Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (75 page)

Behind the scenes of the exploding happiness that November night and over the next few weeks was the exploding fury of hate attacks on Black people. The producers of racist ideas were working overtime to take down some of their color-blind rhetoric that had blinded consumers from seeing discrimination for a decade. They were working to put up something better: a portrait of America conveying that there was no longer any need for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies—and no longer any need to ever talk about race. “Are we now in a post-racial America? . . . Is America past racism against black people?” John McWhorter asked in
Forbes
weeks after the election. “I say the answer is yes.”
²¹

Epilogue

SOME WHITE AMERICANS
who voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election were antiracist. Others probably dubbed Obama the extraordinary Negro, or set aside their racism. If antiracist Blacks could vote for racist Democrats as the “lesser of two evils” over the past few decades, then surely racist Whites could look at the Republican ticket and vote for Obama as the “lesser of two evils.” To claim that a White Obama voter could not be racist would be as naïve (or manipulative) as assuming that a White person with Black friends could not be racist, or that a person with a dark face could not think that dark-faced people were in some way inferior. But White voters did not win the election for Obama, as the postracial headlines implied or declared. They gave him roughly the same percentage of votes (43 percent) they had given his Democratic predecessors after LBJ. Obama’s 10 percent increase in non-White voters over John Kerry in 2004 and the record turnout of young voters won him the presidency of the United States.
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But racist ideas could have easily lost the election for him. What if Obama had been a descendant of American slaves? What if he had not been biracial? What if Obama’s wife looked more like his mother? What if he had not started his lectures to Blacks on personal responsibility? What if Sarah Palin had not mobilized Democrats with her virtual Klan rallies where spectators shouted “
Kill him
”? What if the Bush Republicans had not had some of the worst approval ratings ever? What if Obama had not conducted what reportedly was the best presidential campaign in history? What if the Great Recession had not sent voters into a panic weeks before the election? Postracial theorists
hardly cared about all those forces that had to come together to elect the first Black president of the United States. But when had producers of racist ideas ever cared about reality?
²

The notion of a postracial America quickly became the new dividing line between racists and antiracists as Obama took office in 2009. University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson, speaking for antiracists, stated that the country had not yet “come close to achieving the status of ‘post-racial.’” And the evidence was everywhere. The Great Recession reduced the median annual Black household income by 11 percent, compared to 5 percent for Whites. On January 1, 2009, an Oakland transit cop killed twenty-two-year-old Oscar Grant as he lay face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. All those geneticists, Klansmen, anonymous Internet racists, and of course members of the Tea Party—which formed on February 19, 2009—and other segregationists were organizing like there was no tomorrow after the election of Obama. Between 9/11 and that fateful June day in 2015 when Dylann Roof shot to death nine Bible-studying Charlestonians inside the oldest A.M.E. church in the south, White American Nazi-type terrorists had murdered forty-eight Americans—almost twice as many as were killed by anti-American Islamic terrorists. Law enforcement agencies were looking upon these White American terrorists as more dangerous to American lives than anti-American Islamic terrorists. But these White terrorists are not on the radar of the hawks who are endlessly waging their War on Terror. After Charleston, Americans merely engaged in a symbolic debate over the flying of the Confederate flag.
³

Barack Obama had to notice this rising tidal wave of segregationism early in his presidency, years before he ever heard the name Dylann Roof. Or maybe he didn’t. Or maybe he did, and thought that to point it out would have been divisive, like Jeremiah Wright. “There probably has never been less discrimination in America than there is today,” Obama told the NAACP on July 16, 2009. “But make no mistake: The pain of discrimination is still felt in America.” On that very day, someone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the police after seeing Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to pry open the jammed front door of his home. When Obama commented that
the responding White police officer had “acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” when he acknowledged the “long history” of racial profiling, the postracialists trounced to stop Obama’s antiracism before it got out of hand. Obama’s “angry” Jeremiah Wright construction had come back to bite him, as similar statements had for Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. Du Bois before him. Obama has “over and over again” exposed himself as “a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” Tea Party darling Glenn Beck told his Fox News audience. “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
⁴

