Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (70 page)

Weeks after
Live from Death Row
appeared to a shower of reviews in May 1995, and days before Mumia’s lawyers filed an appeal for a new trial, law-and-order Pennsylvania governor Thomas Ridge, a Republican, signed Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death warrant. His execution would be August 17, 1995. Protests erupted around the world that summer for Mumia’s life and for the death of capital punishment. Among the protesters were graying activists, some of whom had screamed “Free Angela” decades ago, and younger ones, some of whom had helped to mobilize the Million Man March. But before the National Day of Protest was to take place, scheduled for August 12, Mumia was granted an indefinite stay of execution.
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At the end of that volcanic summer, the vast majority of African Americans were supportive of the doubly conscious Million Man March, doubly conscious of racist and antiracist ideas. Arguably, its most pervasively popular organizing principle was personal responsibility, the call for Black men to take more personal responsibility for their lives, their families, their neighborhoods, and their Black
nation. Many of the roughly 1 million Black men who showed up on the National Mall on October 16, 1995, showed up believing the racist idea that something was wrong with Black men and Black teens and Black boys and Black fathers and Black husbands. But many of those marchers who stood there and listened to the fifty speakers also believed the antiracist idea that there was something wrong with rampant discrimination. As Louis Farrakhan thundered at the climax of his two-and-a-half-hour oration, “The real evil in America is not white flesh or black flesh. The real evil in America is the idea that undergirds the setup of the Western world, and that idea is called white supremacy.”
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Bill Clinton did not greet the million Black men or hear their exclamations of racism’s persistence on October 16. Instead he gave a racial progress speech at the University of Texas, pleading in the heart of evangelical America for racial healing, egging on the mass evangelical crusade for racial reconciliation in 1996 and 1997. Crusading evangelicals would go on to preach that the so-dubbed problem of mutual racial hate could be solved by God bringing about mutual love. Clinton, at least, did recognize in his Texas speech that “we must clean the house of white America of racism.” But he surrounded one of the most antiracist statements of his presidency with two of the most racist statements of his presidency. Instead of relaying statistics that Whites usually suffered violence at the hands of Whites, Clinton legitimized the “roots of white fear in America” by saying that “violence for . . . white people too often has a black face.” And then he went on the defensive: “It’s not racist for whites to assert that the culture of welfare dependency, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and absent fatherhood cannot be broken by social programs unless there is first more personal responsibility.”
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Clinton officially declared himself a supporter of the racist idea of personal responsibility when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law on August 22, 1996, with the next presidential election on the horizon. The bill was a compromise between Newt Gingrich’s New Republicans and Clinton’s New Democrats. It limited federal control of welfare programs, required work for benefits, and inserted welfare time limits. Even
though programs for the poor represented only 23 percent of the non-defense budget, and had suffered 50 percent of the spending cuts over the past two years, welfare reform remained the leading domestic issue for the majority of White Americans. From Barry Goldwater’s “animal creature” to Reagan’s “welfare queen,” producers of racist ideas had done their job on non-Black Americans. Republican congressman John L. Mica of Florida held up a sign that said it all during the congressional debate on the bill: “Don’t Feed the Alligators / We post these warnings because unnatural feedings and artificial care creates dependency.”
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The same producers of racist ideas had also done their job on Black Americans, averting a march against welfare reform, and causing some African Americans to hate irresponsible, dependent, violent “niggers” as much as racist non-Blacks did. “I love black people, but I hate niggers,” jabbed a relatively unknown Black comedian, Chris Rock, on HBO’s “Bring the Pain” on June 1, 1996. The unforgettable performance began with a litany of antiracist jabs at Blacks and Whites over their reactions to the O.J. verdict and catapulted Chris Rock into the pantheon of American comedy. It marked the beginning of a revolution in Black comedy and introduced the three main comedic topics for a new generation: relationships, the racism of White people, and what was wrong with Black people. Out of “Bring the Pain,” doubly conscious Black comedy emerged as one of the most dynamic arenas of antiracist and racist ideas, with listeners laughing at, or with, the comedians.
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ANTIRACISTS SUFFERED A
crushing loss in California on election night in 1996. California voters banned affirmative action, or “preferential treatment,” in public employment, contracts, and education. Neither funding allocation policies for public colleges and K–12 schools nor standardized tests—both of which preferentially treated White, rich, and male students—were banned. The percentage of African Americans at University of California campuses began to decline.

