Amid the racist darkness of the 1930s — an era when bigotry against African-Americans may have been worse than under slavery, and when the vast majority of white Americans collaborated in their systematic subjugation — W.E.B. Du Bois kept alive the memory of another day and another social order. “The unending tragedy of Reconstruction,” wrote the legendary black intellectual, “is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and world-wide implications … This problem involved the very foundations of American democracy, both political and economic.”
These words not only serve as the epigraph to Columbia University historian Eric Foner’s new book “Forever Free,” they are the clarion call Foner has spent his whole career answering. Foner may not possess the pop-culture appeal of Harvard professor Howard Zinn, but he is without doubt the other important radical historian of the American academy. If Zinn’s specialty is the grand, sweeping generalization — the idea, more or less, that everything you think you know about American history is wrong — Foner’s work has remained tightly focused on the contentious idea of freedom, that amorphous concept that has meant so many different things to so many Americans. (Among the titles of his 13 books are “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” “Nothing but Freedom,” “Freedom’s Lawmakers,” “The Story of American Freedom,” “Give Me Liberty!” and now “Forever Free.”)
Foner’s field of special expertise is what might be called without exaggeration the crucible of American freedom: the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves and the ambiguous, myth-shrouded period that followed known as Reconstruction. He never puts it this directly, either in this new, somewhat compressed popular history or in his 1988 magnum opus, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877,” but he sees Reconstruction, with all its contradictions and unrealized possibilities, as the key to all of American history.
Given the many thousands of words Foner has already devoted to the topic of Reconstruction, the existence of “Forever Free” requires a little explanation. It was originally intended to be the companion volume to a television series that has yet to be produced; the residue of that project can be seen in Joshua Brown’s interpolated “visual essays,” which explore the changing representations of African-Americans and race relations throughout the period. To avid readers of history, there isn’t much here that’s dramatically new, but as a cogent and gripping account aimed at a wide audience, “Forever Free” fills a valuable niche.
More than that, this stripped-down narrative makes the long-term resonances and contemporary significance of Reconstruction more apparent than ever. One should be cautious about drawing parallels between the vastly different societies of America in 1865 and America in 2005 (and Foner never does so directly). But in both cases, we see a society so sharply divided along racial and cultural lines that it encompasses opposing and indeed incompatible worldviews. Undoubtedly it’s simplistic to reduce the now trite “red-vs.-blue” division of the 21st century to an extended Civil War hangover, but it’s not completely misguided either.
The age of emancipation and Reconstruction saw an explosive collision between federal and state power, and between Congress and the White House. It saw the federal government intervene in local affairs to serve as the protector of a persecuted minority group’s civil rights, and saw local regimes of low taxation and limited government used as a smokescreen for reestablishing white supremacy and traditional oligarchy. Along the way, it remade the landscape of electoral politics, shaping both major political parties into recognizable precursors of their modern selves. And as Du Bois tried to remind the 20th century, it asked still-unanswered questions about whether freedom for African-Americans — or any other Americans — signified more than the freedom to sell their labor rather than have it beaten out of them.
Whatever else it was, the period of a dozen or so years after the Civil War was one of incredible political drama, unlike anything else in our history. Four million newly minted United States citizens, who had been other men’s chattel months earlier, were thrust into the historical and political limelight. In alliance with both the “radical Republicans” of the North and a surprising array of Southern whites, they tried to build a biracial democracy on the ruins of a slave society. The legacy of this revolutionary experiment — more revolutionary than any social change ever effected in the U.S., before or after — has been debated ever since. Indeed, it was debated extensively at the time, and its participants were aware that it cast the notion of American freedom into sharp relief. In the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the former slaves were to be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” But what did that mean?
Leaving aside the question of how to understand Reconstruction, its basic facts are astonishing enough. After the surrender of the Confederacy and the assassination of Lincoln, the Republican majority in Congress was (at least briefly) determined to crush the spirit of Southern rebellion and provide full citizenship to the freed slaves. Waging a ferocious battle against President Andrew Johnson (whose vision of Southern Reconstruction was, to put it gently, less ambitious), Congress drove through the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, enshrining the concept of universal equality before the law in that document for the first time. That extraordinary Washington conflict reached its climax in 1868, when Johnson was impeached by the House and avoided removal from office by a single vote in the Senate.