It was a remarkable turn of events. During the NAACP speech, Obama lectured about African Americans needing a “new mind-set, a new set of attitudes,” to free themselves from their “internalized sense of limitation,” and rebuked Black parents for contracting out parenting. For this litany of rebukes of millions of Black people, Glenn Beck and the postracialists did not offer a critical word. Apparently, it was fine for Obama to critique millions of Black people. But as soon as he was critical of a single White discriminator, the postracialists pounced.

Months into Obama’s presidency, the postracialists slammed down their new ground rules for race relations: Criticize millions of Black people whenever you want, as often as you want. That’s not racialism or racism or hate. You’re not even talking about race. But whenever you criticize a single White discriminator, that’s race-speak, that’s hate-speak, that’s being racist. If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date.

All these postracialists had no problem rationalizing the enduring racial disparities, the enduring socioeconomic plight of Black people though blaming Black people, on
Fox News
, in the
Wall Street Journal
, on
The Rush Limbaugh Show
, on the Supreme Court, and from the seats of the Republican Party. Defending racist policy by belittling Black folk: that had been the vocation of producers of racist ideas for nearly six centuries, since Gomes Eanes de Zurara first produced these ideas
to defend the African slave-trading of Portugal’s Prince Henry. The postracial attacks triggered counterattacks from antiracists, pointing out racial discrimination from Twitter to Facebook, from Hip Hop to Black Studies scholarship, from shows on MSNBC to Sirius XM Progress, and from periodicals like
The Nation
to
The Root
, which then triggered counterattacks from postracialists, who called these antiracists divisive and racist. Assimilationists, stuck in the middle, considered themselves the voices of reasonable moderation. They kept up the drumbeat of the ill-conceived allegory of how far the nation had come and how far it still had to go. The actual American history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism still did not suit their ideology.

Through it all, the postracialists and assimilationists failed to silence all those antiracists giving voice to racial discrimination or to make them conform. Antiracists joined the protest squatters representing the 99 percent in the “Occupy” uprising in 2011. They continue to demand reparations, one of the most notable examples being Ta-Nehisi Coates’s feature story in
The Atlantic
in June 2014. They have fought the progression of racism in the stop-and-frisk policing practices in US cities and in the Republican-engineered disenfranchising policies. Antiracists helped power the unrelenting LGBT fight for equal rights. In the midst of that struggle, Black transgender activist Janet Mock released her memoir,
Redefining Realness
. Hailed by bell hooks and Melissa Harris-Perry and an all-star lineup of other antiracist voices,
Redefining Realness
debuted on February 1, 2014, on the
New York Times
Best-Seller List. Mock’s thrilling and reflective personal quest for womanhood, identity, and love gave readers an opening into the lives and struggles and triumphs of transgender Americans, and especially Black transgender women. “Somewhere along the way, I grew weary of grasping at possible selves, just out of reach. So I put my arms down and wrapped them around me. I began healing by embracing myself through the foreboding darkness until the sunrise shone on my face.” Mock wrote in closing. “Eventually, I emerged, and surrendered to the brilliance, discovering truth, beauty, and peace that was already mine.”
⁵

Antiracists seemed to be protesting everywhere, especially in front of prisons, struggling against what Angela Davis had struggled against for four decades: the racist criminal justice system (and the prison-industrial complex). In 2010, Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander entitled her bombshell best seller
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
. She exposed racial discrimination at every stop in the criminal justice system, from lawmaking to policing practices, to who comes under suspicion, to who is arrested, prosecuted, judged guilty, and jailed. And when Black people leave those jails that are crowded with Black and Brown people, the slavery ends only so new forms of legal discrimination can begin. “A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind—discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service,” Alexander wrote. “Those labeled criminals can be denied the right to vote.”
⁶

