Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (68 page)

Although she was in the market for a new party, Davis did not join the Democratic Party, or rather, the newest force in US politics, the New Democrats. This group was espousing liberal fiscal policies but accepting Republican-style toughness on welfare and crime. A dazzling, well-spoken, and well-calculating Arkansas governor was now billing himself as the ultimate New Democrat. On January 24, 1992, weeks before the start of the Democratic primaries, Bill Clinton traveled back to Arkansas. The country had gone through Nixon’s law and order, Reagan’s welfare queens, and Bush’s Willie Horton—and now Clinton made the execution of a mentally impaired Black man, Ricky Ray Rector, into a campaign spectacle to secure racist votes. “I can be nicked a lot,” Clinton told reporters afterward, “but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”
²⁰

By the time an all-White jury acquitted the four LAPD officers on April 29, 1992, for the Rodney King beating, Clinton had practically run away with the Democratic nomination. The millions of viewers of the beating were told that those officers had done nothing wrong. With justice denied them in the courts, Black and Brown residents rushed to claim justice in the Los Angeles streets. They had reached their own verdict: the criminal justice system, local business owners, and Reagan-Bush economic policies were guilty as charged of robbing the poor of livelihoods and assaulting them with the deadly weapon of racism. On April 30, 1992, Bill Cosby pleaded with the rebels to stop the violence and watch the final episode of
The Cosby Show
. Rodney King himself tearfully pleaded the next day, “Can we all get along?” It would take 20,000 troops to quell the six-day uprising and restore the order of racism and poverty in Los Angeles.
²¹

Open-minded Americans seeking to understand the racist sources of rebellion and the progression of racism read Andrew Hacker’s
New York Times
1992 best seller,
Two Nations: Black & White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
, and Derrick Bell’s
Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
—or, two years later, Cornel West’s
Race Matters
. Or they
entered theaters to watch Spike Lee’s best-ever joint, a film Roger Ebert rated as the top film of 1992. In the opening scene of
Malcolm X
, Lee showed the beating of Rodney King and the burning of the American flag.
²²

“If you call it a riot it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason,” argued South Central LA’s new antiracist congresswoman, the walking powerhouse Maxine Waters. The rebellion, she said, “was [a] somewhat understandable, if not acceptable[,] . . . spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice.” To Vice President Dan Quayle, however, the rebels were not rebelling from economic poverty, but a “poverty of values.” The New Democrat Bill Clinton blamed both political parties for failing urban America before blasting the “savage behavior” of “lawless vandals” who “do not share our values,” whose “children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without families, without neighborhood, without church, without support.” On Clinton’s racist note, Columbia University researchers began a five-year research study of
only
Black and Latino boys in New York to search for a connection between genetics and bad parenting and violence. (They did not find any connection.)
²³

About a month after the LA uprising, Bill Clinton took his campaign to the national conference of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Though Jackson was widely unpopular among those racist Whites whom Clinton was trying to attract to the New Democrats, when Jackson invited Hip Hop artist Sister Souljah to address the conference, the Clinton team saw its political opportunity. The twenty-eight-year-old Bronx poverty native had just released
360 Degrees of Power
, an antiracist album so provocative that it made Lee’s films and Ice Cube’s albums seem cautious. White Americans were still raging over her defense of the LA rebellion in the
Washington Post
: “I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” It was clipped and circulated, but few racist Americans heard or understood—or wanted to understand—her point: she was critiquing the racist idea of occasional Black-on-White deaths mattering more to the government than Black people killing Black people every day.
²⁴

On June 13, 1992, Clinton took the podium at the Rainbow Coalition conference. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Clinton volleyed at Sister Souljah’s post-rebellion comments. This dismissive assimilationist maneuver of equating antiracists with segregationists, this planned political stunt, thrilled racist voters nearly as much as Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton gained a lead in the polls that he never lost.
²⁵

By the 1993 Christmas season, rappers were hearing criticism from all sides of the racist rainbow, not just from Bill Clinton. Sixty-six-year-old civil rights veteran C. Delores Tucker and her National Political Congress of Black Women took the media portrayals debate to a new racist level in their strong campaign to ban “Gangsta rap.” Gangsta rap was not only making Black people look bad before Whites and reinforcing their racist ideas, she said. Gangsta rap lyrics and music videos were literally harming Black people, making them more violent, more sexual, more sexist, more criminal, and more materialistic (here she was sounding a sensational chord that would be replayed years later in response to Black reality shows). In short, Gangsta rap was making its urban Black listeners inferior (to say nothing of its greater number of suburban White listeners). It was a curious time for this well-meaning campaign, and not just because Queen Latifah had released her Grammy Award–winning feminist anthem “U.N.I.T.Y.,” which headlocked and shouted at men, “Who you callin’ a bitch?!” Political scientist Charles Murray was in the midst of reproducing racist ideas for the upcoming 1994 midterm elections, falsely connecting the “welfare system” to the rise in “illegitimacy” that, as he put it in the
Wall Street Journal
on October 29, “has now reached 68% of births to [single] black women.” He repeated the claim on television shows in the final weeks of 1993.
²⁶

C. Delores Tucker could have campaigned against the anti-welfare ravings of Charles Murray, which were much more materially and socially devastating to poor Black people—especially women—than the lyrics of Gangsta rap. Instead, she became the dartboard for Hip Hop artists, especially the twenty-two-year-old new king of Gangsta
rap, the son of Black Panthers, Tupac Shakur. In 1993, Tupac encouraged his fans to “Keep Ya Head Up,” and connected to them with rhymes such as, “I’m tryin to make a dollar out of fifteen cents / It’s hard to be legit and still pay tha rent.”
²⁷

While Tucker remained focused on the scourge of Gangsta rap, Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian Evelyn Hammonds mobilized to defend against the defamation of Black womanhood. More than 2,000 Black female scholars from all across the country made their way to MIT’s campus on January 13, 1994, for “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name.” It was the first-ever national conference of Black women scholars, whose academic lives and scholarship had been routinely cast aside by gender racism. In the cold of the Boston-area winter, these women came blazing about the public dishonor of Black welfare mothers, of Anita Hill, of Sister Souljah, of three of Clinton’s failed appointments (Johnetta Cole, Lani Guinier, and Joyce-lyn Elders): of the Black woman. Some of the attendees had signed the
Times
advertisement defending Anita Hill in November 1991.

