Despite his admission to being unjustly pulled over 18 times for Driving While Black, Senator Tim Scott wants everyone to know that America is not a racist country.
It’s a message he considers so important that he made it the core of his rejoinder to President Biden’s recent address to Congress. To some, it may have seemed a bizarre rebuttal, considering Biden had offered only a few brief remarks on the subject of racism, none of which included the claim that America was a racist country. But Scott’s remarks weren’t aimed at the president; instead, they were crafted for a right-wing base gorged on a diet of white grievance. And what better way to satiate their cravings than to imply that all to the left of Joe Manchin wish to besmirch the nation’s good name and perhaps force God-fearing patriots to attend mandatory Antifa trainings or build shrines to Assata Shakur in their backyards?
It’s genuinely comical listening to the exponents of conservative race theory. Naturally, they insist the left refuses to acknowledge America’s progress and that our hatred of the country blinds us to how much better we are today than in years past. Yet, these are the same people who insist America must be made great again — a formulation suggestive of a nation in decline, a place of regress, not progress.
So who are the real cynics? Those who insist racism has been embedded in the nation’s soil and soul from the start but who nonetheless fight to make America’s promises real for all? Or those who fetishize an America that is blessedly long gone but who nostalgically seek its return? To ask the question is to answer it. You cannot laud progress from one side of your mouth while demanding from the other that the days from which we progressed weren’t really that bad — and were undoubtedly better than those we’re experiencing now. When you say MAGA or insist you “want your country back,” you telegraph the directionality of your desires.
But beyond the internal inconsistency of conservative thinking, there is also the toxic positivity of their narrative that should concern us. To the right, Black folks need to stop complaining about racism. Sure there are individual racists, but racism as an institutional force is dead. What matters, they insist, is progress; thus, we should judge ourselves not in relation to the national ideal as symbolized by our pledge of liberty and justice for all, but only compared to where we were 60 or 160 years ago. But this is a bad faith argument on their part, and I suspect they know it.
First, even with the copious evidence suggesting the ongoing reality of racism and discrimination in employment, housing, the justice system, and elsewhere, few serious voices on the left deny there has been progress in this country regarding race and racism. To suggest otherwise would disrespect the sacrifices made by Black folks who have fought to make it so. Though their labors have not borne the fully formed fruit of multicultural democracy, they have certainly brought us closer to that point than was the case previously. We know that, and we honor those responsible for it. Likewise, we also know who was not — a subject to which I will return.
Even the critical race theorists currently starring as Exhibit A in the fever dreams of the right acknowledge this progress. In fact, the very reason CRT was developed was to examine the incongruity between the genuine and hard-fought reforms of the civil rights era, on the one hand, and the lingering reality of white institutional dominance, on the other. One cannot explore the paradox of ongoing racial hierarchy amid civil rights victories if one doesn’t acknowledge those victories.
Second, that a nation has made progress is not the basis for pronouncing itself a just society. By that standard, Black folks should have been satisfied during segregation — as, sadly, most whites were — because at least it wasn’t slavery. This perpetual backward glance is the ultimate in situational ethics. It’s the kind of thing that would allow us to dismiss any concerns about anti-Semitism today by telling those of us who are Jewish to be glad we’re not still on the train to Sobibor. Go ahead, try that one out at your local shul and see how far you get, with good reason.
This kind of thinking suggests no fixed ideal to which we should aspire, no higher target for which we should aim. Instead, we should always look in the rearview mirror and wonder in amazement at how far we’ve come. But does one do this in any other area of life? I mean, my kids were pretty great when they were 7 and 9. They’re even better now at 17 and 19. But if ten or twenty years hence, they haven’t managed to get their shit together quite a bit more than at present, I won’t likely remain content to brag about how much progress they’ve made since grade school.
Third, progress narratives almost always elide the cyclical nature of history. Progress is not fixed like a star in the firmament. Victories secured in one generation can be erased in another. The end of Reconstruction served as proof of this maxim when the hegemony of the Southern planter class was restored after a brief post-Civil War flirtation with Black empowerment.
