The Internet and the airwaves are full of people trying to make sense of what happened this week in Charleston, South Carolina. And one can be excused for a despairing feeling that this attempt at a “dialogue about race” will go the way of most others.
I find myself thinking of Frederick Douglass’ “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July” address, and in particular of his statement that “it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.”
But maybe I’ve had too much of thunder. Or maybe I feel, up here in New England, many miles away from a state capitol that still flies a Confederate flag, that it’s still time for light. In any case, I want to try to shed a little light on a glaring reality that we never quite seem to see clearly.
Racism is a system, much like capitalism is. It is the name for the way we organized our laws, our social structure, our traditions and our politics for centuries — for much longer, in fact, than we have been the United States of America.
Early 17th century British colonial America was a very unequal place. All kinds of differences — regional, sexual, religious, racial, ethnic, and class, to name a few — were brought over from early modern England, and they stratified the colonies in countless ways.
But in the mid-1600s, beginning in Virginia, legislatures began to emphasize racial difference more than any other. By 1660, for example, municipal authorities in Virginia were forbidden from charging a white person who killed a black person with murder. Definitionally, it just couldn’t be done.
The reasons had a lot to do with defending slavery, and that had a lot to do with imperial politics.
Slavery made tobacco’s huge role in the British imperial economy possible, and race made it easier to make slavery work. The identity of “white” — the identity for which Dylann Roof allegedly killed — was created under those circumstances.
“White” isn’t based in a geographic or national homeland, or in biology; it is the name for the class of people who benefitted from slavery. Race-based laws in colonial America took the bodies, lives, labor and land from slaves, Native Americans and others. The benefit — in money, power, citizenship — went to the class of people that were designated as “white.”
Whites now are the descendants, the beneficiaries of that system.
As a system for organizing power, racism proved to be effective and flexible. It survived the end of British rule in North America. It even survived the constitutional ban on slavery. It was transformed into Jim Crow and adapted to new political and demographic realities.
“Whiteness” could be bent — the Irish could be “non-white” and then become “white,” for example — and history books could be rewritten to accommodate those changes. And the racist system could be reinforced with terror, murder, rape and legalized violence.
None of that has anything to do with individual prejudices. Racism is a system that has been as central to American history as democracy, Christianity, and capitalism. And we have inherited it. Maybe we aren’t as conscious of our inheritance as Roof — who reportedly shared the same ideals embodied in the Confederate flag that celebrates this particular legacy — but it’s still ours.
In 2013, in a case called Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court described how it sees that inheritance. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, essentially gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because, he said, the United States “has changed,” and the VRA, which empowered the US government to combat racial barriers to voting, has been enormously successful “at redressing racial discrimination.”
Let’s assume, for the moment, that the court is right. According to that history, the civil rights movement helped the United States to reject its racist inheritance; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act helped to end Jim Crow. We now celebrate the civil rights movement; one of our only federal holidays that specifically honors one individual is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Americans have rejected racism to the point that they see the claim of racism as a profound insult, something that white Americans in any previous part of our history wouldn’t even be able to understand. Even if that history, that rosiest of scenarios, is correct, racism is still a central institutional part of our history.
An analogy: In the early Middle Ages, Europeans were no longer members of the Roman Empire, but they still used Roman roads, and Roman laws, and even built their homes from the ruins of Roman buildings. In the sunniest version of American racial politics, racism is to us what Rome was to Medieval Europeans: the ruins of the system that, until recently, defined our world — ruins that we still use in constructing our lives in a new era.
But we are not living that version of American racial politics.
The murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which came on the 193rd anniversary of the burning of that church and the lynching of its founders; McKinney, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; Ferguson, Missouri; even Rachel Dolezal — all of these headlines point to the living power of our American racial inheritance. Even the most backward of cowardly racist murderers know that. Even those who have built their lives around racist paranoia know that the system defined by American racism is still alive, even if they think it’s threatened.
We need to face that living inheritance. Just as we are the inheritors of democracy, and Constitutional law, of Washington and Lincoln and King, we are also the inheritors of the legal and political system called racism.
Some of our American inheritance is great; some — like racism — is awful. But you can’t pretend the awful stuff isn’t there — that would be cowardly and silly. Decide what you want to do with it. You can talk about it with friends and relatives. You can protest, or vote, or invest your money in different ways. But you can’t avoid it. It’s a central part of our shared life. It’s right there, like snow, or potholes.
What happened in Charleston is part of your inheritance. What do you want to do with it?
Ronald Schmidt is an associate professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine