Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rowly Brucken, who is a professor of history at Norwich University.
The recent Black Lives Matter protests challenge not just the role of police in communities of color. They condemn the entire political, economic, and social structure that created those unequal, segregated and marginalized communities. In doing so, they allege that a 400-year history of white supremacy is responsible for today’s injustices, with the police as front-line defenders of a racist system.
As a historian of human rights and race, I find such a critique persuasive, though it is based on facts excluded from popular understandings of American history. The protests have created an opening for white folk in particular to take three steps: to learn, consider, and discuss the consequences of this ugly part of our past.
Learning a new history means confronting directly, starkly and honestly the theme of American white supremacy. All of us use history to define who we are, and in the United States in particular, history provides the answer of what it means to be an American. Given that Americans have no common religious denomination or ethnicity, as many other nations possess, history is the glue that holds us together. It is a history that elevates the values of individualism, liberty, equality and material prosperity, as seen through events such as the American Revolution, Civil War, New Deal and civil rights movement. The overall theme is colorblind progress. While we as a country have fallen short of making those ideals a reality for all, we have faith that the future will be brighter.
Recent protests expose continued raw racial inequality and question this popular “progressive equality” story of American history in two ways. First, protesters expose the stubborn, unchanging, and systemic economic inequality that results today in the median white family owning 10 times as much wealth as the median African American family, according to Federal Reserve statistics. Second, the demonstrators ask provocative questions about the continued and powerful existence of historical justifications for inequality, including racist beliefs about people of color, that resist progress toward justice and equal opportunity.
History is always under construction. All knowledge changes when brave prophets ask new questions and skillful pioneers uncover new evidence that challenges the status quo. That being said, often people are unnerved by change, especially if it undermines cherished beliefs about their native country. It’s doubly difficult if new information also challenges one’s identity, morality and position in society.
What might we learn from a new understanding of our past? First, we’d need to admit that the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of those with white skin has been a constant reality over the past four centuries in America. Identifying the ideas, policies and processes that favor some racial groups over others, whether deliberately or not, opens new doors of inquiry.
My research into the 20th century examines such outcomes. We can start with World War I, with a segregated army that gave higher pay and veteran’s benefits to white soldiers. The wartime Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities created segregated neighborhoods not by black choice, but by white design, enforced by white mob violence in Chicago; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Detroit; and Omaha, Nebraska. New Deal programs such as Social Security either purposefully omitted African Americans by eligibility classifications or did so through local control of public works and welfare programs by white officials, especially in the South. The famous GI Bill assisted white home ownership in white communities and segregated college educations but excluded African Americans from those same opportunities. Scholar Edward Humes has estimated that 28% of white veterans were able to attend college on the GI Bill, compared with 12% of black veterans. Suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s depended upon the creation of dual housing markets by banks and real estate agents that profited from white racism while also contributing to it.
The overpolicing of inner cities in the 1980s, caused by defining drug interdiction as a war to be waged in black communities (while drug abuse in white suburbs was a public health issue to be managed in the suburbs) fed white racist views of people of color as criminals. And few can deny the current president’s overt racism, white supremacist fantasies and opposition to nonwhites gaining economic or political power.
The second step is to think deeply about the ramifications of this knowledge. I do not believe that the founding principles of the United States are outdated; they are actually all the more relevant. Their practical irrelevance to many today, as in the past, necessitates conversations on wealth and opportunity redistribution. Affirmative action, for example, favored whites for more than 300 years. But until white folk have the political will, spiritual humility and open-mindedness to view this past unflinchingly, and be moved to imagine a different future, they will continue to perpetuate the profound injustice that makes a hollow mockery of what they claim to believe as Americans.
With acknowledgement comes understanding; with empathy comes change. White folk alive today are not responsible for historical racism, though they benefit from its continued legacy and contribute to its perpetuation. Wealth and opportunity have accumulated over time to those with lighter skin; their heirs inherit and can expand both in turn to their offspring. Even poor whites have a credibility and commonality with white elites that psychologically provides benefits, protections and the promise of social mobility.
The third step is to discuss what we as individuals can do to make our nation inclusive, a true meritocracy, that unleashes the brilliance and talent of all its constituents. This must include conversations about reparations for past oppression and exclusion, whether they are symbolic or tangible. It must include public and private entities, governments, businesses and civil society. It may very well be the most challenging dialogue we have ever had to have as a people.
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do,” novelist James Baldwin asserted. Rediscovering our nation’s past, learning, contemplating and discussing the existence of a white supremacist core theme, is a solid way to begin.