Rip Van Negro: From the Rock of Race to Postracial Sands

For Twunch.

I remember reading a Frank Rich op-ed in the New York Times, a year or so before he retired from that position. During the campaign of then-candidate Obama, Rich had written a few pieces about the social fault line of race, describing his own segregated childhood, surveying the current scene for improvements and regression, and offering insights about the significance of Obama's campaign and opposition to it. As I recall, his take was optimistic, as he insisted that those attempting to re-entrench white supremacy were on the losing side both demographically and in terms of shifts in public opinion. In response to his column, a young white mother wrote that he was harping on an issue that had died. Her children, she exulted, would be completely unaware of race as a way of identifying people. Rich, she explained, was one of the last of his kind. If he still thought in racial terms--even anti-racist terms--he was using terminology that was already antiquated and soon to become alien.

Although I have a number of retorts that I think disable her claim, it's still one that chilled me in a way I've never been able to shake. I'm thirty-three. Is it possible that the framework and vocabulary I have used to analyze the world are already outdated? Unlike Rip Van Winkle, I didn't sleep for twenty years. I was awake the whole time! During my childhood in the 1980s, the era in which we tried to become postracial by becoming colorblind, racism was not a force I could choose to notice or blissfully ignore. How could acknowledging the force of racial hierarchy become optional while I was awake?

Remembering a Conservative Call for Reparations

This is dedicated to the holders of a particular ideology in my hometown of Cincinnati and its vanilla suburbs. 


Consider this another dispatch from the Blind Squirrel Finds Acorn files. 


I don't think I had heard of the notion of reparations before I stumbled upon the topic during high school. The unlikely source of my introduction was a 1990 op-ed piece by arch-conservative Charles Krauthammer. He was still an advocate for reparations in 2001. In a surprising departure from the beliefs of his conservative colleagues, Krauthammer did not advocate a Great National Forgetting nor instruct African-Americans simply to Get Over It. Rather, he followed principles recently rearticulated in an article on forgiveness, insisting that for grievances to be suspended, appropriate amends must be offered. I can get behind that vision of social harmony.


Here is Krauthammer in a 2001 rejoinder to David Horowitz: "There is nothing to compare with centuries of state-sponsored slavery followed by a century of state-sponsored discrimination.... Is there a way... to recognize the debt of the past without poisoning the present and future? There is. Reparations. A lump sum compensation does not, of course, make full amends. Nothing can. No one, for example, would pretend that postwar German reparations for the Holocaust made amends. But they were nonetheless extremely important. They gave both symbol and substance to atonement." 


Sounds rather like a Fox News caricature of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, does it not? Well, I assure you, it is the very same Krauthammer who bitterly opposes the Democratic Party and President Obama, the same one who lent his full-throated supported to neocons such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.

Fleshing out his program for reparations, Krauthammer goes on to suggest that something on the order of $50,000 be given to every African-American family in exchange for, well, shutting up forever about the whole effects of slavery, rape, lynching, joblessness, arson, depressed wages, baseless incarceration, and residential segregation thing. One wonders if he still feels the same way now that the "budget surplus" from which he proposed drawing the $440 billion in reparations has blown away in an Iraqi sandstorm...

I have my own reservations about some of the premises and details of the project, but I do not disagree with its basic vision of redress. However, I would imagine that most white Americans would balk at Krauthammer's proposal, even in the best of economic times. Across the broad middle of the ideological spectrum and across a variety of class positions, most would offer an alliterative slogan of Hard Work and not Handouts. At this point, many would begin to talk about an immigrant grandfather who "came to this country with nothing" but, through a disciplined work ethic and frugality, moved the family into the middle class. 


I do not dispute the existence of these Grand Fathers. But is the story of the middle class, told in aggregate, a story of self-reliant individuals who, spontaneously and simultaneously, chose to work hard and save their money? Or is the American middle-class the product of large-scale social projects? After the jump, I synthesize the work of historians to show that the middle class was the product of elite political and financial decision-makers. Were it not for these large-scale social projects, American society would have settled into something like feudalism or the oligarchies of the decolonized world.