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A striking feature of the 2000 presidential
election, among the many associated with that historic event, was
that it completed the capture of the American political system by
the radical Conservative wing of the Republican party, a project
begun when Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House in 1980.
In this work I argue that race has had much to do with the
evolution of this politics and that, as consequence, Blacks have
constituted the base target of a set of public policies initiated
by the Reagan regime. Thus I will discuss the development of the
Conservative movement and its influence on public policy from the
perspective of its focus on the Black community.
The force of this politics has caught the Black
community off guard, since it deviates substantially from the
Liberal vision that resulted in the civil rights laws of the 1960s
and 1970s. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we
appear to be living in an era when a dominant sector of the White
majority seems to have lost confidence in the promise of America
as a liberal democratic state and has been recoiling from this
vision, which implies shared power based upon racial equity.
Instead, the White majority is proceeding to concentrate economic
and social power within its own group, using its control over the
political institutions of the state to punish presumptive
enemies.
The targets of this punishment has been Black,
Hispanic and other non-White communities. Here I use the term
“target” with the connotation Helen Schneider and Ann Ingram
assign it: “The social construction of target population refers
to the cultural characterization or popular images of the persons
or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public
policy. These characterizations are normative and evaluative,
portraying groups in positive or negative terms through symbolic
language, metaphors, and stories.”1
In many ways this work activates the
Schneider/Ingram thesis, extending the “targeting” phenomenon
to the supposed “ally” of Blacks—the U.S. government—which
is also presumed to constitute a threat to the interests of the
White Conservative sector. Perceiving itself under threat, this
sector mobilized, pursuing a politics that dictates institutional
resources should be withdrawn from the target group and rules
eliminated which are in any way conceived to disadvantage Whites.
I argue that this was accomplished through the fomentation of
nationalist movement by a substantial sector of the White
majority.
The case made in this work for the existence of
“White Nationalism” is a sociopolitical phenomenon is based on
substantial evidence which suggests the proposition that if a race
is dominant to the extent that it controls the government of the
state—defined as the authoritative institutions of decision
making—it is able to utilize those institutions and the policy
outcomes they produce as instruments through which it is also
structures its racial interests. In short, it may reward, punish
and so structure outcomes as to protect and enhance racial
interest.
The problem in recognizing the purely racial
interests of the majority is different from discerning those of a
minority group seeking equality. In the case of the Black
minority, this group often seeks parity through movements that
explicitly expose “Black power” or other forms of Black
Nationalism, practically elaborated as economic, political and
group self-determination, and equality with Whites.
Given a condition where one race is dominant in
all political institutions, most policy actions appear to take on
an objective quality, where policy makers argue that they are
acting on the basis of “national interests” rather than racial
ones. In fact, how to separate the objective civil interests of
the state from the subjective racial interests of those who manage
it constitutes a critical problem, posing an impediment to the
achievement of democracy—partially defined as racial
equality—within the context of multiracial state. How does one
recognize the racial interests of the majority in policy making,
since policy is rarely articulated in terms that directly imply
favoring the dominant group? Often the straightforward
articulation of racial interests is not only difficult to discover
but generally from public discourse.
The discovery of racial interests under such
conditions, then, must be inferential. Policy actions and outcomes
must be examined in order to understand which group’s interests
are advantaged or disadvantaged. For example, I argue here that
the detection of national White-majority interests can be achieved
by understanding the sources of White racial alienation that led
to the development of an intellectual rationale of policy
“failure.” Together with the notion that government actions
were detrimental to Whites in the social arena, this rationale was
used as the pretext for attacks upon policies oriented toward
Black group interest and on the federal government which supported
them.
Policies oriented toward Blacks, it was argued,
must be devalued of their perceived advantages, and the federal
government must be weakened. This could be accomplished through
policies which redistribute power to states and localities and
promote flexible regulations of programs, thus permitting
resources to be utilized in the interests of White-majority
communities.
The consequence of this new set of policies is
that Black advancement in society is defined as a threat to White
national interests in the competitive context of the
“zero-sum” concept. If Blacks are empowered, then White
interests suffer. This interpretation is reflected in the new
definition of “racial discrimination,” whereby courts have
reversed policies designed to provide fairness to Blacks because
they are seen as unfair to Whites. Indeed, this view has been
constitutionalized, resulting in the decimation of large areas of
civil rights and the devaluation of Black social mobility.
Moreover, this logic promotes government actions which have had
the consequence of punishing Blacks by withdrawing resources and
subordinating them by such practices as racial profiling and high
rates of incarceration and execution.
I will also argue that the racial character of
White Nationalism has been further confused by the use of Blacks
to promote aspects of White policy interests. Blacks, especially
Black Conservatives, serve as proxy agents to legitimize the
strategies that further White interests. Blacks have assumed
prominent roles in support of policies such as school choice,
which promotes the use of vouchers for students to attend private
schools, or the “faith-based” administration of social
programs.
Identifying White interests and examining their
impact upon the Black community, this work attempts to describe
why a new White Nationalism movement has emerged, the nature of
its politics and the characteristics of the resulting policies
affecting Blacks.
TWO RECONSTRUCTIONS
This new Conservative movement has a historical
parallel in the backlash to the nineteenth-century Reconstruction
program, when Whites fostered a political revolution that
overthrew a Liberal regime which they perceived as a threat to
their national unity. This new “White Nationalist movement”
presages the return of an era most Blacks believed could never
come again, but the full force of its impact has persuaded many
even beyond the Black community that is an alarming phenomenon,
with critical consequences for American democracy. Indeed, there
is such a strong historical predicate for what has been occurring
in the past two decades that some have described the current
period as “the second Reconstruction.”
In the election of 1880, Republican James
Garfield won the presidency with no southern electoral votes. But
in 1884, in a scenario reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s election in
1992, Democratic party “centrist” Grover Cleveland gained the
White House after a campaign in which he claimed he had broken
with his sectional allies in the South; he pledged to “support
the rights of all citizens.” Four years later, with the majority
of Blacks voting for him, Republican Benjamin Harrison won a
narrow victory over Cleveland. Yet the 1888 election showed Blacks
that there was little difference between the two parties, since
Harrison calculated that his slim margin meant he needed to
strengthen his appeal to southerners, which he promptly did by
excluding Blacks from his administration.
Those who were convinced that Reconstruction
constituted an “immoral” attempt to raise the status of
inferior Blacks to that of Whites set about the political
disenfranchisements of Blacks, which had begun as early as 1880.
This was undertaken with ferocious vigor and largely completed by
1900. In many ways, the 1896 decision of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson represented the icing on the cake.
In his seminal work, The
Black Image in the White Mind, George Frederickson included a
chapter on “White Nationalism” which describes the efforts in
the mid-nineteenth century of a group of White intellectuals and
civic leaders—led by Dutch sociologist H. Hoetink—to effect
the racial purification of America and achieve a “homogeneity
that allegedly would result from the narrow localization or
complete disappearance of an ‘inferior’ and undesirable Negro
population.”2 Frederickson notes that one objective
of this group was the containment of the Black population; this
project involved antislavery activists who believed that the
geographic dispersal of Blacks would make it more difficult for
them to achieve social accommodation with Whites as well as
Conservatives who believed deeply in Black inferiority. The
group’s efforts led to such activities as agitation to stop the
expansion of slavery and the limitation of Blacks to a southern
“Black Belt” that still exists today.
Another group of nineteenth-century White
Nationalists attempted to construct “a ‘pseudo-homogeneity’
that could attained by the exclusion of the Negro from the
community of citizens.”3 Their influence generated
the idea that particular areas of the country would be reserved
for Whites, and it led to the vicious suppression of Blacks,
through such means as deportation and even sanctioned violence.
Another result of this movement, Frederickson suggests, was “the
rise of a new sense of American nationalism that had clear racial
overtones.” By the 1850s, the destiny of America had been
racialized as a White project; this helps explain the 1854 Supreme
Court decision which voided Dred Scott’s claim to citizenship on
nationalist grounds.
Against the backdrop of this movement, the
politics of the last decades of the nineteenth century could be
conceptualized as an attempt to re-invoke the White supremacy that
was temporarily shattered by the Civil War and forestall the
emergence of Blacks as a substantial civic and political force.
