Systemic Racism

The premise of this website is that individual stories can reveal larger patterns, and vice-versa: important truths can often be discerned in small or even forgotten details. In that spirit, I observe that today is the 102nd anniversary of one of the most notorious events in modern American history, the so-called Tulsa Race Riot [sic] of 1921. There are no less than a dozen thoughtful books on the subject, so readers who are unfamiliar with the riot -- better thought of as the massacre and dispossession of the black residents of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK -- are referred to those books, or to the reasonable synopsis on Wikipedia: Tulsa race massacre - Wikipedia. My attention is drawn, fractal style, to the larger pattern of which the Tulsa race "riot" was one example: systemic racism in American history.

Several years ago I attempted to visualize how racism and discrimination function in American life and throughout American history. It is of necessity a crude attempt to render such a complicated topic. But nevertheless I present for my readers’ consideration the following illustration:

The object here is several-fold. First, the graphic aims to account for the difference between what those of us who have studied “white supremacy” mean by the term, and what those who seek to deny white supremacy a place in American life mean by the term. Many white Americans consider racism and white supremacy to be purely psychological, an affliction of the mind, an emotional expression, and an individual orientation to prejudice. This narrow view of white supremacy is expressed in the personal: the use of racial epithets, the joining of a racist organization, the maintenance of personal racist standards (“I would never let my daughter date . . .”, etc.) By reducing white supremacy to the personal, the psychological, and the individual, practitioners and beneficiaries of white supremacy can deny that there is any systemic substance to racism at all. Hence the shop-worn denial of white supremacy with the altogether inadequate defense “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
 
Scholars, by contrast, understand personal racism to be merely the tip of an immense, widespread, interlocking, multi-layered, and adaptive system whereby African Americans and other minorities ultimately have their labor appropriated for the benefit of an advantaged white majority. This system is complex and inventive. I stress the creative and adaptive aspects of white supremacy because as a system, it has been required to be so. That is because white supremacy runs contrary both to the U.S. Constitution (as it has evolved in jurisprudence and law) and to the traditions of equality and human rights in which many Americans have professed belief. White supremacy is a system that has emerged in lockstep with the development of American capitalism (in various historical stages) and American empire, but also in opposition to American constitutionalism, and widespread American values of equality.
 
White supremacy’s adaptability is the story of Jim Crow in law and culture after the end of Reconstruction (c. 1877). Having been denied free labor by the 13th Amendment, most states of the former Confederacy enacted various restrictive laws and ordinances meant to control black movement, limit black economic freedom and political power, and determine black laboring conditions – the so-called post-Civil War “Black Codes.” In response, the federal government passed national civil rights legislation which it sought to enforce through federal power and also black political enfranchisement in the 14th and 15th Amendments. Those protections lasted, imperfectly to be sure, through the end of Reconstruction. When federal troops and other institutions of the federal presence were withdrawn in 1877, southern states and locales re-energized their anti-black campaigns, enacting new laws, new extra-legal procedures (such as poll taxes and literacy tests), a new policing presence, and a general campaign of terror (the KKK, lynching, urban and rural violence) to impose by extra-legal means the same set of limitations on black political and economic freedoms that could, barely plausibly, be said to conform to the post-Civil War Constitutional order. South Carolina’s state Constitution of 1895, for example, disenfranchised the state’s black population; the grounds of the state capitol building currently showcase a memorial statue to one of the principal architects of that racist constitution. 

Memorial statue to South Carolina's Ben Tillman, guiding political hand behind the state's 1895 constitution which barred African American suffrage. The statue features prominently on the grounds of the State House in Columbia, SC.

Where possible, southern states established a legal system that curbed black freedom while it evaded close Constitutional scrutiny; where that delicate balance could not be pulled off, white supremacists resorted to capricious violence, from lynching to what happened in Wilmington, NC in 1898 (Wilmington insurrection of 1898 - Wikipedia), a precursor to the Tulsa massacre in 1921. Back of those tactics was an enveloping Jim Crow culture of racist and stereotyped depictions (minstrelsy, blackface, etc.) familiar to students of American popular culture. Jim Crow, one might say, is the backfilling of the Constitutional order with the creative legacy of racism and white supremacy that we have never been able to expunge from our body politic.
 
What we have, in other words, is a system. It is a system because it is interlocking and productive of an outcome: the transference of black wealth to white ownership. It is imperfect in that it does not “catch” every individual. Enough escape the system to maintain plausible deniability. But the system works well enough that it has been difficult for most of the 20th century for very many African Americans to escape one layer without running afoul of another.
 
I hope to elaborate additional examples of how systemic white supremacy functioned in American life, and how the hierarchies white supremacy created inform the practices of the American empire. For now, one example, this time close to home. The University of South Carolina, during Reconstruction, was open to all citizens, and actually began to admit black students after its reopening in 1869; by the early 1870s, the majority of students enrolled were black. By 1877, the newly installed white supremacist government closed the university rather than continue to matriculate black students. When it reopened in 1881, it returned to its roots as a whites-only institution; that color bar remained in place until 1963, perfectly corresponding to the period of Jim Crow. This means that for more than eighty of its post-Civil War years, from 1881 to 1963, the University of South Carolina was supported in part by the taxes paid by citizens who were formally and officially barred from admission. The white students who were allowed to attend found the technical skills and social prestige that produced careers in banking, law, finance, architecture and the arts, education, and more. This is a textbook example of the system of white supremacy in place, of transferring the economic activity of a subservient class of imperial citizens into the generational wealth of a privileged class. Every public institution of higher education in the south, and many in the north, followed this same pattern.

 Tulsa, Wilmington, the University of South Carolina: these are fractals of a systemic pattern that is clear and evident throughout American history. Merely because we use the word "system" does not mean consistent, perfectly homogenous, or even uncontested. But the durability of racist beliefs, practices, and policies cannot be denied by any fair and knowledgeable observer of American history. Contemporary political attacks on the books and scholarship by which we understand white supremacy is just the latest iteration of this age-old process. Those attacks are the creativity and perdurability of white supremacy in action.
 
Further reading:
Scott Farris, Freedom on Trial: The First Post-Civil War Battle Over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression (Lyons Press, 2020)

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper, 2014)

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford, 2001)