More recently, and keeping with this theme, the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act — one of the key victories of the civil rights era — and those preaching progress, like Tim Scott, support laws that will make voting harder, especially for Black and brown folks. For nearly a decade, Republicans have been passing (or at least trying to pass) new voter rules that would have that effect.
In North Carolina, GOP lawmakers requested information from the state about which kinds of IDs Black people were most likely to lack, as well as the racial breakdown of early voters. They then crafted voter ID rules to allow only those forms most possessed by whites and cut out a week of early voting because Black voters were more likely to cast ballots early. According to the court that blocked implementation of the new rules, the Republican effort had targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”
Indeed, some on the right are now openly declaring their desire to keep certain people from voting altogether. For instance, Steve Bannon and Tea Party leader Judson Phillips have suggested we eliminate universal suffrage by limiting the franchise to property owners. It’s a position also endorsed by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association.
Blogger Matt Walsh argues that voting should be limited to “productive tax-paying adults,” 25 and older, by which he means income taxes (since everyone pays other taxes, like sales tax). Such a rule would disenfranchise most all low-to-moderate income workers in America — roughly the bottom half of income earners who don’t make enough to owe net income taxes — as well as those who find themselves unemployed during a down economy or those with disabilities. And Walsh supports such a policy, which would disproportionately limit voting by people of color, even as he thinks they should be grateful for all the progress we’ve made on the road to racial equity. Oh, and he also supports requiring passage of a civics test to vote, despite how such instruments have been misused, historically, for explicitly racist ends, so there’s that.
Finally, much of the progress about which conservatives brag came about no thanks to them. It was liberals and the left that fought for those changes, not the right. Yes, Northern Republicans (most of them moderate or even liberal by today’s standards) voted for the Civil Rights Act, along with moderate and liberal non-Southern Democrats. But it wasn’t conservatives who fought and died in the civil rights struggle. The conservative movement was implacably opposed to it.
William F. Buckley’s National Review, the right’s leading publication, defended preventing Blacks from voting and worried that in the face of civil rights and anti-colonial uprisings, the “jungle” might be taking over. They even went so far as to blame the civil rights movement for the violence done to Black people — suggesting that some “crazed Negro” might have been responsible for the infamous bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, solely to discredit the segregationist cause.
Although not motivated by racial animus, Barry Goldwater, the father of modern conservatism, opposed the Civil Rights Act and the movement that fought for it. So too (and with far more vitriol) did right-wing mouthpieces like Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms, and James J. Kilpatrick.
Even now, Ben Shapiro, perhaps the right’s leading “intellectual” insists the Civil Rights Act wrongly and unjustly prohibited discrimination by private employers and businesses — a vital element of the law without which much of the progress since would not have occurred. In other words, arguably the leading voice of respectable conservatism today believes lunch counters should have had the right to remain segregated, as with stores and movie theatres. He believes — and he is not alone in this among conservatives — that companies even today should be allowed to refuse to hire Black people if they wish. And yet they dare brag about the progress we’ve made? The very progress that would never have occurred had their thinking prevailed?
Sadly, white America has always thought the nation was doing fine when it came to race. At no point in history have most whites — especially not those who were the conservatives of their respective eras — thought we had much of a problem. In the early ’60s, even before civil rights laws were passed, and when Black folks and their progressive white allies were dying for the cause of justice, most whites told pollsters time and again that there was no need for the movement. Blacks were already treated equally, they insisted — no need for sit-ins or freedom rides or protests of any kind.
No doubt, if probed further, they would have insisted upon how much better things were in 1960 (or 1930 for that matter) than during the days of the auction block. But then again, during enslavement, most whites never lost much sleep over the ownership of other human beings either. Instead, it was common for white folks to content themselves with the notion that Blacks should be grateful; after all, at least they were “better off than in Africa” and had been brought to the salvific light of a lily-white Jesus.
In short, denial and relativistic morality have been pretty consistent pastimes for white Americans. They’re sort of our thing. And the fact that a Black man like Tim Scott is willing to repeat after us the glories and wonders of the nation — even as that nation’s police continue to pull him over solely for the color of his skin — doesn’t diminish the mendacity of the narrative itself.
I’m an antiracism educator/author. My latest book is Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020). I post audio at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise
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Previously Published on Medium
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