The campaign for California’s Proposition 209 ballot initiative displayed the progression of racist ideas in their full effect: its proponents branded antiracist affirmative action as discriminatory, named
the campaign and ballot measure the “civil rights initiative,” evoked the “dream” of Martin Luther King Jr. in an advertisement, and put a Black face on the campaign, University of California regent Ward Connerly. It was a blueprint Connerly would take on the road to eliminate affirmative action in other states, but not before receiving a public rebuke from the sixty-nine-year-old Coretta Scott King. “Martin Luther King, in fact, supported the concept of affirmative action,” she said. “Those who suggest he did not support affirmative action are misrepresenting his beliefs and his life’s work.”
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On November 6, 1996, a day after passage of the proposition and the reelection of Clinton and a Republican Congress, quite possibly the most sophisticated, holistically antiracist thriller of the decade appeared in theaters. Directed by twenty-seven-year-old F. Gary Gray, who was already well known for
Friday
(1995), written by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford, and starring Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise—
Set It Off
showcased just how and why four unique Black women could be motivated by Los Angeles’s job, marital, and gender discrimination; class and sexual exploitation; and racist police violence to commit a violent crime—in their case, well-planned armed bank robberies—in an attempt to better their lives and get back at those who were trying to destroy them.
Set It Off
did what law-and-order and tough-on-crime racism refused to do: it humanized inner-city Black perpetrators of illegal acts, and in the process forced its viewers to reimagine who the real American criminals were. While Pinkett played an erudite, independent, sexually empowered heterosexual woman in all her normality among male lovers and abusers, Latifah portrayed a mighty butch lesbian in all her normality among poor Blacks. In the end, three women die, but the shrewd Pinkett escapes with the stolen money into the sunset away from American racism.

Critics and viewers fell in love with the tragedy and triumph of
Set It Off
. Even film critic Roger Ebert “was amazed how much I started to care about the characters.” If only law-and-order America, seeing the structural racism, had started to care about the real characters. But the producers of racist ideas seemed determined to make sure that never, ever happened.
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BILL CLINTON WAS
sadly mistaken about the root of the “problem of race” when he made a stunning announcement on the subject on June 14, 1997. In his commencement address at Angela Davis’s alma mater, UC San Diego, Clinton pledged to lead “the American people in a great and unprecedented conversation on race.” Racial reformers applauded Clinton for his willingness to condemn prejudice and discrimination and for his antiracist ambitions of building “the world’s first truly multiracial democracy.”
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Upward of 1 million Black women made sure to inject their ideas into the conversation, gathering in Philadelphia on October 25, 1997. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Sister Souljah, Winnie Mandela, Attallah and Ilyasah Shabazz (daughters of Malcolm X), and Dorothy Height spoke to the Million Woman March. At one point, a helicopter flew down low to drown out their words. Thousands shot up their arms, trying to almost shoo the helicopter away like a fly. It worked. “See what we can do when we work together,” intoned the passionate director of ceremonies, Brenda Burgess of Michigan.