Whether newly emancipated or free-born, African-Americans flooded into the political and civic life of the Reconstruction South with prodigious enthusiasm. Many of the social organizations that had persisted underground under slavery, such as the black churches, black schools and black social organizations, became legitimate for the first time. (A fair number of these Reconstruction institutions, such as the traditional black colleges and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, remain prominent in African-American life today.) Within a few years, a middle class of black preachers, doctors and other professionals had begun to emerge, partly because of existing disparities in wealth and education between free blacks, rural plantation slaves and urban domestic slaves (some of whom had led relatively privileged lives).
These are the most energizing sections of Foner’s propulsive narrative: Even white Southerners with openly racist attitudes and allegiances to the defeated aristocracy were struck by black Americans’ appetite for literacy, political discourse and civic engagement after emancipation. “You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the Negroes of the South,” wrote an Alabama plantation overseer in 1867. “They are perfectly wild.”
Upward of 2,000 African-Americans were elected or appointed to office across the South before Reconstruction had run its course, a number not matched for more than a century afterward. These included the first two black U.S. senators, Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both of Mississippi (with Revels actually taking the Senate seat that had been abandoned by Jefferson Davis), and the wonderfully named Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, who served briefly as governor of Louisiana amid the chaos of that state’s 1872 gubernatorial election. Far more important were the many hundreds of black men who served as sheriffs, magistrates, constables, county supervisors and other local officials across the region; it was their prevalence that made hostile whites believe that they were living through “a terrifying social and political revolution,” or as hostile later historians would put it, a botched experiment in “Negro rule.”
In fact, high office was almost universally reserved for whites throughout Reconstruction, and while several states had black electoral majorities or near-majorities, only South Carolina ever had a black majority in its state Legislature. That state’s African-Americans, in fact, consistently called for the most radical and sweeping reforms during Reconstruction (including the confiscation and redistribution of plantation land), which may be why they had to endure an especially repressive segregationist regime in later years. Across the South, the Republican Party remained an uneasy coalition between freed slaves, free-born blacks, Northern “carpetbaggers” and Southern white “scalawags,” which mostly meant small farmers and other less affluent whites who had little attachment to the antebellum slave economy.
Reconstruction governments were often awkward and plagued with problems that would draw the eager attention of later scholars. But there can be no doubt, Foner insists, that “the appearance of African Americans in positions of political power a few years after the end of slavery represented a truly radical transformation in Southern and American history.” By the early 1870s, he goes on, “biracial democratic government, something unprecedented in American history, was functioning throughout the South,” and “the old planter elite had been evicted from political power.”
As one South Carolina legislator would put it in a later memoir: “We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb … rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it on the road to prosperity.” Even Foner admits this is too rosy a portrait. Some Reconstruction governments were corrupt, although not exceptionally so by 19th century standards, and the Republican Party became increasingly divided by factional infighting, sometimes between blacks and whites and sometimes between radicals and moderates.
What was even more important, and not much discussed by later scholars hostile to Reconstruction, was the fact that the Southern experiment in biracial democracy came under violent attack from virtually its moment of birth. Various counterrevolutionary white militia groups had emerged by the late 1860s; the best known of them, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen and similar “night riders” murdered dozens of black public officials, burned out freedmen who had purchased “white land,” and frequently assaulted whites who spoke out for equal rights, taught blacks to read or simply voted Republican. By some accounts the Klan murdered 1,300 people during the 1868 election campaign; Foner calls the Reconstruction-era Klan “the most extensive example of homegrown terrorism in American history.”
President Ulysses S. Grant moved aggressively to crush this white terrorist resistance in the early 1870s, using the far-reaching powers granted him by the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Indeed, the Bush administration’s Patriot Acts were self-consciously modeled after the KKK Act, which responded to a perceived national emergency by federalizing a whole range of criminal offenses and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. The Nation, then as now a liberal newsweekly, complained about the unprecedented expansion of federal power. But the KKK Act also looked forward to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. “If the federal government cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty and lives of citizens,” asked former Union Army Gen. Benjamin Butler, “why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all?”
