The Right Wing Reboots Segregation
By Patricia J. Williams
The Nation
January 6, 2011
http://www.thenation.com/article/157530/right-wing-reboots-segregation
As we pass from 2010 to the new year, Congress resumes
in its conservative-dominated configuration. This new
wave is sustained by a right-wing power base informed
by ideologues who would eviscerate the Fourteenth
Amendment's promise of equality by restricting voting
rights and limiting public expenditures on the
"parasites" who leech off the welfare of "their"
Many of these views, while wrapped in Ayn Rand's
individualist "ethical egoism," protect a political and
social order based on wealth and impermeable group
privilege, one also rooted in a segregationist "us
versus them" mentality, albeit persisting well beyond
the racial divide. Christians versus others. Natives
versus immigrants. English-only speakers versus snooty
cosmopolitans. Inherited privilege versus equality as birthright.
Consider these recent salvos
Russell Pearce is so concerned about the "hijacking" of
the Fourteenth Amendment that he has sponsored a bill
that would refuse issuance of state birth certificates
to children born here whose parents are not legal
citizens. Rand Paul, freshman senator from Kentucky,
believes that the Fair Housing Act is wrong because "a
free society will abide unofficial, private
discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-
filled groups to exclude people based on the color of
their skin." John Cook, the very public member of the
Texas State Republican Executive Committee, wants to
replace Republican Joe Straus, who is Jewish, as
speaker of the
"We elected a House with Christian, conservative
values. We now want a true Christian, conservative
running it." And Judson Phillips, head of the Tea Party
Nation, has endorsed "the original intent" of
restricting voting rights to citizens who are property
holders because "if you're a property owner, you
actually have a vested stake in the community."
Many policies originally promulgated to maintain
economic supremacy by controlling the movement and
political force of blacks in the
have come full circle, afflicting not just recent
immigrants but poor and middle-class white people. One
vivid example is the fate of Gene Cranick, an elderly,
wheelchair-bound white resident of
house in October, the fire department arrived, only to
watch his home burn to the ground because Cranick had
not paid a $75 yearly "pay to spray" fee. Cranick had
the misfortune to live in an unincorporated area that
had the limited services historically associated with
black neighborhoods-when fire, sewer and police
services would stop at the edge of a town based on the
lines of segregation. Richard Kluger's book Simple
Justice relates how in the 1950s civil rights activist
Joseph DeLaine's
targeted by arsonists
Summerton fire department were on hand as the wooden
house burned to the ground, but they made no effort to
put out the flames because DeLaine's house, they said,
was beyond the town limits. And it was-by 100 feet."
(For those interested in the details of the legal and
political battles for the Fourteenth Amendment's
promise of equal citizenship, I highly recommend
Patricia Sullivan's Lift Every Voice
Making of the Civil Rights Movement.)
Just a few weeks ago, while speaking of his youth in
Yazoo City, Mississippi, during the most violent times
of the civil rights movement, Governor Haley Barbour
became positively misty
being that bad." How bad wasn't it? According to
Barbour, the White Citizens' Council heroically ensured
school integration and bravely kept the Ku Klux Klan at
bay. In fact, the White Citizens' Council set up a
system of all-white private academies that left
all woefully underfunded. It is true that to some
degree the White Citizens' Council often took public
stances in opposition to the KKK, yet this professed
opposition was not because it was in favor of blacks'
civil rights but because Klan violence attracted
international attention, which was often "bad for
business." So instead the council tended to espouse
resistance to integration through economic threats and
the isolation of entire communities.
Indeed, Haley's elder brother Jeppie was elected mayor
of
isolation of any blacks (or whites) who pressed for
integration. Willie Morris's 1971 book
Integration in a Deep-Southern Town details what Jeppie
described as blacks' efforts to "get us on our knees so
they can tell us what to do." "When I came into office
I intended to get some paving and some sewage
improvements for the colored," Jeppie said. "But now I
can't get too enthusiastic about it." The time might
come, Jeppie warned, for the whites to retaliate with
firings and other measures.
Recently, The Huffington Post ran excerpts from a 1956
article by David Halberstam in which Nick Roberts of
the
one of fifty-three blacks who had signed an integration
petition withdrew their names
and you believe in something, and that man is working
against it and undermining it, why you don't want him
working for you-of course you don't." This sort of
thinking imagines the collective power of the White
Citizens' Council as nothing more than the individual
choices of "a man" in dealing with "that man"-both of
whom are syntactically equally endowed with options and
opportunities. In the aggregate, however, these
"preferences" become insidious disguises for a
gangsterish mentality by which the endowed "we"
eliminates anything but the narrowest sense of
community. The rest of the polity, marked as "them,"
remain alien-all while being chided to pay and pay and
pay in order to play. That this creates a controlling
class of the economically privileged-to wit, an
oligarchy-seems utterly lost on the ground these days.
_________
Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at
___________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment