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.

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Dr. Ronald Walters is internationally known for his expertise on the issues of African American leadership and politics, his writing and his media savvy. Walters carries three major titles. He is director of the African American Leadership Institute and Scholar Practitioner Program, Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and professor in government and politics at the University of Maryland. For the 2000 presidential election season, Walters also served as senior correspondent for the National Newspaper Publishers Association and political analyst for Black Entertainment Television's Lead Story. Walters is a frequent guest on local and major media as an analyst of African American politics. He has appeared on such shows as CNN's Crossfire and The Jesse Jackson Show, Lead Story (BET), CBS News Nightline, NBC Today Show, C-Span, public television shows such as the Jim Lehrer News Hour and Think Tank, Evening Exchange, radio shows such as All Things Considered (NPR), Living Room (Pacifica), and many others. Dr. Walters also writes a weekly opinion column for newspapers and Web sites.

Dr. Walters also helped develop the intellectual framework of the Congressional Black Caucus in the 1970s. Some of his political ideas, such as comprehensive health care and a proposed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, were viewed as radical. A quarter-century later, they are part of the intellectual mainstream. . . . Dr. Walters had recently edited a book about D.C. politics, Democratic Destiny and the District of Columbia and was at work on a book about Obama at the time of his death. In an essay in January, Dr. Walters defended Obama's record in the face of criticism from the left and the right.—WashingtonPost

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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created By Charles C. Mann I’m a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that it’s anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, I’m proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, “globalized” entity. Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose “southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.

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The Heart of Whiteness By Robert Jensen The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have is the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know — when we are honest with ourselves — that we did not get where we are by merit alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact. A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have — literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more just and equitable.—Robert Jensen

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Democratic Destiny and the District of Columbia Federal Politics and Public Policy Edited by Ronald W. Walters Washington, D.C., is among the most known and least understood cities in the world.  A collection of emerging scholars and activists have produced a rare volume exploring the nation’s capital, or as some describe it, the nation’s “last colony.”  Michael Fauntroy discusses the Home Rule Charter; Toni-Michelle Travis presents chapters on mayors Walter Washington and Sharon Pratt Kelley; Wilmer Leon III writes about Mayor Marion Barry, Jr.; Daryl Harris writes on Mayor Tony Williams; ReShone Moore and Darwin Fishman analyze the city’s educational system, Kevin Glasper presents a chapter on crime; Angelyn Flowers discusses the dynamics of poverty; William Jones analyzes housing policy and Jared A. Ball writes on the impact of the city’s media environment.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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update 7 February 2012