Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
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Just as with the old, the new Southern strategy counted on racial dissociation to work. The 1980s were, the Edsalls would write, a period in which Republicans skillfully “consolidated, updated, and refined the right-populist, race-coded strategies of Wallace and Nixon.” They added, “The race and tax agenda effectively focused majority public attention onto what government takes, rather than onto what it gives.”6
Mad that they put in basketball courts and not tennis courts at your local park? Angry your school-age kids were being bused to the inner city? Suspicious your hard-earned money was going to support welfare moms, junkies, and gays? Certain the job at the downsizing plant went to an unqualified person of color over you because of affirmative action? Atwater was saying: we feel your pain.
And he understood: defunding legal services and food stamps might slam poor whites, too, but if they thought it hurt minorities more, that might be enough to make them vote Republican. In this way the 1960s divide between Wallace voters and Nixon voters—those comfortable with naked racial appeals versus those who were not—was reconciled. Southern strategy 2.0 meant never having to say “White Power.”
These new abstractions demanded a new class of encrypters and code talkers, and as the historian David Roediger wrote, “The Republicans, it must be said, knew the codes better than the Democrats.”7 The Heritage Foundation’s 1984 edition of Mandate for Leadership, the essential conservative politician’s playbook, stated the cultural imperative clearly: “For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil rights field has been for the control of language.”8 After the civil rights movement, the Mandate authors wrote, Americans were clearly for “equality,” “opportunity,” and “remedial action,” and against “racism,” “discrimination,” and “segregation.” They concluded, “The secret to victory, whether in court or in Congress, has been to control the definition of these terms.”9
Over the next thirty years the right would experiment at containing and reversing the advances of the civil rights movement—claiming and subverting its moral language, repackaging old racial superiority theories in the new language of “color-blind justice,” encoding attacks in racialized narratives and imagery, denying both difference and inequality. The nation’s race conversation itself would pass from clarity into kudzu.
The Republicans had learned a lot since George Wallace had first mobilized white rage against the Northeastern liberal establishment. Two decades later, Atwater was working for a son of that establishment, the former oilman and CIA chief George H. W. Bush. As the summer began, Bush was in big trouble, double digits behind Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Atwater faced a major problem: how could he generate working-class white sympathy for a stiff-necked blue-blood millionaire?
Violent crime in Massachusetts had dropped 13 percent during Dukakis’s administration.10 The campaign needed an image that would eclipse the facts. Then Reader’s Digest published a story about a man named Willie Horton. Horton was a Black felon imprisoned for life in Massachusetts, who, after disappearing from a weekend prison furlough, had kidnapped, stabbed, and beaten a white suburban couple in their home, raping the woman. Atwater told Republican operatives in a private meeting, “If I can make Willie Horton a household name, we’ll win the election.”11 At the same time he told his staff that the issue with Horton “was crime, not color.”12
In the fall an independent conservative political action committee ran an attack ad featuring a grainy black-and-white police lineup photo of Willie Horton in full ragged Afro and unclipped beard. The ad was primitive in look and primal in message: a slide show of images of Horton, Dukakis, and Bush; the words “kidnapping,” “stabbing,” “raping” flashing under a picture of a handcuffed Horton; the conclusion—“Weekend Prison Passes: Dukakis on Crime.”
Publicly Atwater denied having anything to do with the TV spot. He told journalist Eric Alterman that he had asked campaign groups not to use photos of Horton in their ads. “I defy you to find any other campaign I have done where race has become the issue,” he taunted. “Race, politically, is a loser.”13
Historians would forever debate whether Atwater masterfully plotted this turn or completely lost control of his strategy and operatives. Either way the proof was in the results: Dukakis never recovered from the Pandora’s box of racial and sexual anxieties that the Horton ad had unleashed. “Here we have,” Kevin Phillips wrote, “the nation’s leading preppy—an ornament and offspring of the Establishment—winning as a barefoot populist.”14 Bush’s victory not only turned the word “liberal” temporarily into a political millstone, it secured the continuing neoconservative realignment of America.
Plunged into despair, some liberals began to train their sights on multiculturalists, feminists, and queers, whom they said had destroyed the left with identity politics. Class, they said, was the real issue, not race or gender or sexuality. But, really, it was all of the above. Why had working-class white Americans—after half a century of strongly supporting strong government, social programs, and economic reform—turned so strongly against their own clear economic interests? What really was the matter with Kansas? It was the culture wars, stupid.
As a political gambit to realign the American two-party system, the Southern strategy had succeeded beyond its architects’ imaginings. But it also needed continual care and feeding. As the demographics of the nation shifted profoundly, the culture wars would continue to mobilize voters against the emerging America.