Foner, in fact, doesn’t quite give Grant his due. As a leading exponent of the radical reassessment of American history, Foner tends to steer away from the deeds of Great Men and focus instead on mass movements, local organizations and community leaders we’re unlikely to know about. This is all to the good when it foregrounds stories like those of John R. Lynch, a former slave who became a Louisiana justice of the peace and influential memoirist, or Abram Colby, a Georgia legislator who was abducted by the Klan and whipped viciously before his wife and daughter. The Klansmen asked him, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned radical ticket?” He assured them he would vote Republican till the day he died. “They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more.”
But Grant, so often derided by later historians as a drunkard and incompetent — judgments more recently called into question — was almost certainly the last president before Dwight Eisenhower to behave as if the federal laws mandating racial equality actually meant something. (It may not be an accident that both men had experience commanding black troops in combat.) Grant was apparently given to vulgar racial talk in private life, but it’s reasonable to assume that African-Americans preferred a president who called them ugly names but crushed the Klan to the many who followed, who said polite things about “the Negro” but tolerated vicious regimes of white supremacy and racist violence.
In the North, political leaders were increasingly concerned with the rising power of labor unions and the resulting workplace strife, developments fueled by a major influx of new immigrants from poor European countries like Ireland, Italy, Poland and Russia. As the Democrats began to identify themselves more and more distinctly as the party of the white working class, moderate Northern Republicans became the party of stability and order, identified with affluent WASPs and big business. In this context, the enduring turmoil and racial discord of the South seemed like a distraction, even an embarrassment. By the mid-1870s, the abolitionist generation of radical Republicans had left the stage, Grant’s administration was embroiled in scandal, and both parties were eager to restore what was deemed normalcy to the South.
Five years ago, we heard a great deal about the the disputed presidential election of 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner despite receiving 250,000 fewer votes than Democrat Samuel Tilden. As part of the final compromise that put Hayes in the White House, Tilden extracted a promise that federal troops would be withdrawn from the South and full local autonomy reestablished. In practice, this meant that political control of the region rapidly reverted to white Democrats, and more specifically to the same tiny class of wealthy white landowners who had dominated the South before the Civil War. In some areas, blacks continued to vote, and black Republicans continued to hold office, as late as the 1890s. But Reconstruction was over, and a long, dark period in American history was just beginning.
What lay ahead were the Jim Crow segregation laws, the rise of widespread lynching and the reborn “homegrown terrorism” of the Klan, often acting as a de facto arm of local government. For African-Americans, the age of freedom promised after emancipation was delayed for almost a century, until the “second Reconstruction” of the civil rights movement.
By the dawn of the 20th century, disenfranchising blacks and defunding black schools and other government services was official policy throughout the South. Laws mandating poll taxes, literacy requirements and other hurdles never mentioned race (and so were held not to violate the 15th Amendment), but their expressed aim was to “reduce the colored vote to insignificance,” as a Charleston, S.C., newspaper put it. Louisiana’s 1890 Constitution, for example, reduced the number of black registered voters from 130,000 to around 1,000 (and also disenfranchised about 80,000 poor whites).
Many of the “Redeemer” Democratic state governments of the late 1870s and after sound strikingly like today’s Republicans, at least on fiscal issues. They took office promising massive cuts in taxes and spending, which served the dual role of helping rich planters and merchants retain their fortunes and denying education, healthcare and other services to the blacks and poor whites who had most likely voted Republican. Reconstruction schools had generally been segregated, but South Carolina, for example, had expended the same amount per student regardless of race. By 1895, white students were receiving three times the per-capita resources as blacks, a trend that would worsen dramatically in years to come.