This was effected by a return to Black subordination through the
reinterpretation of the Constitution and the perpetuation of a
reign of terror. And it was paralleled by a series of electoral
events remarkably suggestive of the politics of the last decades
of the twentieth century.
In racial terms, the dominant intent of the
first Reconstruction was that peace between North and South would
be constructed by the convergence of the interests of Whites in
both regions with regard to “the Negro question,” effectuating
a unity that was, implicitly, of demonstrably greater priority
than the freedom of Blacks. Although radical reconstructionists
purportedly upheld the logic of the Civil War in their attempt to
construct a regime of rights that would ensure Black equality, the
greater lesson of the Civil War came to be the domination of the
state by Whites who instituted a Conservative regime that
virtually eliminated Blacks from political participation and
limited their access to national resources until the coming of New
Deal politics in the 1930s and 1940s.
Both the first and second Reconstructions
suggest the kernel of a theoretical proposition designed to answer
several questions. Among these is: What processes initiate the
kind of White Nationalist movements that have had such disastrous
consequences for Blacks? Within the context of the maintenance of
White supremacy, nationalist ideology historically took of two
forms: paternalism, whose adherents considered Blacks childlike,
or autocratic engagement, a policy based on the conception of
Blacks as beasts. Frederickson has suggested that White
paternalistic engagement with Blacks during the late nineteenth
century was accompanied by a considerable degree of Liberal
noblesse oblige, which encouraged a moderate form of engagement
and quasi-democratic forms of equality.4
These would be allowed in situations where
Blacks’ engagement with Whites was considered to be appropriate,
as in political activity, and most often this happened under the
direction of radicals within the Republican party.
By contrast, autocracy was a harsher version of
racial relations. In this formulation, individuals who held that
Blacks were “beasts” sought forms of social engagement
designed to subordinate, punish or eliminate them altogether. John
Cell describes this phenomenon vividly: “The extremists left no
room for ambiguity. In speech after speech they proclaimed their
harsh, violent, nasty views. God had placed blacks only a little
higher than the apes—and there was apparently some doubt about
that. Intending them for severity, He had marked them with His
curse. Anything that might raise blacks from their naturally
inferior status they denounced and, when in office, vetoed. As a
corollary, anything that the white man might do to defend his
supremacy was fully justified.”5
WHITE CONVERGENCE
What the two perspectives, one Liberal and one
Conservative, have in common is that they both affirm the
subordinate status of Blacks in relation to Whites as a basic
value, a paradigm that, if challenged or changed, would activate
both Liberals and Conservatives alike to seek to protect their
status and reimpose subordination upon Blacks. This paradigm is so
powerful that it has the capacity to energize Whites to invoke
common interests and come together regardless of differences of
political ideology or party.
The convergence of White political interests
also helps explain why, historically, Blacks who have been engaged
in political coalitions with one party or the other were abandoned
when historical circumstances appeared to threaten White interests
from either the Left or Right. What this seems to suggests is that
temporary coalitions between Blacks and the Republican party or
the Democratic party violated the racial order of unity among
Whites but were tolerated as long as these coalitions served a
great value, such as economic growth.
The prime example of this would be the Civil
Rights—era coalition of the 1960s between Democrats (including
some southern Democrats) and Blacks that existed so long as Blacks
were still clearly subordinate in the South and economic growth
was occurring in the rest of the country. In the late 1970s and
1980s, when Whites began to perceive that their dominant status
was threatened, White racial convergence acted to maintain the
racial hierarchy by effecting policies that began to dismantle the
civil rights protections.
The political behavior described above
classically fits that noted by Professor Clarence Y. H. Lo, who,
in his analysis of busing as a “countermovement” motivating
force, confirmed the reports of other observers such as Michael
Unseem, Gary Orfield and David Sears that there was a strong
correlation between antibusing sentiment and the perception that
Blacks were making social gains faster than Whites.6 Lo
further argued that the federal government did not operate as a
passive judge of competing interests but responded by providing
resources, legitimacy and leadership to the developing White
Conservative movement.