For Atwater, there would be a painful postscript. A month after Bush’s inaugural bash, he was appointed to Howard University’s board of trustees. He seemed humbled by the nomination. He said he was eager to lecture to the predominantly Black student body, to perhaps teach this new generation something about politics.
Yet the students, whose leaders included Ras Baraka, the son of Amiri and Amina Baraka, and Karma Bene Bambara, the daughter of Toni Cade Bambara, had not forgotten. They closed down the university with a five-day strike. Hundreds took over the administration building and disrupted the annual university convocation. Saying that he was “deeply saddened” that he had not had a chance to dialogue with the students, Atwater quickly resigned.
It was the end of the 1980s, a decade in which almost every day felt like a battle for the heart of America.
THE FEAR
In his first inaugural address in 1981, President Ronald Reagan had said, “We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline.” Yet as the eighties closed, traditionalists’ faith in American exceptionalism was being tested. They invoked metaphors of endings: the fraying of America, the disuniting of America, the closing of the American mind, the twilight of common dreams.
What had happened in between? The arrival of the most diverse generation in history and the outbreak of the culture wars.
These wars, like all wars, began with no name. They were partly the product of a free-floating white anxiety, unloosed by Reagan’s economic restructuring and attack on the welfare state. Barbara Ehrenreich named this new complex of anxieties afflicting the middle class. The middle class, she wrote,
is afraid, like any class below the most securely wealthy, of misfortunes that might lead to a downward slide. But in the middle class there is another anxiety: a fear of inner weakness, of growing soft, of failing to strive, of losing discipline and will.… Whether the middle class looks down toward the realm of less, or up toward the realm of more, there is the fear, always, of falling.15
The fear of falling would catalyze a suburban arms-race meritocracy, with its contradictory ethic of self-management and binge consumption, its harder-better-faster-stronger mode of presentation, even its structured leisure of twenty-four-hour fitness, reality TV, and youth soccer leagues.
The fear would also spread like a thunderhead over the heartland. Reagan’s disastrous farm policies caused food prices to plunge and real estate prices to rise. At nickel auction prices family farms passed into the hands of large agribusinesses at an astonis
hing rate. At the peak of the crisis in 1986, family farms were foreclosing at a rate of two thousand per week, the fastest since the Great Depression. A whole way of life seemed to be disappearing. Outbreaks of violence and suicide—not just among farmers, but even their bankers and federal lenders—accompanied the despair.16
“You don’t talk free trade to a man with an empty belly,” said one agricultural economics expert. “You feed him.”17
Yet in their 1984 reelection ad, Reagan’s image managers offered only a voice intoning “It’s morning again in America,” and pictures of Rockwellesque imperialist nostalgia—saccharine, gauzy, sentimental.
Across calm daybreak waters a fishing boat sails past the city-on-the-hill out to sea. Suited men and women march to their office jobs. An elderly man steers his tractor backward in the dawn’s half-light. A newsboy tosses the morning paper onto green lawns. A family carries a rug into their newly purchased picket-fenced white home. A young couple gets married before a weeping, happy, gray-haired mother. Flags are raised over a log cabin, a firehouse, and a country home, and as each is run up the pole, two white-shirted boys, a fireman, and a family patriarch look up to the Stars and Stripes and smile.
“It’s morning again in America,” the voice says, “and under the leadership of President Reagan our country is prouder and stronger and better.”
Against unrest and despair, these were images of comfort and stability, a soft utopia of restored order. No dislocating economic programs, tough-on-crime policies, and social service–slashing proposals here. Optimism was now, literally, a thing of the past, deracinated and familiar.
All the existential dread was reduced to a simple question: Do you still believe in this country’s great destiny? If you did, then all you needed to do was trust these leaders to lead us back to the future. And if you wanted to worry, then you could worry about those who were questioning our singular Western heritage and threatening to overwhelm our European American cultural core.
THE RAINBOW MOMENT
The emergence of a new America had been born of the brief civil rights consensus, and could be seen in two major demographic shifts.
The first had occurred with the advent of public school desegregation. In the year of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, researchers Gary Orfield and John Yun noted a mere 2 percent of Black students in the South attended majority white public schools. By 1970, the number was 33 percent, and the South had become “the nation’s most integrated region for both Blacks and whites.”18 Through the 1980s, busing and consent decrees continued to diversify the schools.
In one generation, the nation had come a long way from “separate but equal.” Racial desegregation in secondary education peaked in 1988, Reagan’s last year in office. In the South alone, almost 44 percent of Black students now attended majority white public schools.19 National trends mirrored these numbers. To be sure, the picture wasn’t entirely rosy. Well over half of Black students were still attending majority-minority schools. After this moment, such segregation would intensify again.
The other powerful demographic shift had been initiated in a legislative breakthrough that no one wanted to claim. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act quietly reversed the nation’s long-standing exclusion of non–Western European immigrants.
