the Civil War that the slaveowners brought on to defend their Peculiar Institution, as they called it. Many of them had their first contact or extensive involvement with slaves, and had seen black Union troops performing bravely and ably in the Union cause, while the defenders of slavery were killing US soldiers in the service of treason.

So many Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery or not especially concerned about seeing it ended before the war now deeply despised it and understood its destructive effects on a democratic Republic like the United States.

A neo-Confederate moment in 2001

I came across this letter I wrote as a letter-to-the-editor in 2001, almost exactly 17 years ago, 04/24/2001. It was just after a now largely forgotten political moment in Mississippi, a special election whose only topic was whether Mississippi should keep its current state flag that features the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of treason and opposition to basic rights for African-Americans, in favor of a proposed alternative design that was, admittedly, bland and forgettable. The Confederate battle flag design won by a strong majority. The vote was heavily polarized along racial lines, as is often the case in Mississippi. The neo-Confederate Sons of Confederate Veterans group was the most visible proponent of keeping the Confederate version of the flag. As I allude in the letter to a slogan that the SCV used in the election that counts as a "thoughts and prayers" approach to white racism. Which at that time rightwing groups felt it necessary to pretend they did not condone.

Mississippi still has the same official flag today:

And there has recently been some active discussion in the state legislature about changing it.

This was the letter I did in 2001

The Mississippi flag vote was a week ago today. With today's news cycles, that's enotgh to qualify it as part of the state's "heritage" now. Though I'm not quite sure it qualfies for the "judgment of history" just yet. Actually, I'm trying to forget about it.

But walking to my office this morning, I saw Mississippi staring at me again right on the front page of the "Los Angeles Times." The headline announced that the state would be pumping $500 million into predominantly black colleges. Three weeks ago, most people would have probably thought, "Oh, things are really different now in Mississippi than they used to be."

Then you read the secondary headline and see that it was in response to a court decision in a lawsuit. Now that Mississippi has branded itself (in the ranching as well as the marketing sense) with the Confederate flag, most people probably think, "Of course. Mississippi would never do something like that without being forced to." Unfair? Prejudiced? Maybe. But Mississippi's self-marketing pretty much insures responses like that.

This whole thing reminds me of one of Karl Marx's sayings that's still considered respectable, "History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

The "first time" in this case would have been the segregation days, where Mississippians took resistance to the Constitution and the democratic standards of the country to an extreme in some ways beyond what even other Deep South states were willing to embrace.

Last week's flag vote was the farce. Mississippi succeeded in recreating the thrill of showing that it won't kowtow to the standards of the country, even to those of other Southern states. Someone remind me, just what is the thrill of that?

But 2001 just ain't 1961. The Confederate state flag's defenders pointed to the big Nissan factory being built there as evidence that things were fine. Mississippi still has the biggest number of African-American elected officials of any state - numerically, not just in proportion to the population. Japanese investors and black Mississippi elected officials were just not factors 40 years ago.

The NAACP will probably feel obliged to go through the motions of a boycott, because of their public stance in the South Carolina controversy. Ironically, the attitude of Mississippi's black elected officials will inevitably be a big consideration for them in making that decision.

But since the Sons of Confederate Veterans led the charge for the Confederate state flag saying that "racial reconciliation requires changing hearts, not the flag," I think it would be quite effective if the folks from the SCV were to meet with NAACP officials. They could explain to them all the good things they plan to do to improve race relations in the state, and see if they can avoid a boycott.

If they don't try something like that, people might suspect the Sons of Confederate Veterans of being just a bunch of gasbags.

Establishment "identity politics"

I'm still cautious about using the term "identity politics" because it doesn't yet seem to have achieved a reasonably stable meaning in the American political vocabulary. And the "Identitarian" movements in Europe are a small but militant and influential group among the far right.

The term was tossed about a lot in connection with the 2016 elections. It was often used by pundits to distinguish Hillary Clinton's pitch that emphasized civil rights for women and minorities from Bernie Sanders' emphasis on economic issues. while this wasn't entirely off-base, "identity politics" still carries a pejorative connotation. Especially among Republicans. Which is why some Democrats take care to emphasize that Trumpism is very much white identity politics. Dibgy Parton recently wrote, "This is the fundamental contour of American politics. When the two parties take opposite positions on slavery, now racial equality, we are divided. It's hard to believe that we are back to this place, but we are. And we can try to ascribe that to other motives all we want, it won't change anything." (It's white supremacy, people. It's always been white supremacy. Hullabaloo 02/04/2018)

But whatever term we use for it, it has become common in the internal arguments within the Democratic Party for the corporate Democrats to try to accuse progressives of being deficient in their concern for women's and minority rights. On the face of it, this doesn't make much sense, since the Sanders wing of the party is very much in favor of women's rights, including abortion rights, and of protecting minority civil rights, including affirmative action. The key difference is that the Democratic progressives also support New Deal economic policies, while the corporate Democrats are on board with the neoliberal economic agenda which is mostly in agreement with Republican positions.

After the 2008 and 2016 primary campaigns, it is now pretty much standard practice, at least at that level, for female candidates to try to portray male opponents and minority candidates to portray theirs as anti-black, anti-Latino, etc. In some cases, it's more objectively accurate than in others. But politics is politics. It's part of the mix. Whether it's effective or not depends on a lot of variables, including who is making the criticisms and, obviously, how the target audiences process the attacks.

I've expressed concern before about the Gillibrand Standard applied in the defenestration of Al Franken by his fellow Democratic Senators in 2017. I'm worried that the lessons Republicans have taken from it is to prepare to deluge Democratic candidates in October 2018 with frivolous allegations of sexual harassment. (Which doesn't exclude their being able to find some real ones.) See my posts: Kirsten Gillibrand as Presidential candidate 12/12/2017; The Gillibrand Standard Takes Out a Female Candidate? 12/17/17; Two weeks too late 12/19/17

Branko Marcetic writes about the use of "identity" issues against progressives in Only When It Suits Them Jacobin 02/02/2018.

During the primaries, Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright appeared to admonish young women for favoring Bernie Sanders over Clinton. Numerous liberal feminist writers insisted on the importance of getting Clinton into the White House, regardless of how centrist she may be. “Not electing a woman, again,” warned Rebecca Traister, would be “much more than symbolic.” In a now-deleted post on David Brock’s Blue Nation Review, Clinton loyalist Peter Daou explained that, “[Sanders’] views notwithstanding,” he was “a white male who has been in Congress for over a quarter century,” making him the “definition of establishment,” while Clinton, solely by being “a woman attempting to break the ultimate gender barrier” was “the definition of anti-establishment.”

This line of attack continued into 2017, when similar claims were used to deflect substantive criticisms of potential presidential candidates. Skeptics of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick — three establishment Democrats floated as 2020 contenders who also happen to be black — were told they were simply motivated by bigotry, to the point where some critics were blithely misidentified as white men. In the words of Briahna Joy Gray, liberal discourse became “a world in which personal identity [is] shorthand for ‘progress’ … and ‘white man’ [is] an epithet.”

Howie Klein of Blue America comments on that article at his Down With Tyranny! blog in an apparently ironically-titled post, My Budding Romance With The DCCC, The Blue Dogs, The New Dems And EMILY's List 02/06/2018. "I like his line of thinking," he writes of Marcedtic's article, "but he wastes it on [Chelsea] Manning and [Paula] Swearengin, one step up from vanity candidates." But Klein also stresses, "The tragedy of all those walking garbage candidates the DCCC--along with the Blue Dogs, New Dems and EMILY's List-- try to pass off as real Democrats is that most of them have-- or had before the DCCC chased them away-- fine progressive candidates. Don't be fooled."

