For Carib News 11/21/16
When Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 to the Presidency of the United States, there was much talk that the country had entered into a post-racial period. Although President Obama was re-elected in 2012, there is no question that the election of the first African-American to occupy the White House immediately triggered a white backlash. After losing the majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, the Republicans spearheaded that backlash and were dogmatic about not cooperating with the President.
The election of Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States represents the culmination of that white backlash movement. But it also is in keeping with a historical pattern that runs deep in the American bodypolitic.
Outside of Haiti, the United States is the only country in the western hemisphere that freeing the Africans in bondage required a civil war. The more enlightened American historians have argued that slavery was a system of capital accumulation but also a way of life in which white identity was profoundly embedded. The Civil War that began in 1861 ended the question of slavery with the adoption of the Thirteenth amendment but it did not end the ideology of racism. The Reconstruction Period that followed the collapse of the Confederacy was short-lived and was abandoned by 1877. There was no “forty acres and a mule”. All Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and Rutherford Hayes was sworn in as President. This compromise allowed the Jim Crow caste system to flourish after Reconstruction.
The freeman was put into new shackles and in terms of the division of labor, the Jim Crow system restricted black people to servile positions that paid pittance. In many parts of the southern states, there emerged a system of peonage in which black men who were sentenced to prison often on flimsy and unwarranted charges were farmed out to corporations for the exploitation of their labor. This system of peonage was quite widespread throughout the Jim Crow South.
Jim Crow was a particularly brutal system known for lynchings, disenfranchisement and sharecropping immiseration. The black intelligentsia established institutions like the Niagara Movement, the NAACP and the Urban League to resist the Jim Crow system of segregation and the caste-like conditions. Stalwarts like Paul Robeson, W.E.B Dubois and Ida Wells Barnett struggled to break down the system and to outlaw lynching but Congress was a co-conspirator in allowing whites in the south to keep black folks in a state of oppression.
The Jim Crow system lasted for almost 100 years before the non-violent mass movement spearheaded by James Farmer of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) built a non-violent mass movement to tear down the segregated “walls of Jericho”. It was not a struggle that was won overnight. Many lives were lost in the process. But there could be no social order in America until the Congress passed the Civil rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Housing Rights Act of 1968. De facto segregation was outlawed and the civil rights of the African American were re-affirmed as was the case after the Civil War.
Nonetheless, by 1968, the gains of the Civil rights Movement were under attack with the forging of the second white backlash movement. The late Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist, put together the Southern strategy. This entailed re-alignment of the political parties as white Democrats left the Democratic Party in droves to link up with the Republicans to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The re-alignment enabled the Republican Party to establish hegemony in Presidential elections. That was the case in the 1970s, the 1980s and the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Even though during this period there was an expansion of the black middle class, Republicans jettisoned Affirmative Action and packed the Supreme Court with conservative nominees like Clarence Thomas, Alito and Scalia. Inner cities suffered from benign neglect and attempts to reduce poverty stalled. The Conservative ideology reigned supreme.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as a consequence of the Great Recession marked the ending of the second white backlash movement. President Obama, benefitting from the changing demographics of American society, put together what became known as the Obama Coalition. The Coalition was comprised of millennials, white unmarried women, segments of the white working class, African Americans and Hispanics. That coalition enabled Barack Obama to triumph at the polls in 2008 and 2012. Some progress was made on questions of climate change, lifting the country out of the Great Recession and providing healthcare for 20 million Americans.
The presumption was that the Obama Coalition constituted a firewall for Democrats vis-à-vis the Presidency even though the Republican Party controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate and the majority of state legislatures. But in 2016, the firewall of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin crumbled. White working class voters who supported President Obama abandoned Hillary Clinton for the job-rectification promises made by Donald Trump.
The election of Donald Trump marks the third white backlash movement. The white blue collar workers did not gravitate to Donald Trump solely because of subtle racial appeals to white nationalism. Many of these workers have seen a marked reduction in their standard of living. They are frightened by the prospects that they will not be able to live as comfortable as their parents’ generation. Compounding the economic immiseration is the epidemic of heroin, alcoholism, opiods and suicides. The Democratic Party failed to address the plight of the white working class in the Rust Belt.
The Trump Administration with its selection of Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General and Steve Bannon of Breitbart News to be his chief strategist in the White House is a clear signal to black people that the Trump Administration has no intention of restoring teeth to the Voting Rights Act or to criminal justice reform. Mass incarceration will continue ad infinitum and affordable housing will become an increasingly scarce commodity.
There can be no accommodation to the Trump Administration. Progressive folks will have to return to the streets and reconstruct a non-violent mass movement similar to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We cannot allow Trumpism to destroy the inclusive social fabric of contemporary American society.