Such appraisals are consistent with those of
“status crystallization” theorists, who assume that class
plays a role in building alienation and, therefore, in the types
of manifestations of activity perpetrated by alienated groups.7
However, I will argue here that race also plays a role in the
process of White alienation, since it has the capacity to motivate
groups across class lines. Social psychologist Johann Galtung
suggested that culture was an important intervening variable in
disrupting the structural dimensions of status, and that the
improvement of economic and educational opportunities for Blacks
promoted conflict between Blacks and Whites.8 Thus, the
manifestation of alienated behavior may be expressed differently
according to class, with lower-income alienated groups expressing
more violent, socially aggressive behavior and higher-income
groups utilizing institutional processes aggressively.
I will also argue here that just as the first
Reconstruction was driven by a convergence of interests on the
part of a critical mass of Whites, the second Reconstruction has
replicated this convergence through a political movement led and
joined by radical Conservatives. Though public discourse neither
recognizes nor names this as a nationalist era in American
history, Faye Harrison has argued that “historicized analyses of
whiteness go against the convention of ignoring yet universalizing
whiteness as an unspoken but naturalized norm presumed to be
unaffected by racism.”9
This characteristic of “unspokenness” and
the presumption of being unaffected by race allow and promote the
reluctance of intellectuals to evaluate Whites in terms of the
same racial dynamics accorded other groups. This study seeks to
unearth the determinants of White Nationalism through an
examination of its impact on the politics of public policy where
African Americans are the target population.
THE POLICY IMPACT OF WHITE CONVERGENCE
Since the policy manifestations of White
Nationalism in the first Reconstruction were measures that opposed
Blacks as part of the process of advancing the restoration of
White power in the South and White reconciliation in the nation,
the major reason for engaging in such a study is to deepen
understanding of a growing impediment to modern Black progress. By
the end of the Plessy
era, a series of Conservative public policies were in place that
mandated racial containment, and these will be characterized here
as “policy racism.” More recently, what has become mainstream
politics also fosters the reconsolidation of White power, largely
by attempting, and in some cases succeeding, to weaken the civil
rights policy legacy that advanced the status of Blacks in
American society.
A poignant example of the racially divisive and
oppressive strains in modern public policy reside in an example
taken from a congressional debate in 1997 over public housing
legislation. In this debate, the central issue was an amendment
sponsored by Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.). Jackson wanted to
eliminate mothers with children under the age of five from the
requirement—sponsored by the Republican majority—that all
inhabitants of public housing be subject to a mandatory,
uncompensated, community service work requirement of eight hours
per month. Jackson maintained that: “Forced voluntarism under
penalty of eviction demeans residents by saying they are lazy. It
tells them that we do not trust them to take part in their own
communities, so we must force them to do so. There is no pride in
community service when it is mandated as if residents have done
something wrong.”10
Republican House members responded. Rep.
Richard Baker (R-La.) asked: “Are we invoking some sort of
slavery, as some have suggested, on these individuals? No, there
is another purpose behind this. It is to let that individual who
stayed within the walls of public housing get out into the
community and learn what skills are necessary to get a real
job.”11 Rep. Merrill Cook (R-Utah) added: “The
overwhelming majority of my constituents tell me that they are
troubled by government handouts.
We have seen time and time again that handout
programs do not work. Public housing was intended to be helping
hand toward self-sufficiency, not another handout. I urge my
colleagues to defeat any attempt to remove the work
requirement.”12 Next Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa) said:
“We have get people who are getting apartments with several
bedrooms and a kitchen. They are getting free electricity, free
heat, and the gentleman is saying they cannot work 2 hours a week.
Come on. Give me a break. That is one Oprah Winfrey show, that the
cannot find somebody to mind their kids for 2 hours within the
authority.”13
The Democrats counterattacked. Rep. Joseph
Kennedy (D-Mass.) argued:
|
[Speaking
to Rep. Jim Leach] It seems to me that it is eminently
reasonable for us to characterize the way your party acted
towards the poorest and most vulnerable as insensitive to
their needs.
I
would just point out to the gentleman that another
gentleman on your side of the aisle suggested that what
the poor in public housing do is sit around and watch
Oprah Winfrey. I believe, Mr. Chairman, that
that has racist characteristics that ought to be
dealt with by the gentleman’s side. That is a
mean-spirited comment.14 |
Next, Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) said: “I
would suggest that what this entire process is really about
scapegoating; is having the middle class and the working people
think that their problems are because of the poor, rather than
looking at what the wealthy and the powerful are doing.”15
Finally, Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) declared:
|
We
all know what is going on here. We should know what is
going on here. It is nothing different from the welfare
housing that we saw in the last Congress.
What
I am saying, Mr. Chairman, is they are going to pass a
policy here that says make the poor pay, because we know
what the poor are. We are talking minorities here. Make
the poor pay. OK? What they should be doing, if they
really thought that the people, the federal government,
ought to be getting a little bit of return on its
investment, which is what they are trying to cloak this
argument as, then why not apply it to every other federal
contract and federal program that is out there? They are
receiving taxpayers’ money. Why are they not
volunteering? Because they know and I know what we are
talking about. They’re talking about the perception out
there of the poor being minorities, and they are thinking,
they ought to go out and work, because my taxpayers back
home are sick and tired of this welfare state.16 |
The ideas expressed by proponents of the
community service requirement in this debate—with their vivid
racial stereotyping of the poor, racial scapegoating, and racist
innuendo—are commonplace in the radical Conservative political
discourse of the 1990s and beyond. The point, however, is that the
policies on which such ideas are based have had real and negative
consequences upon the socioeconomic status of a significant sector
of the Black community.
Political discourse exhibiting the dominant
public attitudes in support of the devolution of government power
has grown so pervasive that spokespersons for both major parties
have formulated and learned to speak in the new coded public
language of class and race when discussing public policy. They
value being “tough on crime” and enacting “welfare
reform.” They express support for the “the middle class” and
for “the future of our children.” They espouse “family
values” and “individual responsibility.”
How to deconstruct this language, uncover its
hidden meanings and demonstrate how it is used to define new
principles and policies for society is a subsidiary task of this
book. Its principal aim is to describe the phenomenon of White
Nationalism in the politics of public policy, which has had little
direct exposure either in the public arena or in academia.
CONCLUSION
In this work, I seek to represent aspects of
the more radical sector of the Conservative movement in national
politics, its use of a reawakened nationalist ideology and the
impact of this upon issues of interest to the Black community. It
is an attempt to understand this movement more clearly by
discussing the subject in terms of a series of broad stages: the
evolution of the White Nationalist movement and its causes; the
impact of the movement on the political culture; the movement’s
subsequent seizure of the political system; and its promulgation
of policy racism.
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Notes
1. Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram, “The Social Construction
of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy,” American
Political Science Review 87:2 (June 1993): 334. The authors
also suggest that the “social construction of target populations
has powerful influence on public officials and shapes both the
policy agenda and the actual design of policy.” They
additionally deduce that “public officials often devise
punitive, punishment-oriented policies for negatively constructed
groups,” which they say helps explain why the policy system
advantages some groups more than others.
2. George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character
and Destiny, 1817–1914
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 130.
3. Ibid., p. 133.
4. Frederickson cites Rev. Atticus Haywood, president of Emory
College in Atlanta, Georgia, as representative of many moderate
southern Whites; Black Image
in the White Mind, p. 204.
5. John W. Cell, The
Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in
South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), p. 178.
6. Clarence Y. H. Lo, “Countermovements and Conservative
Movements in the Contemporary U.S.,” Annual
Review of Sociology 8 (1982): 117.
7. Christopher Bagley, “Race Relations and Theories of Status
Consistency,” Race
(London: Institute of Race Relations, 1970), p. 267.
8. Cited in ibid., 269.
9. Faye V. Harrison, “The Persistent Power of ‘Race” in
the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism,” Annual
Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 63.
10. Congressional Record,
House, May 1, 1997, p. H2124.
11. Ibid., p. H2129.
12. Ibid., p. H2133.
13. Ibid., p. H2137.
14. Ibid., p. H2139.
15. Ibid., p. H2143.
16. Ibid., p. H2144.
Source:
White
Nationalism Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and The
Black Community • by Ronald W. Walters • Detroit: Wayne
State U. Press • © 2003
amazon.com
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posted 31 December 2005 |
