Bending the Moral Universe

On the Wall

When I was in college, politics was “my thing”.  I was involved in student politics, local politics, and even worked for the 1976 Jimmy Carter Campaign as a paid (not much) staff member.  Pasted up on my wall were different sayings to remind me of why I wanted to be in politics. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, and “I dream things that never were and say, why not?” were prominent.

But there were also phrases to remind me what was bad about American politics.  Remember, this was in 1974-75, only ten years after the Civil Rights Act was passed.  Nixon resigned the month I started college, and the Vietnam War was still going on, though “winding down”.  And a power in Southern Democratic politics was the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace.

Wallace

It’s easy to look back on Wallace and see him as the racist he was.  But in the early 1970’s, Wallace was still important, still a Governor, and had the sympathy of many as a candidate paralyzed in an assassination attempt.  Wallace had “smoothed the edges” of his racist rhetoric, trying to sound like a “populist”.  But like the proverbial leopard, he hadn’t changed his spots.  So I made sure George Wallace’s most famous phrase was on my wall. 

When he first won the Alabama Governorship in 1962, Wallace was sworn in on the State Capitol portico, intentionally standing on the same spot (marked with a star) where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederacy.  And Wallace’s speech that day was one that Davis himself might have delivered.

“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

The “Seventies” might have changed Wallace into a more polished “media figure”, but he still was the man of 1962, and of 1963 when he stood in the “Schoolhouse Door” of Alabama University to prevent integration.

Dog Whistles

Racism  has smoothed its language.  No one is talking about segregation as a “good thing” anymore.  But Racism is a constant of American political life.  It has been for one-hundred and fifty six years, since the end of the Civil War.  In my youth, racism was more “obvious”, with physical segregation the law in many states.  My parents took trips to see the horse farms in Kentucky, and as we stopped for gas, there were “White” and “Colored” restrooms.  It isn’t “ancient” history – it is in my memory (though some of the students I see as a substitute might equate me and the word ancient).  

In the seventies it was no longer segregation.  The new term was “busing”.  The threat of “busing” students to integrate schools brought a new reality of racism to the North.  And it built the “suburbs”, as white folks fled the cities in order to keep their children from integrated schools.  The “threat” of busing pretty much ended when the Supreme Court ruled that while school districts needed to work towards integration, the Courts couldn’t force “cross district” busing.  So the “suburbs” were safe with their separate districts.  And politicians used busing as a cudgel, to threaten the community, and gain votes.  Underlying the term, like segregation, was racism.

Then in the eighties and nineties the cry was “affirmative action”.  How dare a person of color with fewer opportunities get some “advantage” over those that always had privilege.  We still hear that “dog whistle” today.  A reasonable accommodation to hundreds of years of discrimination has become a “battle cry” of victimhood for some white folk.  Their “whiteness” put them at advantage throughout US History, now when the tables are tweaked just a little, they cry with “righteous outrage” about the unfairness of things.

Heritage

In the early 2000’s the new term was “heritage”.  Preserving “our” heritage was a codeword for keeping the advantages that “whiteness” had always allowed.  Heritage was a carefully preserved and protected story of America that “white-washed” all of the hateful actions towards people of color and indigenous natives.  It was an America where slaves were freed by Lincoln, and then again by Lyndon Johnson.  The intervening century of discrimination wasn’t discussed.  

It was a land where sturdy pioneers went out into the wilderness and wrested a world of agricultural industry from empty fields.  It didn’t talk about the folks that lived in those fields before, or the culture that was destroyed so that the wheat could grow and the cattle graze.  Even the buffalo had to be eliminated – to, as General Phil Sheridan put it, “destroy the Indian commissary, and make the plains safe for the speckled cattle”.  American heritage didn’t talk much about that.

Critical Nonsense

Racism was supposed to “die out” in the new millennium.  We are a nation that will soon have no majority race, a nation that will be “majority-minority”.  And still the appeal to white voters is there, the “dog whistle” so high pitched that only white people can hear it.  This year, that’s being called “Critical Race Theory”.  

It doesn’t matter that “Critical Race Theory” really is an esoteric graduate level study of American law and procedure.  Critical Race Theory now is incorrectly applied as a watchword that covers all kinds of diversity training, and the rooting out of the more blatant racism of our past.  The words are used to evoke the same racism that “heritage” and “affirmative action” and “busing” and “desegregation” did in our past.  

The Moral Universe

It’s not really a “dog whistle”.  The incorrect use of the term Critical Race Theory has become a national clarion call for those white folks who are fighting their own inevitable minority-ness.  They are losing their privileged status, and some are kicking and screaming about it every step of the way.  And much like George Wallace, politicians from Senators to school board members are taking advantage of their discomfort, and appealing to their basest hatreds.

A phrase that was not on my wall at college, but should have been, is by Martin Luther King;  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”   Time will cure America.  But like any disease, the sooner you start curing the illness, the sooner you can get better.  Right now, we are letting the sickness spread.  That IS our heritage, but it should not be and cannot be our future.  

We need to do some bending to make America just.