Who’s kidding who? Setting the record straight on the political ancestry of modern American racism

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Why are you blaming the Republicans so much? Don’t you know that the Democrats are the authors of Jim Crow?

This is one of the criticisms that my Tory correspondents frequently express these days when I write about race and racism, especially when it comes to pikes directed at GOP leaders over political decisions. of a racist nature, such as making it more difficult to vote, punishing protesters or denying access to health care.

It’s an interesting argument, but more for what it says about the people who speak it than for its substance.

Regarding the latter, there is no real debate on the intersecting positions that the Americas have taken by two major political parties over the past century and a half. For most of the first 100 years after the Civil War, it is undeniable that the Democratic Party and, more blatantly, its powerful southern wing was the party of racism and white supremacy.

In contrast, the Republican Party, Lincoln’s party, was, despite its myriad of racial challenges, the institution to which most black Americans rightly felt the greatest allegiance.

All of that changed, however, in the decades of the mid-20th century. President Lyndon Johnsons celebrates / infamous lamentation when signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act that he had in doing so lost the South [to Republicans] for a generation was a watershed moment in the transition, but far from the last. Black liberal Republicans and conservative racist Democrats (often referred to as Jesse-crats in North Carolina because of their loyalty to Republican Jesse Helms) have remained a part of the political scene for at least a few decades.

Today, however, the transition is over. People on the political right can pontificate whatever they want about racist gun control laws and the supposed benefits for people of color from choosing school and the segregation it inevitably brings. But when Donald, very good people on both sides, Trump is a party flag bearer, and when a state lawmaker, Rep. Larry Pittman, publicly compares Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler, while still being a member, he There is little doubt about which party the white supremacist Democrats of the Jim Crow era would feel most at home in.

When it comes to race issues, the identities and modern ancestors of the two main American parties are not seriously questioned. The most interesting discussion concerns the denial that those who cling to Democrats and Liberals engage in is the racist argument.

On the one hand, it is encouraging that many conservatives are at least voicing their opposition to racism. In a time when white supremacy and overt hatred have shown their grotesque faces in so many places, we take comfort in the fact that many Conservatives are rejecting them at least in word, if not in deed.

That said, there is a harsh and underrated truth about race in modern America whose recognition (and lack of it) increasingly serves as a dividing line in our politics. Simply put, color blindness is an illusion.

Many white Americans (and even a few people of color) like to imagine that the end of de jure segregation and the advent of seemingly racially neutral laws have somehow erased the national slate. But it is, in truth, a fantasy.

Indeed, as Ronda Taylor Bullock, executive director of Durham-based nonprofit education group WeAre convincingly explained in a recent Policy Watch interview, color blindness when it comes to race is not only impossible, it is not even useful or desirable.

Becoming a true anti-racist and anti-racist, she argues, is not something you simply claim to have accomplished or achieved in a few easy steps. On the contrary, working to repair the damage caused by centuries of racism and building real bridges of connection and community is a constant struggle for awareness and closer to a way of being.

The same is true, of course, for society as a whole. In a country where, among other things, the federal government’s official policy of redlining has intentionally deprived millions of colored households of billions and billions of dollars of family wealth for most of the past 90 years, the idea that systemic racism and its toxic legacy have been eradicated and do not need further corrective action is absurd.

The sad conclusion: Over sixty years ago, when Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond used filibuster to block voting rights legislation, few Americans had any doubts about their purpose. Today, when the party to which Thurmond has devoted the last 39 years of his life uses the exact same tactics for the exact same goal, it’s hard to imagine that the goal has somehow been made pure, no matter what. be the illusions some of Thurmond’s descendants might cling to.

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