The calls for Black unity resounded in Philadelphia as they had two years earlier among those million men in Washington, DC—as if Black people had a unity problem, as if this disunity was contributing to the plight of the race, and as if other races did not have sellouts and backstabbers. The nation’s most unified race behind a single political party was never the most politically divided race. But, as always, racist ideas never needed to account for reality.
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“Racism will not disappear by focusing on race,” House speaker Newt Gingrich argued in the wake of Clinton’s national race conversation. This reaction to Clinton’s conversation synthesized into a newly popular term: color-blind. “Color-blindness” rhetoric—the idea of solving the race problem by ignoring it—started to catch on as logical in illogical minds. “Color-blind” segregationists condemned public discussions of racism, following in the footsteps of Jim Crow and slaveholders. But these supposedly color-blind segregationists were much more advanced than their racist predecessors, announcing that anyone who engaged Clinton’s national discussion in any antiracist way was in fact racist. In his 1997 book
Liberal Racism
, journalist Jim Sleeper
argued that anyone who was not color blind—or “transracial”—was racist. In their runaway success of the same year,
America in Black & White
, Manhattan Institute Fellow Abigail Thernstrom and Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom said that “race-consciousness policies make for more race-consciousness; they carry American society backward.” “Few whites are now racists,” and what dominates race relations now is “black anger” and “white surrender,” the Thernstroms wrote, echoing the essays in
The Race Card
, an influential 1997 anthology edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Criers of racial discrimination were playing the fake “race card,” and it was winning because of liberal “white guilt.”
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All this color-blind rhetoric seemed to have its intended effect. The court of public opinion seemed to start favoring the color-blind product nearly a century after the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the product “separate but equal.” The millennium was coming, and people were still being blinded to human equality by colors.

CHAPTER 36

99.9 Percent the Same

THE COLOR-BLIND IDEAL
was reinforced by the propaganda of the arrival of American multiculturalism. “More than ever, we understand the benefits of our racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity,” Clinton said in his speech at UC San Diego. The old assimilationist ideal of all Americans, no matter their cultural heritage, adopting Euro-American culture, had indeed suffered a devastating assault in schools, and especially colleges, from the new Ethnic Studies departments, the profusion of non-White immigrants, and Americans learning their native and foreign ancestral roots. Nathan Glazer, the coauthor of a book detailing the assimilationist standard of the 1960s,
Beyond the Melting Pot
, despondently confessed that things had changed. The title of his 1997 book was
We Are All Multiculturalists Now
. The book became a punching bag for assimilationists, who had spent the decade swinging at those increasingly popular Black Studies programs and departments.
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But Glazer again got it wrong on culture. A truly multicultural nation ruled by multiculturalists would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion. It would not have suits as its standard professional attire. English would not be its standard language or be assessed by standardized tests. Ethnic Studies would not be looked upon as superfluous to educational curricula. Afrocentric scholars and other multicultural theorists, lecturing on multiple cultural perspectives, would not be looked upon as controversial. No cultural group would be directly and indirectly asked to learn and conform to any other group’s cultural norms in public in order to get ahead. A
nation of different-looking people is not automatically multicultural or diverse if most of them practice or are learning to practice the same culture. The United States was maybe a multicultural nation in homes, behind closed doors, but certainly not in public in 1997. Racists in the United States were only embracing diversity and multiculturalism in name. In practice, they were enforcing cultural standards.

And this maintenance of the status quo became apparent in the critical reviews of Angela Davis’s game-changing new book,
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
, published in 1998. It had taken years for her to transcribe the entire body of Ma Rainey’s and Bessie Smith’s available blues recordings, the material basis of her analysis. Known for her integrative analysis of gender, race, and class, Davis quietly extended the analytical factors to include sexuality and culture. She looked at lyrics in light of lesbianism and bisexuality, and she examined African cultural retentions in the blues genre. Not many Americans had expressed antiracist ideas in the five major analytic categories: gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture. So the critiques came from all five sides, especially the side of culture. The
New York Times
reviewer rebuked Davis’s cultural antiracism as “ingrained cultural nationalism,” while the
Washington Post
ridiculed her “turgid academic jargon and rigid ideology.” Apparently, scholars like Angela Davis who uncovered, studied, and articulated cultural differences in more than just name were ideologues and cultural nationalists.
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