By the time Du Bois published his prophetic book “Black Reconstruction in America” in 1935, white historians almost unanimously regarded Reconstruction as a disastrous and illegitimate experiment, concocted by wild-eyed Northern radicals and carried out by incompetent Southern blacks. If certain things about the Jim Crow era were regrettable (the argument went), white rule was nonetheless necessary, largely because of the innate “negro incapacity” to overcome childish ignorance or lustful passions. Foner cites Columbia professor John W. Burgess, one of the founders of American political science, who explained that blacks “were a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, and has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.”
Needless to say, today’s academic world is much closer to Foner than to Burgess. Ever since Kenneth M. Stampp’s 1967 “The Era of Reconstruction” began to rehabilitate the radical Republican perspective, historians have quibbled over the details rather than the bigger picture. Reconstruction is portrayed as a noble experiment, perhaps naive or poorly executed, that challenged the nation to live up to its purported ideals. Disagreements exist over the roles played by Lincoln and Grant, or whether the radical approach of Northerners like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens — who wanted the Southern aristocracy broken up and dispossessed — was preferable to the more conciliatory and legalistic strategies of moderate Republicans North and South.
But Foner is arguably less concerned with his colleagues’ views than with the currents of folk memory and public opinion — which he says keep alive the negative stereotypes of Reconstruction — and with the way the period permanently altered Americans’ notions of freedom. African-Americans understood that concept, he argues, in a way that had been shaped by the experience of slavery and the forceful rhetoric of underground preachers who drew heavily on the biblical story of Exodus. Freedom was to be more an existential condition than a statutory one, a liberation of mind, body and spirit that would right the wrongs perpetrated upon an entire race across three centuries of bondage and torment.
Out of this understanding grew the call for “40 acres and a mule” envisioned under Gen. William T. Sherman’s famous Field Order 15, the demand for slave reparations after the Civil War (a movement that remains alive today), and the vision of what is now known as affirmative action. Foner clearly believes that all these were morally justified, and that the American South would be an unimaginably different place today if the freed slaves had indeed been granted land ownership along with the means to work it. In that sense, he understands Reconstruction as a tragic missed opportunity to create real racial justice.
Beyond that, Foner rejects the now-standard progressive narrative of American history, in which emancipation and Reconstruction mark “the logical fulfillment of a vision originally articulated by the founding fathers.” Indeed, as he says, the original Constitution never mentions the concept of equality, and “limiting the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been intrinsic to the practice of American democracy.” Reconstruction, he continues, was “less a fulfillment of the Revolution’s principles than a radical repudiation of the nation’s actual practice of the previous seven decades.”
American political culture of the 19th century, Foner writes, rested on federalism, limited government, local autonomy and deeply rooted ideas about the superiority of whites to blacks and men to women. These were the political values so dramatically reasserted when the Redeemers came to power after 1877, and it’s not unfair to suggest that, however they may have been rhetorically modulated in recent years, they remain the values of the white Christian Southern majority today.
During the protracted battle with Congress that led to his impeachment, Andrew Johnson protested that the Reconstruction ideals that blacks were entitled to civil equality, and that the federal government had the power to define and protect citizens’ rights, violated “all our experience as a people.” Foner thinks he was right. Americans have never resolved the conflict between these radically opposed visions of freedom: the egalitarian model of republican citizenship on one hand, the hierarchical model of localized independence and self-government on the other. Based on the political landscape we see around us, 130 years after the end of Reconstruction, we never will.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
This month, a federal judge in New York dealt a blow to “stop-and-frisk,” a policy that resulted in 685,000 recorded police stops in 2011. Eighty-five percent of those stopped were African American and Latino, mostly youths.
U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin granted class-action certification to a stop-and-frisk lawsuit against the city of New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The plaintiffs allege that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy regularly violates the Constitution by illegally stopping and searching scores of people belonging to a particular demographic — black and Latino. Pending the city’s appeal, the class-action ruling will put stop-and-frisk on trial.
Plaintiffs in Floyd et al. vs City of New York also argue that they were stopped by police who did not have the legally necessary “reasonable suspicion” that they had committed or were going to commit a crime. What’s more, the suit alleges, police often performed frisks, but not because they saw a bulge they suspected to be a weapon, another legal requirement.