Zaid Jilani calls attention to establishment Dem primary mischief in Democrats Anonymously Target Muslim Candidate, Questioning His Eligibility to Run for Michigan Governor The Intercept 02/01/2018.

Charles Blow also uses the establishment-Dem trope here, somewhat carelessly equating Trump's vote with white working-class voters assumed to be primarily motivated in their voting by white identity issues, "He [Trump] was working-class white America’s rebuff to an erudite black man and a supremely experienced woman. Trump’s defects had been validated. He was loved among those who hate." (my emphasis; Constitutional Crisis in Slow Motion New York Times 02/05/2018)

Tea Party whites, Trumpism and neo-Confederate pseudohistory

In yesterday's post on Arlie Russell Hochschild and her study on Louisiana Tea Party supporters, I mentioned an article of hers that appears in the current (10:1917) Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Weiß und stolz und abgehängt.Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus (behind subscription at this writing).

Part of her point in this article is that Southern Tea Party adherents - it would be redundant to say "white" adherents - focus on the government as the image and main instrument of the groups they see as the enemy: Yankees, coastal elites, Hollywood, black people, professional women, the mainstream media. In part, this is because of the eternal complaint against alleged freeloaders: "Und zudem gab der Staat Leuten Geld, die nicht arbeiteten, und untergrub damit die mit der Arbeit verknüpfte Anerkennung und Ehre." ("On top of it all, the government gave money to people who don't work and thereby undermined the recognition and honor tied up with work.")

The article notes that it is a translation into German from English, so I'm reverse-translating here without having the English original available.

But Tea Partiers do not view the government as a whole as their enemy. On the contrary, they worship the military and the police, worship in the Christian theological sense of idolatry even. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents terrorizing Latino parents picking up their children and school - those actual coercive agents of the state, they ones that are charged with using physical violence on behalf of law-and-order, they are big fans of those!

No, it's the civilian government that raises their hatred. And particularly those aspects of civilian government that they imagine to benefit people less fortunate and/or less white than they are.

Hochschild describes a related aspect of Tea Partiers' admiration for Donald Trump's demagoguery and his rejection of "political correctness":

Daher hörten viele mit freudiger Erleichterung einen Donald Trump reden, der offenbar hemmungslos, omnipotent und wunderbar frei von jeglichen Einschränkungen durch politische Korrektheit war. Er äußerte sich verallgemeinernd über alle Muslime, alle Mexikaner, alle Frauen – unter anderem auch darüber, dass Frauen menstruierten, was er „ekelhaft” fand. (So sagte er über Megyn Kelly, die Nachrichtenmoderatorin von „Fox News“, sie „blute aus was auch immer”). Munter imitierte er einen behinderten Journalisten, indem er seine Arme schüttelte und so eine Zerebralparese nachahmte – in den Augen seiner Gegner alles zutiefst abfällige Äußerungen, die jedoch befreiend auf all jene wirkten, die sich durch die Mitleidsverpflichtung geknebelt fühlten. Trump ermöglichte es ihnen, sich als gute, moralische Amerikaner zu empfinden und zugleich überlegen gegenüber Menschen zu fühlen, die sie für „anders” oder unter ihnen stehend hielten.

[From that viewpoint, many listen to Donald Trump speak with happy relief, he being clearly unrestrained, omnipotent and miraculously free from any limitations from political correctness. He made sweeping declarations sweepingly about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women - including even about women menstruating, which he finds "disgusting." (So he said about Megyn Kelly, the news moderator for Fox News, that she "had blood coming out of her wherever.") He jauntily imitated a disabled journalist by shaking his arms in order mimic cerebral palsy - in the eyes of his opponents, all the most deeply derogatory expressions, which nevertheless had a liberating effect on all those who felt themselves gagged by the obligation to feel pity. Trump made it possible for them to experience themselves as good, moral Americans and at the same time to feel superior to people that they regarded as "other" or beneath them.]

Or, to put it more succinctly, they got a thrill by identifying with Trump's meanness. This is a typical characteristic of authoritarian followers. Trying to understand this in terms of their "deep story," a Hochschild term that is otherwise useful, complicatres rather than clarifies understanding of how this attitude translates into the politics of Trumpism.

We could say that a normative issue imposes itself here. At what point does explaining this kind of collective joy in meanness cross over from understanding it to justifying it?

And this is not jsut a matter of show business. We see in Trump's callous and irresponsible response to Puerto Rico's hurricane disaster right now that this kind of meanness has ugly, real-world consequences. No matter how "liberating" Trump-adoring white people in Louisiana might feel it is to see Puerto Ricans suffer and die due to the kind of meanness Trump practices as President or how much "happy relief" it may give the Louisiana Tea Partiers.

Not to defend Donald Trump, but I couldn't find a report in which Trump used the word "disgusting" specifically in relation to his own genuinely disgusting comment about Kelly; he did use it about Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom during a break in one of the debates. (See: Kayla Epstein, Trump responds to Megyn Kelly's questions on misogyny – with more misogyny The Guardian 08/06/2015; Jacob Sugarman, Donald Trump’s disgusting new attack on Megyn Kelly: She had “blood coming out of her wherever” Salon 08/08/2015

If the reference above to white conservatives' complaints about welfare loafers seems like a throwback to the 1960s, Hochschild is also aware that the throwback goes even further.

In explaining the historical and sociological background of Southern whites, Hochschild relies heavily on the classic by W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Cash's book is a standard work and often quoted. But it was published in 1941. It has historical value. But it doesn't directly address the political of white Republicans in the Deep South in 2017. And even her historical accounts rely on confusingly wide descriptions. It likely wouldn't be clear to readers who weren't history with the history of sharecropping, for example, that this system was a post-Civil war institution, not an antebellum one.

But her historical account in this article recounts the neo-Confederate pseudohistory:

Dann brach der Bürgerkrieg aus, und der Norden schlug den Süden vernichtend. Städte wurden niedergebrannt, Felder verwüstet – teils von konföderierten Truppen auf dem Rückzug. Nach dem Bürgerkrieg ersetzte der Norden die Regierungen der Südstaaten durch eigene, handverlesene Gouverneure. Profitgierige Glücksritter kamen als Agenten des dominierenden Nordens. Ausbeuter aus dem Norden, eine wütende, traumatisierte schwarze Bevölkerung zu Hause und von allen Seiten moralische Verurteilung – das war das Bild, das mir die wütenden Südstaatler zeichneten.

[Then the Civil War broke out, and the North pulverized the South. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. Profit-seeking adventurers came as agents of the domineering North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home and moral judgments from all sides - that was the picture that the furious Southerners drew.]

That's my translation from the German. And this is my supplemental translation out of Neo-Confederate-Speak:

Then the Civil War broke out when Southern slaveowners insisted on seceeding to defend slavery when they rejected the democratic results of the Presidential election of 1860. The North pulverized the South in four years of bloody warfare initiated by the white southern planters to defend their "right" to own other human beings as property. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. And when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states, mass abandonment of the plantations by black ex-slaves, most of them native Southerners by birth, played a massive part in the "pulverizing" of the traitor Rebel government. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. (That one is too much of a fiction to even qualify.) Profit-hungry adventurers came as agents of the domineering North, according to the WATB grumbling of many former Confederates, even though massive capital investment from the hated North was desperately needed. Many Northern whites also came to act in such roles as schoolteachers, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to create a better future for the South that had been wrecked due to the treason of the slaveholding planter class. Exploiters from the North, as Southern white supremacists were wont to call any of their fellow Americans from the North, an angry, traumatized black population eager to become responsible free citizens, voters and full participants in civil life, and moral judgments from all sides - except from that of white supremacists who still hated democracy and Constitutional government, judgments that came because even Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery had been confronted with the true horror and destructiveness of the slave system - that was the picture that the furious white Southerners who rejected the American form of government and the American way of life drew, even though a significant number of Southern whites also supported the new democratic governments established during Reconstruction.

A very similar passage appears in her book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), although she includes a couple of phrases there to slightly distance herself from the narrative, indicating that she's describing the version her Tea Party subjects gave her.

As a native-born white Mississippian, I'm tempted to say that only a Yankee would swallow that white Southerners actually believe that Lost Cause, neo-Confederate version of history. Yankees in my experience tend to be generous-minded in that way.

But for the most part, for any adult white Southerners that present the view of the Civil War and its aftermath that she describes there, one of three things is going on: (1) they are shooting off their mouths without putting their brains in gear; or, (2) they've made no effort to fact-check even the most superficial aspects of that story, even though the information is readily available; or, (3) they know it's hogwash and they are just repeating it because they see it as the White Man's tribal narrative and they identify with it and doing give a flying flip if it's actually true.

All of this points to a basic problem in trying to understand and explain a political phenomenon like the Tea Party or Trumpism in terms of a "deep story" that is heavily based on long-established ideological constructs. And deeply dishonest ones, at that.

The problem of whiteness

Ta Nahisi Coates had a piece published recently on the role of "whiteness" in American history, The First White President The Atlantic Oct 2017 (accessed 09/07/2017):

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness — that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump — a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

Gerald Horne offers his own version of the history of American whiteness in this interview with Abby Martin, From 1776 to Trump - White Mobs, Racist Heroes & Hidden History Empire Files/TeleSUR English 09/09/2017:

All this talk about the role of white racism and its role in American history and politics is making Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby irritable. Because in his perpetual liberal-concern-troll mode, he's always unhappy to see the Democrats or anyone associated doing or saying anything that might be annoying to white people who would never consider voting for the Democrats. He grumps about Coates' writing style in
Our team is an embarrassment, faux! Daily Howler 09/12/2017. His post is mainly a polemic accusing Coates of being a publicity hound. He doesn't engage with the substance of Coates' arguments.

Coates gives this good description about how white privilege in the US is manifested in Donald Trump:

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy - to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible. [my emphasis]

I would have to agree the style is a little confusing at times. Although I do appreciate the Lovecraftian "eldritch energies."

Coates is making an argument about white racism and white privilege in current American politics that is actually pretty straightforward and hard to deny, although defenders of the racial status quo, not to mention those more fond of the racial status quo of 1955, have reason to discredit the argument. But he tries to explain them within a larger theory of American history.

His historical arguments from early and antebellum American history don't hold up so well, though. He looks at aspects of that history that are important in defending a democratic, humane, and scholarly understanding of history against the ideological pseudohistory of the neo-Confederates, which is a major part of the white supremacist worldview of hardcore Trumpists. But he builds them into a outlook that essentially assumes that overwhelming white solidarity against the interests of blacks has always been the decisive factor in American politics. And also effectively assumes that virtually everything in the early-antebellum that rose to the level of becoming policy at the national or state level was and is hopelessly tainted by that fact.

The problem is that it requires a pretty one-dimensional reading of historical events and players. One example from Coates' article:

And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery intellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white workers were “ ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune” by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection” — even when the loafing slave “feigned to be unfit for labor.” Fitzhugh proved too explicit—going so far as to argue that white laborers might be better off if enslaved. (“If white slavery be morally wrong,” he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true.”) Nevertheless, the argument that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the exploitation of white labor by white capitalists — “white slavery” — proved durable. Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural. This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class.

Several problems are obvious to me in that passage. One is that he seems to be actually taking George Fitzhugh's argument against the exploitation of white workers seriously. But Fitzhugh didn't give a rat's behind for the well-being of white workers North or South. He was a proslavery propagandist, and he was making a polemical argument that the mean Yankees are big ole hypocrites. The polemics on both sides of the slavery issued produced an impressive set of descriptions of the downsides of the competing social models. But taking a polemic like Fitzhugh's as evidence of slaveowners solidarity with white labor is a serious misreading of the historical source. And it's really kind of silly. The fact that he mentions Fitzghugh saying that white workers would be better off enslaved should have been a tip-off.

Second, the highlighted passages about "original sin" and how black workers suffer because "it was and is our lot" may be meant as literary flourishes. But the also serve to define the problem of race in American history as a metaphysical one, which puts it beyond merely human solutions.

Third, that last concept of "the consistent awarding of grievance and moral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands closest to America’s aristocratic class" is indeed vague. But it's not because of the writing style. It's because it's a muddled idea. Who is he talking about there, the class "closest to America's aristocracy"? All white workers? A segment of the highest paid workers? Lawyers and accountants? His larger argument depends on a general white solidarity with wealthy whites who are hostile to blacks. But if the solidarity is only from a privileged segment of white workers, the larger argument is hard to sustain.

Gerald Horne in the interview above talks about the thesis of his book on the American revolution. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014). He makes the case that the essential point of the American Revolution was to secure the existence of slavery. So the American Revolution was a reactionary, undesirable even in the world of the late 18th century? And this is different from the conclusions of aristocratic reactionaries of the time, how?

The problem with both approaches is their one-dimensionality. If we look at the advance of freedom and democracy in history, it comes not just in fits and starts. At any given time, some things are getting better and others are getting worse. Historical accounts need to be able to explain how it came to be that opposition to slavery among whites was associated with hatred and hostility to black people by those same whites. And if the American Revolution was all about defending slavery, how to explain that key leaders like the nonslaveholder Benjamin Franklin and the slaveowner Thomas Jefferson were in favor of abolishing slavery? How to explain that Northern states abolished slavery in their borders?

And if we are looking for a "usable history" that might throw light on current problems, to consign the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and every other political development and government action taken by white-dominated political community known as the United States is hopelessly tainted by a sinful metaphysical condition, it seems to me that it cedes the history and symbolism of that period to the right. Who will be happy to claim it and present themselves as the defenders of the Real American heritage.

George Packer makes some criticisms of Coates' article in George Packer Responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates The Atlantic 09/15/2017. Any article or book can be criticized for not including other things that might be relevant. And sometimes it a very valid criticism. The entire neo-Confederate narrative, for example, is built around minimizing or denying altogether the realities of slavery in the politics of secession. Packer argues with considerable justification that Coates' approach results in a much truncated view of current American politics:

When you construct an entire teleology on one cause —even a cause as powerful and abiding as white racism — you face the temptation to leave out anything that complicates the thesis. So Coates minimizes sexism — Trump’s disgusting language and the visceral hatred of many of his supporters for Hillary Clinton—background noise. He downplays xenophobia, even though foreigners were far more often the objects of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policy proposals than black Americans. (Of all his insults, the only one Trump felt obliged to withdraw was his original foray into birtherism.) Coates doesn’t try to explain why, at one point in the campaign, a plurality of Republicans supported Ben Carson over the other nine candidates, all white. He omits the weird statistic that slightly more black and Latino voters and slightly fewer whites went for Trump than for Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even mention the estimated eight and a half million Americans who voted for President Obama and then for Trump — even though they made the difference. No need to track the descending nihilism of the Republican Party. The urban-rural divide is a sham [in Coates' approach].