Angela Davis was honored as the conference’s closing keynote speaker. She was certainly the nation’s most famous African American woman academic. But more importantly, she had consistently, prominently, and unapologetically defended Black women over the course of her career, including those Black women that even some Black women did not want to defend. She had been arguably America’s staunchest antiracist voice over the past two decades, unwavering in her search for antiracist explanations when others took the easier and racist way out of Black blame. Davis had looked into the eyes and minds and experiences of those young incarcerated Black and Brown women during her imprisonment in New York in 1970, and she had never stopped looking into their lives and defending them. Her career embodied the conference’s title, like the careers of so many of those accomplished intellectuals who listened that day to her speech.

Davis opened her address by taking her audience back to the origins of the conference title, “Defending Our Name.” She took them back to the moral policing of Black clubwomen in the 1890s, which, like the campaigns today “against teenage pregnancy,” denied “sexual
autonomy in young black women.” Davis admonished the “contemporary law and order discourse” that was “legitimized” by both political parties and all the races. Black politicians were sponsoring “a deleterious anti-crime bill,” and Black people were “increasingly calling for more police and more prisons,” unaware that while African Americans constituted 12 percent of the drug users, they constituted more than 36 percent of the drug arrests. Davis called for her sisters to envision “a new abolitionism” and “institutions other than prisons to address the social problems that lead to imprisonment.”
²⁸

Ten days later, in his first State of the Union Address, President Clinton called for the very opposite of “a new abolitionism.” Congress, he said, should “set aside partisan differences and pass a strong, smart, tough crime bill.” The president endorsed a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law, bringing on wild applause from both Democrats and Republicans. Heeding Clinton’s urging, Republicans and New Democrats sent him a $30 billion crime bill for his signature in August 1994. New Democrats hailed the bill as a victory for being “able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.” The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in US history, created dozens of new federal capital crimes, instituted life sentences for certain three-times offenders, and provided billions for the expansion of police forces and prisons—and the net effect would be the largest increase of the prison population in US history, mostly on nonviolent drug offenses. Clinton fulfilled his campaign vow that no Republican would be tougher on crime than him—and crime in America was colored Black. As Tupac Shakur rhymed in “Changes,” “Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” (About two decades later, Hillary Clinton—in the thicket of a run for the White House—renounced the effects of her husband’s signature anticrime bill, calling for the “end of the era of mass incarceration”).
²⁹

Just as the discourse on the overblown welfare problem primarily defamed Black women, the discourse on the overblown crime problem in 1994 primarily defamed Black men. Media critic Earl Ofari Hutchinson passionately rebuked the defamers in
The Assassination of the Black Male Image
, his 1994 scorcher. The Queens-born rapper Nas released “One Love,” a composition of letters to incarcerated friends, on his debut album,
Illmatic
, an instant classic, as revered that year—and in history—as “Juicy,” the debut single of the Brooklyn-born Biggie Smalls. In Biggie’s music video, one lyric is sung over the sight of a Black male behind bars: “Considered a fool ’cause I dropped out of high school / Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood / And it’s still all good.”
³⁰

Biggie Smalls had no idea he had released his debut single on the eve of the most spirited academic debate in recent history on whether Black people were natural or nurtured fools. It was an academic debate that had serious political repercussions for Clinton’s tough-on-Blacks New Democrats and the newest force in American politics, which pledged to be even tougher.

CHAPTER 35

New Republicans

BY THE TIME
Biggie Small’s “Juicy” was released in 1994, a growing number of academics was accepting the truth that “intelligence” was so transient, so multifaceted, so relative, that no one could accurately measure it without being biased in some form or fashion. And these revelations were threatening the very foundation of racist ideas in education (as well as sexist and elitist ideas in education). These revelations were endangering the racist perceptions of the historically White schools and colleges as the most intelligent atmospheres; the contrived achievement gap (and actual funding gap); the privileged pipelines for Whites into the best-funded schools, colleges, jobs, and economic lives; and the standardized testing that kept those pipelines mostly White. Harvard experimental psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray watched the growth of these endangering ideas in the 1980s and early 1990s. In response, they published
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
, a landmark book that gave standardized tests—and the racist ideas underpinning them—a new lease on life.

In the first sentence, Herrnstein and Murray took aim at the spreading realization that general intelligence did not exist, and as such, could not vary from human to human in a form that could be measured on a single weighted scale, such as a standardized test. “That the word
intelligence
describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human,” Herrnstein and Murray wrote
at the beginning of their Introduction. They went on to dismiss as “radical” and “naïve” those antiracists who rejected standardized test scores as indicators of intelligence and thus the existence of the racial achievement gap. For Hernnstein and Murray, that left two reasonable “alternatives”: “(1) the cognitive difference between blacks and whites is genetic” (as segregationists argued); “or (2) the cognitive difference between blacks and whites is environment” (as assimilationists argued). Actually, Hernnstein and Murray reasoned, “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.” They claimed that “cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40 percent and no more than 80 percent.”