In her written decision, Scheindlin said the alleged constitutional violations result not from the actions of rogue officers, but from a policy handed down from the very top. “The stop-and-frisk program is centralized and hierarchical,” said Scheindlin. “Those stops were made pursuant to a policy that is designed, implemented and monitored by the NYPD’s administration.”
Scheindlin’s ruling cites “overwhelming evidence” — a spike in stop-and-frisks and the NYPD’s own words — indicating that at the “highest levels of the department” police are enforcing a policy that leaves behind a trail of daily injustices.
For years, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have used distortions and misinformation to promote and justify a policy that violates the constitutional rights of those who were stopped. Now, the Scheindlin findings have exposed the NYPD game for what it is, an illegal system of quotas and racial profiling imposed on field police from the top of the NYPD.
“Suspicionless stops should never occur,” Scheindlin wrote in her decision, adding that, “Defendants’ cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a ‘widespread practice of suspicionless stops’ displays a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” Stop-and-frisk, which the data shows is a form of racial profiling, violates not only the Fourth Amendment — protection from unreasonable searches — but also the 14th Amendment, which includes the equal protection clause, the plaintiffs charge.
The Scheindlin decision was informative and comprehensive, including a number of important facts and observations. Here are eight important points from the decision.
1. Soaring numbers. The rate of stops has grown exponentially under the Bloomberg administration. Scheindlin’s ruling notes that police conducted 2.8 million documented stops of people between 2004 and 2009, about half of whom were frisked. In contrast, in 1998, Scheindlin explains, NYPD officers made roughly 150,000 stops per year. In 2004 alone, officers recorded more than 313,000 stops, “and since then the number has increased every year except 2007, rising to over 684,000 in 2011.” Scheindlin cites the large increase as evidence of a centralized policy change.
2. No reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in a crime is necessary for a legal stop. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped, however, are not charged with any crime. As Scheindlin noted, the data shows that “according to their own records and judgment, officers’ ‘suspicions’ were wrong nearly nine times out of ten.”
3. Imaginary bulges. Officers’ suspicions were similarly unsubstantiated when reportedly searching for guns. A “suspicious bulge” was cited as a reason for about 10 percent of all stops, but guns were seized in less than 1 percent. “For every 69 stops that police officers justified specifically on the basis of a suspicious bulge, they found one gun,” the decision notes.
4. Stops for no reason. The absence of a legally necessary, interpretable “suspected crime” cited on official forms grew from 1.1 percent in 2004 to 35.9 percent (more than 200,000 reported stops) in 2009. During those years, “Overall, in more than half a million documented stops — 18.4 percent of the total — officers listed no coherent suspected crime,” Scheindlin wrote, meaning they either ignored the section altogether or did not cite suspected behavior that is indeed illegal.
5. Unlawful stops. Scheindlin writes, “According to their own explanations for their actions, NYPD officers conducted at least 170,000 unlawful stops between 2004 and 2009.” Stops based on nothing more than “furtive movement” or a “high-crime area” were the justifications of at least 100,000 stops, but as Scheindlin says, are illegal due to the Fourth Amendment law protecting Americans from unreasonable search.
6. Racial profiling. The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program targets blacks and Latinos because of their skin color. Scheindlin admitted the testimony of Columbia University professor Jeffrey Fagan, who found that police stopped blacks and Latinos far more than white residents. Isolated from other factors like crime rates and neighborhood racial composition, racial disparity from racial targeting was statistically significant, strongly underscoring that skin color is the essential factor in determining who gets stopped and throwing weight behind allegations of 14th Amendment violations. Fagan’s research also found that “the search for weapons is (a) unrelated to crime, (b) takes place primarily where weapons offenses are less frequent than other crimes, and (c) is targeted at places where the black and Hispanic populations are highest.” Cops are more likely to list no suspected crime category, or what Scheindlin called “an incoherent one,” like “furtive movements,” when stopping blacks and Latinos than when stopping whites. They also are more likely to use force against people of color.
7. NYPD illegal quotas. Scheindlin links the rising number of stops and the targeting of black and Latinos to NYPD quotas and to Commissioner Kelly’s own admission that the NYPD has a quota policy, albeit disguised. In a recent operations order, Commissioner Kelly explained departmental policy under the euphemism “performance goal.” Kelly said in the order, “Department managers can and must set performance goals,” for “the issuance of summonses, the stopping and questioning of suspicious individuals, and the arrests of criminals.”
The order also explains a weekly review during which a sergeant compares each officer’s monthly “activity” with the “daily assignment,” whereby police who “do not demonstrate activities” — or keep their numbers up — “will be evaluated accordingly and their assignments re-assessed.” In other words, there will be consequences for officers who don’t meet quotas, even though New York labor law says penalizing cops for failing to meet quotas is illegal.
Former NYPD officers turned whistleblowers Adhyl Polanco and Adrian Schoolcraft have collected evidence documenting NYPD quotas in practice. From 2008 to 2009, Polanco, from the 41st Precinct, and Schoolcraft, from the 81st, recorded roll calls revealing supervisors’ and other high-ranking officers’ enforcement of quotas. In Scheindlin’s own words, Schoolcraft’s audio files expose supervisors “repeatedly telling officers to conduct unlawful stops and arrests and explaining that the instructions for higher performance numbers are coming down the chain of command.”
Similarly, Polanco testified that “his commanding officers announced specific quotas for arrests and summons (quotas that rose dramatically between early 2008 and 2009) and for UF-250s” (a term for the forms used in stops), said Scheindlin, “and threatened overtime and undesirable assignments for those who failed to meet them.”
8. Repeat performances. According to the NYCLU, in 2011 the NYPD stopped more young, black men than live in New York; that is, some individuals are stopped and frisked repeatedly. To protect their rights, plaintiffs are seeking “systemic relief” — an end to the unconstitutional practice of stop-and-frisk.
Kristen Gwynne covers drugs at AlterNet. She graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism and psychology.
The Census Bureau has announced that a majority of new-born infants in the U.S. now belong to categories other than what the U.S. federal government calls “non-Hispanic white.”
While so-called “non-Hispanic whites” still account for 49.6 percent of American newborns, immigration has expanded the Hispanic and Asian categories, while the African-American or black share of the U.S. population has remained roughly constant. Whether they celebrate or dread it, progressive champions of the “rainbow coalition” and white conservative nativists at least agree on one fact: In the future, whites in the U.S. will be a minority.
But what if both the multicultural left and the nativist right are wrong? Definitions of racial identity in the U.S. have changed over time. In the twentieth century, Americans with different degrees of African ancestry who in earlier generations would have been described as negroes, quadroons and octoroons were all lumped together in a single category as blacks. And in the nineteenth century, eminent American ethnologists debated the question of whether Irish-Americans belonged to the same race as Anglo-Americans.
In the 1970s, the federal government came up with the bizarre “non-Hispanic white” label, lumping together Arab-Americans, Norwegian-Americans and Irish-Americans into a single government-created pseudo-race. To compound the absurdity, at the same time the federal government invented a category of “Hispanics” who, as government forms invariably note, “may be of any race.” The artificial “Hispanic” category is even more preposterous than the “non-Hispanic white” category, including blond, blue-eyed South Americans of German descent as well as Mexican-American mestizos and Puerto Ricans of predominantly African descent.
These government racial labels are increasingly out of touch with America’s fluid demographic reality. But for the sake of argument, let us take America’s official racial classifications, all too reminiscent of Soviet nationality labels, at face value. According to polls, a slight majority of Hispanics (or Latinos) identify themselves as “white.” Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of government-labeled Hispanics who identified as “other race” dropped in percentage from 42 to 37 while those who identified as white rose from 48 to 53 percent.
If self-described “white” Hispanics are annexed to the “non-Hispanic white” group in order to form a single category of “whites” (Hispanic and non-Hispanic), then the emergence of a “nonwhite” majority in the U.S. is postponed by generations and perhaps indefinitely.