Given that this is 2017, it's also worth noting that Coates' argument agrees with the current corporate Democratic polemic that tries to treat a prolabor position as simultaneously somehow opposing civil rights issues for blacks and women. Although, as Packer writes, Coates' article also also tends to make consideration of the role of sexism in American society yet another distraction of the problem of white racism.

As a final note, I think that the concept of "whiteness" is a useful analytical tool. Race itself is a social construct. But the notion of whiteness allows for a dynamic historical view of how the boundaries of the American political community expanded to include groups like the Irish immigrants who weren't originally consider "white" enough. But as a master narrative of American history, it has its limits.

Digby on Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and DACA

Digby on the Trump Family Business Administration's DACA policy as announced by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (Another step toward Making America White Again Hullabaloo 09/05/2017):

Trump and Sessions and the people who back them are dangerous racist fascists. And the only people who can stop them at this point [i.e., the Republican in Congress] are just as bad. They had their chance to fix this for the last five years and didn't do it. DACA wouldn't have been necessary if they'd passed Comprehensive Immigration Reform or the DREAM Act.

Maybe they'll do it now. But I wouldn't be too sanguine. So far they have not been able to show they can get anything done, much less something that their base hates with a passion. Does anyone believe that after the failure of Obamacare Repeal these people will legalize a bunch of Latinos?

Maybe they'll surprise us. I certainly hope so. This is a nightmare.

Trump makes "MS-13" a slogan of fear and hatred against Latinos and immigrants

Bundespräsident Von Trump spoke before a crowd of uniformed police in New York today, smearing Latinos as sadistic criminals and encouraging brutality and criminal behavior by the police. He used the longtime nativist bogeyman of MS-13 as his excuse. Trump discusses immigration and crime in New York PBS Newshour 07/28/2017:

His speech was basically white supremacist torture porn.

Hearing Trump as President in full Duterte mode today made me feel ill. Part of why his white supremacist fans love him is that he says things that upset Mean Libruls. And I assume that a majority of his white voters approve of seeing nonviolent immigrants brutalized and terrorized by ICE agents.

And why police sworn to uphold the law were applauding this is another reminder of how badly corrupted and lawless too many of our police forces have become.

The use of MS-13 at a symbol of and incitement to fear and hatred against Latinos was a popular theme among white supremacists since at least the early 2000s. Like various other themes, this one migrated from the white supremacist gutter to the position of the Republicans President.

MS-13 is a real gang, or a "brand" of gangs. But I won't stop to cite any reality-based sources here. In this speech, Trump uses "MS-13" as a ritual buzzword. I've focused lately on Islamophia in Austria. And one thing I took fromr a couple of extended TV panels featuring Muslim-hating participants was the way they made a point of tossing in a set of buzzwords: "jihad," "headscarves," "sharia," "salafi," "Saudi Arabia," "political Islam."

Tossing out "MS-13" along with torture-porn accessories functions in the same way: to promote fear and hatred rather than thought or understanding. And Trump is using it in this speech as a symbol against Latinos and immigrants.

Charlie Pierce tweeted a series of comments on Trump's speech:

We're back in American Carnage.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

President Endorses Police Violence.
Applause line.
Man, double-fck these people.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

Yes, organized crime never occurred to the previous waves of immigrants to this country.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 24: Removing Lost Cause monuments in New Orleans

I'm going to jump to the present day for this post. Because a moment in the opposition to neo-Confederate attitudes is making national news.

From MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show New Orleans Removes Confederate Monument 04/24/2017 with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu:

Note that Landrieu mentions a contractor's car being bombed, presumably by a neo-Confederate terrorist.

From MSNBC's Morning Joe New Orleans Mayor Discusses City’s Deportation Stance 04/25/2017, also featuring Mayor Landrieu:

And, yes, I'm running a day late on this post, so the post for April 24 is using a broadcast from April 25. Spacetime can be confusing.

In an early morning press release dated yesterday, Landrieu explained what the Liberty Place monument commemorated (City of New Orleans Begins Removal of Divisive Confederate Statues Commemorating “Cult of the Lost Cause” 04/24/2017):

The Battle of Liberty Place Monument at Iberville Street, was erected in 1891 (originally on Canal Street) in honor of the “Battle of Liberty Place,” an 1874 insurrection of the Crescent City White League, a group of all white, mostly Confederate veterans, who battled against the racially integrated New Orleans Metropolitan Police and state militia. The monument was meant to honor the members of the White League who died during the battle. In 1932, the City of New Orleans added a plaque to the monument, explicitly outlining its white supremacist sympathies, which explained that the battle was fought for the “overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers" and that “the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state."

In 1989, construction on Canal Street forced the removal of the monument, but it was relocated to its current location on Iberville Street in 1993. At that time, the 1932 white supremacist plaque was covered with a new plaque that read: “In honor of those Americans on both sides who died in the Battle of Liberty Place… A conflict of the past that should teach us lessons for the future.”

Louis Harlan describes the event the now-removed monument celebrated in "Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools During Reconstruction" American Historical Review 67:3 (Apr 1962):

The White League arose in 1874, spread quickly from the rural parishes to New Orleans, staged a three-day coup d'etat in September until the arrival of federal troops, and installed a Conservative city government in December. In the same period the position of mixed schools was weakened by the removal from the congressional civil rights bill of the school desegregation clause. The stage was set for the well-known school riots of December 1874, which reflected the momentary political climate of that period as clearly as the acquiescent mood of the previous three years reflected an opposite policy.

During three days of rioting, mobs often described as high school boys or "boy regulators" rudely ejected from mixed schools colored children who had been peacefully attending for years, insulted teachers, beat and threatened to hang the city superintendent. The White League and its newspaper supporters instigated and directed the mobs, which were composed mostly of men and adolescents not enrolled in the high schools, using a handful of high school rowdies as fronts. More- over, the riots failed to achieve their objective. Sober citizens persuaded the White League to call off "the boys," and the schools reopened after the holidays on a desegregated basis, remaining so for another two and a half years, until after Reconstruction.

Here are a couple of articles form the New Orleans Times-Picayune on the New Orleans Confederate monuments being removed: Kevin Litton, New Orleans Confederate monuments can come down, court rules 03/06/2017; Beau Evans, Removal of the first of four New Orleans Confederate monuments begins with Liberty Place 04/24/2017.

In another report, Litton describes the decades of protests against the pro-treason, pro-Confederate monuments: Efforts to remove Confederate monuments in New Orleans go back decades 03/14/2017.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 22: Missouri Compromise and the "free labor" antislavery narrative

I've referred several times in this month's series of posts to an article by Joshua Michael Zeitz, "The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis" Journal of the Early Republic 20:3 (Autumn 2000) because it gives such a lucid account of the complexity of racial attitudes among whites in America prior to the Civil War. And particularly to the phenomenon described by historians like William Freehling that white opposition to slavery could be and was combined with hostility toward black people.

As Zeitz writes, "Throughout the North, emancipated slaves seemed to confirm the commonly held supposition that African Americans were more often than not a public nuisance and, on occasion, an outright threat. Much of this prejudice stemmed from the public's inability or unwillingness to distinguish between slaves and freemen." Zeitz refers to it as "this increasingly instinctive association in the white mind" between slavery and presence of black people.

Zeitz catalogues in his article a grimly impressive list of discriminatory measures taken by Northerners against free blacks living among them: restrictions; degrading and hostile attitudes; violence, even "ethnic cleansing" in some areas: bans on blacks entering a state.

He places this within the context of Northern opposition to slavery often being combined with hostility to black people, even outright hatred.