Immigration policy had long been based on a national origins quota system, a program aimed at restricting undesirable immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, Africa, and, most forcefully of all, Asia. In addition, Mexican and Native peoples of the Southwest, who were indigenous and not immigrant populations, faced waves of deportation terror. Pathways to citizenship for nonwhites were severely limited. Through seven presidencies, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler steadfastly argued that the national origins system was, in fact, racist.20
With the historic passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Celler’s hope had finally found its moment. Buoyed by the civil rights consensus, he and Democratic senator Philip Hart sponsored a bill to sweep away national origins quotas. It passed both the House and the Senate with overwhelming majorities. By removing “the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege,” Lyndon B. Johnson said when he signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the act “does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.”21
In the decades afterward, immigration from Mexico and from Asian and Central and South American countries rose sharply. Through the end of the 1950s, only a quarter of immigrants had come from Third World countries. After the 1960s, more than three-quarters did.22 Anti-multiculturalists would come to liken the bill’s passage to the fall of the Alamo. But by 1983, the demographic shifts were so tangible that they could encourage civil rights activist Jesse Jackson to begin his unlikely candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Jackson felt the Democrats were increasingly slouching to the right, accommodating Nixon’s Southern strategy in their rush to court the shrinking population of white “Reagan Democrats.” Instead he chose to barnstorm Black churches through the South with a message to both the grassroots and the Party: “Reagan won by the margin of our nonparticipation.”23 The path to the future, Jackson argued in his signature rhyming cadences, lay in expanding, not abandoning, the Democratic base. “My constituency,” he told the 1984 Democratic National Convention, “is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.”
For the next five years Jackson gave activists a wealth of inspirational images—he was a veritable meme machine. The Iowan small farmer, the Native American environmentalist, the immigrant, the disabled veteran, gays, lesbians, youths—all, Jackson said, were part of an American quilt, “many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.” The following year, AIDS activist Cleve Jones began the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Jackson’s presidential aspirations ended with his 1988 loss to Michael Dukakis. But he had helped fire a movement’s imagination. He had incepted into the mainstream the prophetic images of the rainbow: the lapel button of the 1968 Third World Strike, the image of red, yellow, brown, black, and white fists coming together, echoed again in Romare Bearden’s 1973 commissioned artwork for the city of Berkeley, with its four faces in white, brown, tan, and black.
“Our flag,” Jackson had said in his 1984 speech, “is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight.”24
PUSHING OVER THE MELTING POT
In 1908, at the peak of European immigration and amid successful efforts to shut down Asian immigration, the Russian Jewish immigrant and activist Israel Zangwill wrote and staged a play called The Melting Pot. It became one of the biggest Broadway plays of its day, and fixed the century’s dominant American narrative around race and ethnicity in politics, pop culture, and sociology—the story of assimilation.
Zangwill’s play is about a poor immigrant musician named David Quixano, who is prone to speaking and acting in exclamations. At one point, Quixano says to his Old World uncle, “I keep faith with America. I have faith America will keep faith with us.” Then he starts praying to an American flag.
The play’s message was just as unsubtle: in America, all the ethnic hatreds, blood ties, and cultural bonds that had defined the Old World would dissolve and give rise to a new kind of global superman. Quixano is a migrant survivor of a Russian pogrom. But he falls in love with Vera, the daughter of Russian Cossacks. “America is God’s Crucible,” he exclaims to her, “the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!”
The couple splits for a moment when David learns that Vera’s father, Baron Revendal, presided over the massacre that killed most of his family back in Russia. Yet in the end they reconcile, because, well, that’s America. “Ah, Vera,” Quixano sighs, “what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and rac
es come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!”
Zangwill understood that the immigrant’s aggressive ambition was less threatening to white Americans when coupled with the promise that all that baggage of history and difference would be shed. Small wonder the metaphor remained so dominant for so long. But by the 1980s, the melting pot idea had run its course. There would no longer be just one way to be American.
Multiculturalism was about recognizing and representing how Black it was to be an American, how Latino, how Asian, how indigenous it was to be an American. Being American was a thousand narratives, not just one. Ishmael Reed and his friends Rudolfo Anaya, Shawn Wong, and Victor Hernández Cruz would write, “‘Multiculturalism’ is not a description of a category of American writing—it is a definition of all American writing.”25 They were writing about writing, as well as the history of writing, but they were also capturing the shape of a groundswell.
Through the decade, multiculturalists were founding art collectives, expanding alternative spaces, starting up journals, writing books. They were organizing street protests from the Bronx to Broadway to Sunset Boulevard against movies, plays, and TV shows they considered racist. They found platforms at universities, local and state agencies, and in the rapidly expanding network of community arts organizations. They were institutionalizing themselves. In the language of their activism, they were “building power,” working toward “cultural equity.”