Michelle Alexander exposed the lie of postracial America in
The New Jim Crow
. But nothing really jump-started the traveling exposition of the postracial lie better than what happened on February 26, 2012, when neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman stared down a trotting Black teen, Trayvon Martin, as if he’d stolen something in Sanford, Florida. Scared, the unarmed teen fled. Zimmerman defied a police dispatcher, chased after Trayvon, and ended the seventeen-year-old’s life. A series of events followed—Zimmerman claiming self-defense, protests, Zimmerman’s arrest, the murder case, the defense portraying Trayvon Martin as a scary thug, Zimmerman being exonerated, and finally, jurors airing their racist justifications as segregationists rejoiced over the verdict. Antiracists were upset, and assimilationists were of two minds. This emotional swing seemed to intensify with each police killing, including those of mentally ill Shereese Francis of New York, twenty-two-year-old Rekia Boyd of Chicago, and twenty-three-year-old Shantel Davis in Brooklyn, all within months of Trayvon Martin’s assassination. On March 9, 2013, two New York police officers shot sixteen-year-old Kimani Gray seven times. The violent protests that followed Gray’s death—and others—provoked another round of debates between the postracial segregationists, who
condemned the violent “thugs”; the antiracists, who explained the racist source of the violence; and the assimilationists, who condemned the violent “thugs” and pointed out the discriminatory sources of the violence.

For many antiracists, the term “thug” had become “the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays.” This was how Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman explained it in early 2014 after he was subjected to the slur. When the Stanford-educated Sherman shouted into the camera, racist Americans did not see an athlete fired up minutes after his “Immaculate Deflection” that won his team the National Football Conference Championship. They saw a “thug,” like the unarmed thugs officers were killing, and the thugs who were violently rebelling in 2013 for Kimani Gray; in 2014 for Staten Island’s Eric Garner and Ferguson’s Michael Brown; and in 2015 for Baltimore’s Freddie Gray. “Thug” was one of many new acceptable ways of calling Black people inferior or “less than.” Other widely used racist slurs and phrases included “ghetto,” “minority,” “personal responsibility,” “achievement gap,” “race card,” “reverse discrimination,” “good hair,” “from the bottom,” “no good Black . . . ,” and “you see, that’s what’s wrong with Black . . .”
⁷

Hearing the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 punched Alicia Garza in the gut. Seeking relief, she pulled out her phone at an Oakland bar. She only got more upset as she read racist messages on her Facebook newsfeed “blaming black people for our own conditions.” Garza, a domestic workers’ advocate, composed a love note for Black people, pleading with them to ensure “that black lives matter.” Her friend in Los Angeles, anti-police-brutality activist Patrisse Cullors, read Garza’s impassioned love note on Facebook and tacked a hashtag in the front. Their tech-savvy friend, immigrant rights activist Opal Tometi, came in and built the online platform, and #Black Lives Matter was born. From the minds and hearts of these three Black women—two of whom are queer—this declaration of love intuitively signified that in order to truly be antiracists, we must also oppose all of the sexism, homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice, and class bias teeming and teaming with racism to harm so
many Black lives. The antiracist declaration of the era quickly leaped from social media onto shouting signs and shouting mouths at antiracist protests across the country in 2014. These protesters rejected the racist declaration of six centuries: that Black lives don’t matter. #Black Lives Matter quickly transformed from an antiracist love declaration into an antiracist movement filled with young people operating in local BLM groups across the nation, often led by young Black women. Collectively, these activists were pressing against discrimination in all forms, in all areas of society, and from myriad vantage points. And in reaction to those who acted like Black male lives mattered the most, antiracist feminists boldly demanded of America to #Say Her Name. Say the names of Black women victims like Sandra Bland. “We want to make sure there is the broadest participation possible in this new iteration of a black freedom movement,” Garza told
USA Today
in 2015. “We have so many different experiences that are rich and complex. We need to bring all of those experiences to the table in order to achieve the solutions we desire.”
⁸