He cites a public meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1920 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, in which "leading Cincinnati citizens ... openly endorse[d] a doctrine of racial equality." And he describes the other side of Cincinnati racial attitudes:

Nine years later, Cincinnati mobs terrorized the city's black community with such ferocity that a large portion was persuaded to emigrate to Canada. Twelve years after that, the remaining African-American residents were so beleaguered by renewed violence that the men were disarmed and jailed for their own protection. While they waited helplessly behind bars, a white mob swept into black neighborhoods and turned on the women and children. As these episodes suggest, the history of race relations throughout the antebellum Midwest is generally one of recurrent violence.

There's no reason from Zeitz' account to assume that there was any overlap between individuals involved in the two incidents.

But it also illustrates how the real conflict between democracy and slavery kept playing itself out. They couldn't survive together in one country forever.

Zeitz' article also lets us know that what we today call "voter suppression" and related practices did not begin with white opposition to Reconstruction or to the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

New Jersey disenfranchised its black residents in 1807, Connecticut in 1814, Rhode Island in 1822, and Pennsylvania in 1837. In New York blacks were subject to a special property qualification that effectively excluded all but a scant few from the electoral process. According to Eugene Berwanger, African Americans in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana did not cast their first legal ballots until after the Civil War. By 1840 approximately ninety-three percent of northern free blacks were denied the right to vote. In addition, Leon Litwack has found that "[b]y the 1830s, statute or custom placed Negro children in separate schools in nearly every Northern community." When in 1835 abolitionists reacted in typical fashion to this unfortunate circumstance by establishing an interracial academy in Cannan, New Hampshire, the town responded by literally ripping the building from its foundation and placing it in the village common with the help of a large army of men and oxen.

At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Zeitz sees what is known as the "free labor" narrative as gaining predominance among antislavery advocates, or hegemony, if we prefer to use a fashionable academic term, over the previously dominant abstractly moral narrative:

As white America systematically denied blacks the trappings and status of citizenship - as it came to identify the interests and inclinations of African Americans as antithetical to those of the American nation-antislavery activists found it possible to reconcile their advocacy of emancipation with the dominant protoracist tendencies of the broader culture. It became convenient and even ideologically consistent to isolate slavery, and its past and present victims, as injurious to the new dynamism and liberal social order that defined the antebellum North. If denunciations of the institution's violation of natural and religious law could coexist with a pervasive prejudicial disposition, so too could northerners conceive of their opposition to slavery as benevolent and morally grounded even while they shifted the focus of that opposition to broader social concerns. Slavery and slaves and freed slaves were newly recognized as the cause of southern depravity and impoverishment. In tum, the debate over slavery assumed new dimensions. No longer was the question a "moral" one in the strictest sense of the word. Instead, it became a vital point of contention in a broader struggle for the security of America's economic future and public character.

Not that the moral argument completely went away. But it was undergoing a transformation. In the free labor narrative, the morality stressed became one more oriented to the moral imperative to protect white citizens against the baleful effects of the Peculiar Institution.

Ironically, this version of the antislavery narrative stressing more the self-interests of whites in opposing slavery became a way for defenders of slavery to frame antislavery arguments as cynical political concoctions by Federalists and Northern Republicans. Thus, Zeitz writes, "It is not difficult to understand why commentators and observers from Thomas Jefferson to twentieth-century historians interpreted the northern antislavery forces in 1820 as primarily political and only secondarily inspired by 'moral' concerns."

But he also emphasizes, "Although there can be no doubt that baser political motives lay at the heart of some portion of the 1820 antislavery impulse, to so reduce frequent references to 'slave representation' ignores the legitimate moral indignation felt by so many northerners. It was a resentment with various roots. For some the issue was one of fairness." And democratic convictions played a real role in 1820 and afterwards. "Slavery was an affront to the revolutionary era value system northerners still held dear."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 21: Complications of antislavery ideology

I want to return again to Joshua Michael Zeitz' "The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis" Journal of the Early Republic 20:3 (Autumn 2000) to look at some of the evidence he adduces for white antislavery sentiment that also at least moved in the direction of recognizing the human rights of black people, including slaves.

Zeitz gives some examples of such expressions from white opponents of slavery and its expansion:

In 1820, as in the revolutionary period, the belief that African Americans were human beings, as well as the accompanying disbelief that humans could be ordered hierarchically, was fundamental to the position that slavery violated both natural law and God's rule of scripture. Over fifty years before, James Otis had quoted Locke in affirming that '"creatures of the same species and rank ... should also be equal one among another."' ...

The antiextensionists did not always employ scientific terms like "species" and "genus," but they nevertheless betrayed an implicit certainty that African Americans were humans, subject to the same privileges and responsibilities as all other humans. One Philadelphia columnist, writing under the pseudonym of "A Freeman," expressed his astonishment that slavery proponents would, "at this late day [maintain that] the right of one man to hold another in bondage was justifiable by the law of Nature and of God." A Vermont congressman argued "that a right to hold a fellow human being in slavery, under any term of Government, does not exist." ... However much the frequent omission of scientific terminology complicates the characterization of northern racial thinking in 1820, one critical consistency prevails: the restrictionists [opponents of slavery extension] acknowledged no inherent distinctions between men in formulating their defense of the slave's natural and religious rights. Given the improbability that these grounds could have been as liberally maintained in similar debates three decades later, the absence of a racialist idiom during the Missouri Crisis suggests that, to many northerners, it was still second nature to reiterate that''' God created all mankind equal, and endowed them with certain inalienable rights.'" [my emphasis]

This kind of thinking was very much part of the American revolutionary heritage with philosophical, religious and political aspects. Not every white citizen shared it, obviously. And in many cases the emancipatory impulse in such thinking was clearly in conflict with other attitudes. A white person could declare their faith that there are "no inherent distinctions between men" while simultaneously seriously restricting their idea of how fair equality should extent in actual practice.

Zeitz gives us a good example of that, too, which is worth quoting at some length to catch the complexity and contradictions involved:

The Baltimore newspaper editor Hezekiah Niles ruefully observed in 1819 that it was "the policy in some sections of our country, to keep the free people of color, as well as the slaves, in the grossest ignorance possible-to deprive them as far as practicable, of the capacity of reasoning and deny them the means of improvement." But Niles also expressed a cynical disdain for those starry-eyed abolitionists who "were clamorous for emancipation, without considering the consequences that must result from it." The successful manumission and cultural integration of the slave population clearly would require a preformulated plan, and that plan would rest on the assumption that the degeneracy of black America-both slave and free-was a direct but also reversible function of slavery. "[I]t is true wisdom," Niles explained, "to exalt the minds of slaves-to invest them with the correct ideas of [their] moral duties, and encourage them in the acquirement of property."

The states in which slavery is not allowed, should offer every reasonable facility and encouragement to free people of color ... and adopt some measures to lessen the prejudices and antipathies of the whites, in qualifying the blacks to attain a respectable standing in society.

Lest his broad scheme for emancipation fall victim to skeptics, the editor explained two months later that "by adventitious mixtures, the effect of common association with the whites, and the operation of climate, the dark complexion [of the African American] might in time be nearly removed, if not wholly eradicated." This great amalgamation of the American races would be actuated "by the force of certain laws whose principles we do not understand, but whose effects are manifest throughout the works of animated nature." More importantly, it would occur "without sexual intercourse." [my emphasis in bold]

There were many complicated elements to people's motivations on both sides of fight over chattel slavery. Some of them today look more noble than others. And some of the least noble ones still play an active role in American political life today.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 20: Guessing at white attitudes about slavery in 1820 and afterwards

Measuring public opinion in the present day is often challenging. When we're looking at 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, it's far more different difficult. Because there was nothing like the public opinion polls of today being done. I mean, access to telephones wasn't exactly the same back then. (Yes, that's a joke. The telephone device we know was patented by of Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Although the ever-informative Britannica Online notes, "The word telephone, from the Greek roots tēle, “far,” and phonē, “sound,” was applied as early as the late 17th century to the string telephone familiar to children, and it was later used to refer to the megaphone and the speaking tube.")