What is more, by the third generation, a majority of Hispanics marry outside of their ethnic group, mostly but not exclusively into the non-Hispanic white population. It is possible that their children will identify themselves as “mixed race” or “other race” — categories for self-labeling that have been allowed in recent Census counts. But it is more likely that the unscientific but powerful cultural category of “whiteness” will be enlarged to include Hispanics and Asians and their children as “non-Hispanic whites.”
In a widely-reprinted 1998 article for the New York Times Magazine, “The Beige and the Black,” I pointed out that America’s nonrational caste system has been binary: not white/nonwhite, but black/nonblack. Because “white” really means “nonblack,” the arbitrary white category is infinitely elastic, capable of being enlarged to include practically anybody who is not clearly of black African descent. While Hispanics and Asians have suffered from vicious bigotry in American history, anti-black prejudice has always been the organizing principle of caste in American culture.
As I wrote 14 years ago:
In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority — a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans — offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.
(This is a prediction on my part, not a prescription. Rather than witness the redefinition of whiteness, from Anglo-American to Euro-American to Euro-Latino-Asian American, I would rather live to see a truly post-racist America in which caste is completely expunged from culture and consciousness. But I am reporting trends, not creating them; please don’t shoot the messenger.)
If this analysis is right, then present-day Republican racial politics is doomed — and so is Democratic racial politics.
Today’s Republican right seems intent on treating the ridiculous government category of “non-Hispanic white” as though it represented a core community of “real Americans,” excluding black Americans and protected from demographic inundation by Hispanics, or “Third World hordes” as the gentlemanly Patrick Buchanan politely calls our fellow citizens of Latin American descent. Quite apart from betraying its roots in the Republicanism of Lincoln and the abolitionists, a Republican Party whose image of the American nation excludes not only blacks but also Hispanics and their descendants is doomed in electoral politics.
Democrats are right about that. But progressives are wrong to imagine that a new “majority of minorities” is about to emerge and create a lasting majority for the Democrats. The success of white nativists in the GOP in driving away Hispanic voters may help the Democrats for a few more electoral cycles, but sooner or later Republican politicians who are tired of losing will challenge the neo-Confederate wing of their party and practice a more racially-inclusive politics of the kind pioneered by George W. Bush and his brother Jeb Bush, with his Hispanic wife and mixed-race children.
Nor should progressives assume that Hispanics and their mixed-race progeny will remain loyal to the Democrats for generations to come. The fact that Anglo-American nativists in the Republican Party in the early 1900s tried to keep their ancestors out of the country does not deter most working-class white “ethnics” of Irish and Italian descent in the U.S. from voting for today’s GOP. Like earlier waves of immigrants, Hispanics are likely to change in their political values as a result of assimilation and upward mobility.
What does this mean for black Americans? On the one hand, the persistence of an informal “white” majority defined in opposition to the black minority would mean further delay in the realization of a truly post-racist America.
On the other hand, black Americans made much more rapid advances during the New Deal/Civil Rights era, when the melting of European ethnic differences created an overwhelming “white” majority for a time, than they have done since mass immigration made them the second largest official “minority” in the U.S. after Hispanics. The truth is that the “rainbow coalition” strategy of uniting minorities has helped other groups more than blacks. Affirmative action in higher education, for example, while doing little to help the majority of black Americans who do not go to college, has benefited upper-middle-class white women, who are part of the white majority (and, if they are affluent, part of the social elite within the dominant group). Programs like affirmative action and minority business set-asides, originally designed to help the descendants of American slaves, lost all moral credibility when they were opened up to white women and recent Hispanic and Asian immigrants, notwithstanding the feeble “diversity” rationale that America’s white oligarchy invented to rationalize them.
It remains to be seen how changing racial conceptions shape American politics. But if demography is destiny, one thing is clear — in the long run, both the diversitarian left and the nativist right are doomed.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.
The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.
A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.
The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.
What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)
Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.
Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.
Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.
Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.
Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)
Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.
Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.
Further reading
Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories
The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”
Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.
(Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri) 
A still from "The Intouchables" 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
