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November 19, 2003
Book Launch at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars
White Nationalism Black Interests
Conservative Public Policy and the Black
Community
by Ronald Walters
Event Summary
Nationalism, according to Ronald Walters,
connotes a movement aimed at realigning the state with the nation.
It is a reclamation movement based on the assumption that the
concerns and interests of the government have fallen out of line
with the wishes of the people; an attempt by those who feel newly
disempowered to reestablish the primacy of their agenda. Today's
white nationalism is a right-wing movement that, far from being the
instrument of fringe groups, has taken control of the Supreme Court,
the presidency, and the Congress, thereby effectively controlling
the American political system. Ironically, its genesis lay in the
civil rights movement of the 1960s.
During the heyday of that movement, Martin Luther
King warned of the possibility of a "white backlash"
against the radical and systemic institutional shifts being
generated by the civil rights effort. In
White Nationalism Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community,
Ronald Walters suggests that the Reagan administration was the first
one to reflect that backlash. An explicit endorsement of the Reagan
campaign by the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 was rejected by the Reagan camp
but accepted in 1984, a shift that Walters points to as both a
disturbing testament to the state of race relations in America in
the mid-1980s and indicative of the shift that took place between
1980 and 1984.
The negative attitude toward the black community
fit the larger conservative agenda of reduction of funding for
social service programs, the benefits of which were seen as aiding
the black community disproportionately. Walters believes that the
concomitant rise in the drug trade, violence and accusations of
police brutality in the 1980s can be traced to a sense of
desperation on the part of the black community at the erosion of
social services that had been taken for granted.
Walters draws connections between the shift to
conservatism and the 1994 crime statute (Violent Crime Control and
Law Enforcement Act) and 1996 welfare reform legislation (Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) signed into
law by President Clinton. These substantive cutbacks to entitlement
programs, he suggests, illustrate the extent to which the
neo-conservative agenda permeated the actions of even a liberal
administration.
This change, however, may itself be undergoing a
transformation. Walters views Clinton's "third way" for
the Democratic Party as less of a substantive shift than a tactical
one, aimed at political victories rather than the achievement of
particular public policy goals. Walters has recently observed a
shift in the party back to substantive goals and an attempt to
return to the roots of post-World War II Democratic ideology.
Finally, Walters argued that, contrary to
suggestions made by analysts such as Carol Swain (The New White
Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration), the best
way to combat the pressures of white nationalism is to create more
rather than fewer opportunities for the mobility of racial
minorities. To agree to the elimination of affirmative action
programs, he says, is to surrender the possibility that this country
could ever look different from the way it does now.
Daryl Fears, the race and ethnicity correspondent
for the Washington Post, remarked on the importance of
Walters' work as a comprehensive intellectual exploration of the way
the issue of race has shifted America public opinion to the right.
He commented on what he sees as an attempt by white nationalists to
create a new black intellectual cohort that will legitimize
conservative points of view in the black community, Fears applauded
the self-directed and honest perspective espoused in Walters' work.
White nationalists have also managed to criminalize the black
community in the white American mind, he asserted, thereby
exacerbating the punitive nature of the criminal justice system and
racializing discussions of public safety.
Philippa Strum, Director of U.S. Studies
202-691-4129 Published by Wayne State University Press /
The Leonard N. Simons Building / 4809 Woodward Avenue / Detroit, Michigan
48201-1309 / http://wsupress.wayne.edu
/ (313) 577-6077 / 313-577-6131 Fax / Contact: Brandon Kelley / b.kelly@wayne.edu
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updated 29 March 2008 |