And measuring something like racial attitudes is especially tricky even for today's pollsters. One of the innovations of the famous Authoritarian Personality project directed by Max Horkheimer int he 1940s is that it used indirect questions to get at prejudices that many people would not consider respectable to express openly. After the 2016 Presidential election in the US, we've had a whole new round of discussion about the significance of white racism in politics. See, for instance, Thomas Wood, Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog 04/17/2017. And the response from Digby Parton included in Did racism or a longing for authoritarian leadership elect Donald Trump? The right answer is both Salon 04/18/2017.

I've stressed in this year's series of Confederate "Heritage" Month posts the ways in which white opposition to slavery could be combined with disdain and/or hatred toward black people, even free blacks. I've relied heavily on the carefully constructed arguments on that point by historian William Freehling. And I've stressed that form of antislavery sentiment because of the particular role arguments about Northern white racism play in the neo-Confederate pseudohistorical analysis.

But what the attitudes of ordinary whites were and in what proportion and intensities has to be estimated by elections, positions taking by elected officials, legislative enactments touching on race-related issues, statements in newspapers, pamphlets and books, recorded sermons by clergy, etc. If those measurement are less than precise in 2017, making them in retrospect to 1820 involves even more estimation and inference.

One of the most famous and influential antebellum antislavery books was The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857) by Hinton Helper (1829-1909). But Helper himself had overtly racist attitudes toward black people, which he publicly expressed after the Civil War. Helper served as US Consul to Argentina 1861-1866, a period which overlapped the Argentine Presidency of Bartolomé Mitre (1861-68). Helper married an Argentine woman. David Brown reports in Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and the Impending Crisis of the South (2006) that three months after his wedding 1863, he wrote in a letter eventually transmitted to the US Secretary of State William Seward in which he addressed his wife's background. "Although his bride was a Buenos Aires native, she came from 'pure Spanish descent.' helper suggested a strong contrast between the 'pure descent' of upper-class Argentines with that of what he believed was the less worthy Creole background of the masses, highlighting the significance of blood lines in his assessment of personal character." Creole was used to refer to people of Spanish descent but born in a Latin American country. In the racial hierarchies inherited from Spanish colonial days, Spaniards from Spain were considered the more "pure" racial group, with native-born people of full Spanish descent considered the next down in the racial hierarchy.

Hinton Helper (1829-1909)

J.J. Cardoso provides an illustrative description of Helper's racial attitudes in "Hinton Rowan Helper as a Racist in the Abolitionist Camp," Journal of Negro History 55:4 (Oct 1970):

Helper never became an "uncompromising abolitionist" of the Wendell Phillips genre. He was, in fact, a colonizer in a technical sense and a racist in a real one. As a child of the predominantly non-slaveholding class of whites living in the Piedmont frontier of North Carolina, Helper's bias against slavery was indigeonus to his anti-Negro thinking. There was no room in his South or in his United States for the black man. The spectre of emancipated blacks living and associating equally in white America in pursuit of the American dream frightened and angered him. Both publicly and privately he dedicated himself to proscription of the Negro from white society. Helper's yeomen sensibilities rebelled against the idea of abolitionists encouraging the bondsmen to join in common revolution to bring about emancipation, and he divorced himself from any plan concerning racial equality. For Helper the blacks were inert chattel to be freed and removed. He reiterated the principles set forth in his book [Impending Crisis], principles which called for the southern slaveowners either to renounce the institution or to suffer the result of having it taken from them. His program was devoid of any comprehension of the all-inclusive and pervasive nature of slavery. The destruction of slavery and the removal of the Negro, for Helper, meant the creation of a truly democratic white southern society. He relied on the naive hope that middling, non-slaveholding whites would vote slavery out of existence. [my emphasis]

In an ironic twist, "Oddly, Helper's notoriety and personal association with abolitionists caused his name to be associated with [John] Brown's raid" on Harper's Ferry in 1859.

He goes on to observe that Helper's "racial attitudes perhaps epitomized those of Northern free-soilers, middling and poor southern non-slaveholders, and even Lincoln himself in 1860."

Racism, a close cousin to xenophobia

La Opinión recently ran this useful editorial, Racism: silence gives consent 03/14/2017:

The anti-immigrant movement’s base is founded on racism. The comments made by Congressman Steve King about the importance of “American culture” and the difficulty to “rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies” is telling, particularly when they come from the leader in immigration issues at the House of Representatives.

This does not mean that people sincerely questioning the presence of undocumented people on legal grounds are racist. However, such people are in really bad company.

Trumpist ideology and style

It's unlikely in the extreme that Donald Tinyhands Trump or anyone in his entourage will go down in the history of ideas as major contributors to political theory.

But they do have some kind of operative ideology. Here are a couple of articles on his ideological influences.

Jamelle Bouie discusses the white supremacist/white nationalist component in Government by White Nationalism Is Upon Us Slate 02/06/2017. He discusses the contributions of Michael "Publius Decius Mu" Anton, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions.

Arthur Browne in the New York Daily News in 2016 described Trump's political mentor, the truly deplorable Roy Cohn, The devil in Donald: How the ghost of ‘evil’ Roy Cohn lives on inside Trump 10/01/2016:

... it was lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn who taught Donald Trump how to live.

More specifically, Roy Cohn mentored Trump to:

- abuse the legal system to routinely cheat people;

- dodge paying taxes through use of — to be polite — inventively aggressive techniques.

- exploit falsehoods and innuendo to achieve his goals.

Josh Marshall has his own working theory of Trump's behavior (On Trump, Keep it Simple (In 5 Points) 02/06/2017): "Despite his manic temperament, impulsiveness and emotional infantility, this acumen [for branding] gives him real and in some ways profound communication skills. The two don't cancel each other out. They are both always present. They grow from the same root."

And on the ideas we wants to sell with his branding (bold in original):

Trump is Surrounded By Extremists and Desperados: Trump is primarily driven by impulse, grievance, the need to dominate and the need to be praised. There are core political beliefs Trump has had for decades which we should expect him to stick to. They almost all turn on being taken advantage of by other countries - whether in terms of trade or defense. The common thread is a deep belief in zero-sum relationships, whether in business or foreign affairs. As business columnist Joe Nocera put it after decades of observing Trump: "In every deal, he has to win and you have to lose." But if Trump's ideology is fluid, he has drawn around him advisors who can only be termed extremists. I believe the chief reason is that Trump's authoritarian personality resonates with extremist politics and vice versa. We should expect them to keep catalyzing each other in dangerous and frightening ways. [my emphasis in italics]

And David Bromwich, who had good insight into Obama's strangely ambiguous messaging and policy perspectives, writes about the new so-called President in Act One, Scene One London Review of Books 06/16/2017 issue, accessed 02/07/2017.

Comparing his style to his predecessor's, Bromwich writes, "If Obama often seemed an image of deliberation without appetite, Trump has always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the deed." And, "[Trump] is the loudmouth at the bar, cocksure and full of himself and you may want him to stop, but you catch his drift. Trump is short-winded, vulgar and lowbrow, where Obama was long-winded, refined and impeccably middlebrow."

