“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” W.E.B. DuBois wrote that sentence in 1903, over a century ago. The 20th Century has come and gone…but the color-line has stayed right where it’s been since 1619. And it’s stayed the same problem.
In case you missed it, last week, the Supreme Court gutted one of the key provision of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to Southern states disenfranchising their Black populations. Which they did with a speed that we are always told government can’t achieve. In fact, the last two years have seen parts of the government move with a speed and recklessness that progressives have been told over and over that the government isn’t capable of. Thousands of federal officers were deployed across the country with a sweeping mandate; a federal “department” that didn’t exist was created by executive fiat and given the power to cancel contracts, fire federal employees and contractors, change the terms of agreements without any oversight; multiple military missions were launched without even a pretense of justification (besides “The President Said So”) and, again, without any meaningful oversight from any other branch of the government; two other federal departments, mandated by law, have been gutted and had decades of rules and regulations swiped away; several federal officials have been found, repeatedly, in breach of court orders, but none have been prosecuted or even strongly questioned; the Supreme Court has overruled lower courts without issuing any kind of opinion or guidance, in addition to reversing decisions it made three years ago.
The gears of government have been greased and are spinning madly. Not in service of delivering healthcare, affordable housing, lower inflation, better education. Nope, all of that has been in service of one thing: white supremacy.
At this point it’s not worth it sugarcoat anything. This administration is a white supremacist organization backed with the muscle of the federal government. Its whole and only purpose is to roll back any and all gains made by oppressed and minoritized people in the last hundred years. It’s always been obvious, but, particularly during the second Trump administration, it’s now brazen, open and unapologetic.
And let’s be clear about this: white supremacy isn’t even really about ALL people deemed “white” by this power structure. It is about the power structure itself. It’s about an economy that runs on a large underclass of labor that funnels its value up to a small class of owners and oligarchs. Black and White are more terms of power than anything descriptive. As Tony Kushner’s Roy Cohn says, homosexuals are people who can’t get an anti-discrimination bill through city council. He is a straight man who fucks boys.
But race, the construction of it, its entire scaffolding is inseparable from this power structure. A lot of folks are very happy to get out there and start shouting “no war but class war” when people start talking about racism. But that is an incomplete formulation. In some ways, there is no race but race war. And only one side is waging it.
This is not the first time we’ve gone down this very particular river. As many, many, far smarter than people have pointed out, what we’re seeing is the same thing that happened after the Civil War when Reconstruction was dismantled and segregation was instituted. I know most people call it Jim Crow and that is accurate, but I think it’s misleading. When people hear Jim Crow, they picture Southern sheriffs, sharecroppers, they hear the delicate strains of Dixie. But they don’t think about sundown towns in Connecticut, about how the Green Book covered not just the South, about Anti-Chinese laws in California, about Texas independence, which was about throwing off the “illegal” dominance of Mexico. Segregation was the law of the land, all over, until the Civil Rights Movement.
Which, I remind you, was just about 80 years ago. We have had just one president born after Jackie Robinson broke the color line, after Brown v The Board of Education. Ruby Bridges has a TikTok account. No one wants to talk too much about it, but those racist grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, a lot of them were born into a world where Black people and other people of color were legally oppressed. Whether they admit or not, that shaped their entire world. And, again whether they admit it or not, that’s the glorious past that they want to return. A time when certain people knew their place.
What we’re seeing across the country is two-fold. On one hand, it’s just a return to form. The Black vote was suppressed far longer than it was allowed. There’s a gravity to that system that is pulling the country back, an undercurrent that was never properly dammed up, eating away at the foundations of a better, fairer society. That foundation was going to crumble sooner or later and now is the later.
On the other hand, it’s like an allergic reaction. Or like an autoimmune disease. The body is attacking itself, mistaking itself for a foreign body. This is not the same country we were in 1865, not the same country we were in 1903, not the same country we were in 1947. We’re not even the same country we were in 2008. Liberals used to say “demographics is destiny.” At least until 2016, when the Obama coalition was supposed to deliver the first female president. A little Russian chicanery, a lot of prejudice and misogyny and that didn’t happen. And we’ve been dealing with the consequences ever since.
We even came to the same river, the same crossing, and did the same goddamn thing. And those same people, the same people who called Hillary Clinton a hawk and Kamala Harris a cop are lining up to do the same to whoever becomes the Democratic nominee in 2028. I’m watching them do the same thing to Xavier Becerra here in the CA governor primary. The same playbook and it works every time.
Because that foundation of racism, prejudice and misogyny runs deep. And we’ve never excavated. Never blocked it up. The thing that comes into my head at least once a day lately is that John Brown was hung for treason after Harpers Ferry but Robert E. Lee went home after Appomattox. That tells everything about who really matters in this country.
I’m a big fan of The West Wing. There’s an episode in the second season, one of their greatest episodes, titled “11 People.” The subplot of that episode is the show’s token conversative voice arguing against the Equal Rights Amendment and finally saying that she hates being told that she’s “special” because of her gender and that the words of the founders should be enough. That’s allowed to stand as the final word on the argument and that’s always enraged me. Because the response is: the founders excluded you. They didn’t forget about you. They didn’t assume it would be okay. They left you out on purpose because they didn’t think you had or needed rights. We need the Equal Rights Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights amendments because inequality was built into the system and because the ideas that fostered it are still alive and well and just waiting for their opportunity.
Nothing says that more that the speed with which the Confederate states rushed to wipe out their majority Black districts. Nothing says it more than the political establishment (such as it is) that publicly worried about the people of Virginia voting to eliminate their Republican congressional seats but meet what Alabama, Mississippi and other states did without the approval of their voters with a “well, that’s how the cookie crumbles” shrug. Oppression is the normal state of affairs. Forget the saying “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” This is “when you’re used to oppressing people, fairness feels evil.” This isn’t passive. It’s active.
So the big question is…now what? Do we let the riptide pull us back to the most immoral, ugly and truly evil times in this country’s past? Do we keep pushing, against the angry flow of history, to reach the other side? Or do we hope that the best we can do is dogpaddle and stay here, neither drowning nor swimming?
I honestly don’t know. I do know that, no matter what, we have to face what’s actually pulling us down in order to do anything about it. This river is angry, it’s cruel, it’s determined and it is pulling us down. It is both Scylla and Charybdis. It’s a sharktopus. We’re gonna need all hands on deck to fight it.