In this passage, he gives us a perspective on the Democrats' timidity on policy and how Obama's commitment to Bipartisanship fits within it:

With the election and partial legitimation of Trump against the massed energy of the Democratic Party, many Republicans and virtually all the mainstream media, we have witnessed a revolution of manners. Will a political revolution follow? What is ominous is the uncertainty and the leaderless state of the opposition. The Democrats are at their lowest ebb since 1920, and this is anything but a sudden misfortune: the loss of nerve started with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which surprised the Democrats and shook their confidence in the tenability of the welfare state, and the threat to mixed constitutional government was clear in the 1994 midterm election, when 367 Republican candidates signed the Contract with America, with its pledge to slash government spending in the first hundred days of a new Congress. The contract was the precursor of the Tea Party – its instigator, Newt Gingrich, has become a leading adviser to Donald Trump. The Democrats behaved persistently as if the Republican hostility to government-as-such were a curable aberration. Yet eight years of Obama have ended with his party’s loss of the presidency, its relegation to a minority in both houses of Congress and – something that happened when no one was counting – the loss of 900 seats in state legislatures. Any return to majority status must begin at the local and state levels, yet in the 50 states of the union, the Republican Party has 33 governors and now controls 32 legislatures. The losses grew steeper with every mishap, from the delay of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 to the standoff over the national debt ceiling in the summer of 2011. Yet after Obama’s re-election, as the PBS Frontline documentary Divided States of America vividly recalled, he thought he was in 2008 again, the old mandate renewed, and would say to reporters in 2012 and 2014 just as he had done in 2010: ‘the [Republican] fever will break.’ [my emphasis in bold]

Bromwich also includes a sobering list of major elements of "national security state that Obama inherited and broadened, and has now passed on to Trump."

This is also a memorable observation, "The pride of a demagogue is never quite compatible with sanity; and none of Trump’s actions has so perplexed the media and dismayed his party as his ordering of an investigation into possible illegalities in the election that delivered Republican control over all three branches of government."

Unfortunately, so is this, "Democrats have forgotten what it means to constitute an opposition." Unfortunately because it's so sadly true.

Two stories about white Trump supporters from "Mother Jones"

These articles make an excellent contrast.

Rick Perlstein understands that there is a white Southern narrative based that is white supremacist but typically packaged in more abstract pretensions: Peter's Choice Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2017.

Arlie Russell Hochschild seems to have only a dim understanding of that reality: I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump's Biggest Fans. Here's What They Won't Tell You. Mother Jones Sept/Oct 2016.

Also, Perlstein actually took the trouble to fact-check some of the whiny-white-guy claims on which he's reporting. Hochschild's article, like other presentations I read and heard from her, seems to take the white-white-people claims at face value.

But facts matter. If the worldview someone is describing to you referring to their immediate environment isn't consistent with the facts, that tells you something important about what goes on in their construction of their narratives.

Is white supremacy a fringe phenomenon or a definition of race relations and attitudes?

Chauncey DeVega takes a shot at framing the race/gender/"identity" vs. class-and-economics conundrum in You say “racist,” I say “white supremacist”: Sorry, Kevin Drum, “white supremacy” is a fact — not a “fad” Salon 11/29/2016:

For conservatives and members of the right, identity politics is a way to demean and reject the struggles of people of color, women, gays and lesbians and other marginalized groups as somehow not being legitimate or “real” politics. By implication, only the concerns of white men over their maintaining power and affluence constitute real or “normal” politics. This logic is one of the most powerful examples of the social and political work done by white male privilege in American society.

For many liberals and progressives, identity politics are seen as a distraction from the real politics of class and the struggle to reduce income and wealth inequality. Here, racism, sexism, homophobia and other types of social and political inequality are just masks and symptoms of a deeper problem — the way that capitalism exploits workers in the service of big business.

These two perspectives ignore how identity politics are actually part of full and equal civil rights. The concerns of African-Americans and other people of color about racism reflect how white supremacy and other types of systemic racial inequality are a threat to their (in many cases, literal) life chances. When women struggle to protect their reproductive rights, it is an acknowledgment of how control over one’s body is a necessary prerequisite for being equal to men in all ways social, political and economic. The demands for marriage equality by gays and lesbians is a claim on justice and how certain rights and privileges are exclusive to those people whose relationships are given legal standing by the state.

On a fundamental level, most political questions are about identity. As such, to mark identity politics as something unique, different or perhaps even aberrant is to both misunderstand and misrepresent the nature of politics itself. This is a failure of language that does an immense amount of political work in American society. [my emphasis]

As fresh as this debate is at the moment, it's not new. It's been around in a recognizably similar form since at least the 19th century in the democratic-capitalist order that was then emerging.

But it's not an either/or choice. It's a constantly evolving approach having to do with strategic framing and with practical implications. We could argue that Hillary Clinton's strategic messaging at the high level struck a reasonable balance. But that the campaign didn't communicate enough of the "identity" message in practice and organization to turn out adequate African-American votes in key areas of swing states. And that the I-understand-the-economic-distress message didn't get communicated clearly and consistently enough in those same swing states like Michigan, thus sacrificing the effect that might have had in both improving turnout among core constituencies and persuadable swing voters, including those from the much-discussed white working class.

There's a sad irony here. Bill Clinton got elected President in 1992 with his "it's the economy, stupid" approach that de-emphasized so-called "identity" politics in favor of a more traditional Democratic economic message. But in the subsequent years including his Presidency, the corporate liberal message identified with Hillary Clinton morphed into an emphasis on liberalism on "identity" issues accompanied by neoliberal privatization/deregulation economics.

Just to be clear on my answer to the question in the title: white supremacy is an integral part of white racism. And the reluctance of white "moderates" to confront it directly is also a chronic problem. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "Letter From A Brimingham Jail" (1963) was a response to a communication to him from white clergy suggesting that he ease up on his civil rights demands:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

... I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. [my emphasis]

Reagan speeches to explain conservatism?

Elesha Coffman, a history professor at the Baptist-affiliated Baylor University (where the legendary Deplorable, Ken Starr, was President until recently), tells an interesting story about she went searching for a different speech to use in a lecture about 1980s conservatism for her students, Which One Is "The Speech"? Religion in American History, accessed 11/19/2016. She had previously been using a speech of Ronald Reagan's from August 1980 to a group of evangelicals. She wanted to stick with a Reagan speech, I suppose because the image of St. Reagan has become so prominent in the US conservative "imaginary," as the academics say these days. And, more obviously, he was such a prominent conservative figure in the 1980s. She finally settled on one:

I ended up bringing before my class a different speech, the Neshoba County Fair "states' rights" speech of August 3, 1980. I found this speech (video and transcript here) useful less for its content--it's more folksy than forceful--than for the way it shows (1) how political dog whistles work, and (2) why interpretations of history matter. In 2007--27 years after the event!--David Brooks wrote for the New York Times that Reagan was falsely accused of racism on the basis of this speech. Four days later, Bob Herbert wrote for the same paper that the speech was absolutely evidence of racism, and to argue otherwise was "woefully wrong-headed." I read my students portions of both NYT columns and asked, how might both of these perspectives contain elements of truth, and why is an inability to agree on what constitutes racism a huge problem? (Incidentally, my favorite piece on that last question also comes from the NYT, "The Easiest Way to Get Rid of Racism? Just Redefine It.")

One landmark Reagan speech I didn't go over in class was 1987's "Tear Down This Wall." The irony was so thick, I choked on it.

The liberal "concern trolls" are starting to swarm

There never seems to be a shortage of people who are happy to share their advice as to how the Democrats would do better at the polls if they would just act more like Republicans. And especially to stop worrying about all those black people, and wimmin, and Latinos, and gays, and immigrants. Because in showing concern for the rights of those people (who add up to a substantial majority of the population, BTW) those Mean Libruls are acting like the Ku Klux Klan! Here is Mark Lilla getting nostalgic for the days of "Sister Souljah moments, The End of Identity Liberalism New York Times 11/18/2016:

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

That's an innovative idea, that the Democrats should "speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another"!

Maybe they could come up with a slogan like "Stronger Together." Hey, in fact, Hillary Clinton just used that. And won a larger plurality of the vote than Donald Trump.

I definitely want to see the Democrats focus more on stimulative economic policies, better regulation of finance and business, the rights of labor and consumers and generally develop and articulate a New Deal kind of framing for their project instead of the neoliberal one that has worked out poorly for them. And for the majority of the people.

But that's not what Lilla is arguing here. This is little more than a rehash of conservative talking points. And as David Leonhardt reports, also in the New York Times (The Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem 11/17/2016), "In the simplest terms, Republican turnout seems to have surged this year, while Democratic turnout stagnated."

It would be foolish for the Democrats to further disappoint the major constituencies that actually favor them in the forlorn hope of winning over habitual Republican voters in significant numbers. They need to get their own constituence sufficiently motivated to vote and develop the organizational structure to facilitate theat. Leonhardt has a very different recommendation for the Democrats than tired concern-troll scripts:

For starters, it should continue to fight hard for voting rights. Doing so puts it on the right side of history and also helps the party tactically. There is a reason that Republican officials have been trying to restrict voting hours and eligibility: Many of them are afraid of high turnout. The Republicans’ new political dominance will make the fight harder, but it must continue.

Second, the Democrats should recommit themselves to old-fashioned organizing without giving up on the emerging science of voter turnout. Academic researchers have learned a lot in the last decade about voter behavior and turnout tactics. There is much more to learn, as this year’s disappointment makes clear. The ubiquity of social media and smartphones creates opportunities to get more people to vote.

Finally, the Democrats should remember that inspiring turnout and persuading swing voters aren’t separate problems. It’s a lot easier to do both with a galvanizing message that makes voters feel part of a larger project — be it an uplifting project or a combative one. [my emphasis]

Leonhardt reminds us that many factors are involved in voting behavior. But the suggestions he mentions are ones worth following.

The mainstream media fail on Trump and other "deplorables"

Chauncey DeVega reminds us of some of the basics in the Presidential election (He is Graded on a Curve: White Racism and a Cowardly News Media are Keeping Trump Close to Hillary in the Polls Indomitable 09/12/2016):

Primarily, both candidates are viewed negatively by large segments of the American public. The U.S. economy has also experienced a relatively anemic recovery (in terms of wages and wealth) from the Great Recession of the George W. Bush years.

Furthermore, the American electorate is highly partisan and polarized. As Election Day in November approaches — and despite whatever misgivings voters may feel — it is much more likely than not that a given individual will solidify their support for their political party’s chosen candidate.

These foundational factors have combined to create a close presidential race.

The American news media, much of it owned and controlled by large corporations, has also played a significant role in keeping Hillary Clinton within reach of Donald Trump.

While this information gets garbled in the sensationalism and "horse race" obsessions over polling in typical mainstream reporting, those observations are not out of the range of conventional wisdom. Elections actually do take place, and the results can be counted. So there is an anchor in reality that political coverage has to acknowledge, however reluctantly.

Also well understood by Democratic voters and activists is the following, though for obvious reasons the corporate media and our Pod Pundits are reluctant to acknowledge it, is the following:

The American news media, much of it owned and controlled by large corporations, has also played a significant role in keeping Hillary Clinton within reach of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is an atypical presidential candidate who has utter disregard for the standing norms of American politics and even less respect for the Fourth Estate. This has allowed him to outmaneuver and manipulate many journalists and pundits. They feel beholden, or perhaps enslaved, to norms of “objectivity,” “fairness” and “balance.” Trump feels no such limitations.

This observation, however, is one that's inconvenient for the mainstream press and it's Both Sides Do It convention. It's also inconvenient for corporate Democrats who like to make "bipartisan" pitches:

Moreover, despite the media’s discussion of the so-called alt-right, which is little more than an ideological smoke screen, Trump and his supporters are not outliers or aberrations in the Republican Party. They are its unapologetic base and its political id. Right-wing elites may be turned off by Trump’s lack of polish, but his core message, attitudes and values resonate among mainstream Republicans. This gives Trump a deep reservoir of preexisting support. [my emphasis]

I agree with his reading of the probabilities here, "This will get Trump close to the finish line but not over it."

He also does a good job of describing how the "populist" factor interacts with the white racism and xenophobic elements:

Trump is the beneficiary of a populist moment of discontent in American and global politics. While Bernie Sanders’ progressive version of populism was inclusive, cosmopolitan and forward-thinking, Trump’s populism appeals to racism, tribalism and reactionary thinking. Trump is also a political necromancer, deftly skilled in manipulating white conservatives’ anxieties and fears of both generational and cultural obsolescence.

Parsing the role economic discontent plays in interaction with racial/ethnic/nationalistic sentiments is always a challenge because it's a complex relationship and practically impossible to measure in a clear-cut manner.

Charlie Pierce also picks up the granding-on-a-curve metaphor Chauncey uses in The Truth About This Alleged 'Basket of Deplorables' Esquire Politics Blog 09/11/2016:

Hell, we've been grading Republicans on a curve for decades. We graded Reagan on a curve when he burbled about trees and air pollution. We graded him on a curve during Iran Contra on the grounds that he was too dim to know what was going on around him. We graded W on a curve for the whole 2000 campaign when he didn't know Utah from Uzbekistan, but Al Gore knew too much stuff and what fun was he, anyway? We graded Republicans on a curve when they attached themselves to the remnants of American apartheid, when they played footsie with the militias out west and with the heirs to the White Citizens Councils in the South. We graded them on a curve every time they won a campaign behind Karl Rove or Lee Atwater or the late Terry Dolan back in the 1970s. We talked about how they were "reaching out" to disillusioned white voters who'd suffered in the changing economy, as though African-American workers didn't get slugged harder than anyone else by deindustrialization. We pretended not to notice how racial animus was the accelerant for the fire of discontent in the "Reagan Democrats." That was, and is, grading on a moral curve.

He also quotes Hillary's "deplorables" statement more fully than the one sentence the Pod Pundits seized on:

You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of these folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket–and I know this because I see friends from all over America here – I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas–as well as, you know, New York and California–but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

It's hardly roaring populism. But it does define the Republican coalition as well as any politician running for election is likely to these days. Charlie describes it this way:

It is timidity now that grades this ridiculous man [Trump] running this ridiculous campaign on the biggest curve of all - the timidity of a people who have declined the responsibilities of serious citizenship and the abdication of its duty under the Constitution of a putatively free press too timid to call them on it. That is the political correctness that truly is hurting the country and may yet hurt it beyond all repair. There's only one candidate now running however gingerly against that.

But Hillary's statement does a decent job of defining Republican popular support, as distinguished from plutocratic support.

The formulation I've been using this year is that white racism and xenophobia have a psychological and political life of their own and can't be related immediately and clearly to economic distress. Factors like authoritarian inclinations play a large role in the political alignments. But it's also obvious to me that good economic prospects for ordinary people make it less likely on average that voters will be looking for racial or foreign scapegoats.