Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (63 page)

DAYS BEFORE THE
mammoth Gary convention opened, Angela Davis’s trial finally began in California. “The evidence will show,” said prosecutor Albert Harris, “that her basic motive was not to free political prisoners, but to free the one prisoner that she loved.” The ownership of the gun, Davis’s flight, and her words of love in her diary and letters for George Jackson were supposed to convict her of first degree murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. All-White juries had convicted and meted out capital punishment for less. But not this jury, which acquitted Davis of all charges on June 4, 1972. She walked out of the clutches of the American penal system. But she walked out backward, looking at the women and men she left behind bars, and pledging the rest of her life to free them from slavery.
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Despite the law-and-order movement against activists, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails nationwide in 1972. This was far too many for Davis and the nation’s most well-respected criminologists, many of whom were predicting that the prison system would fade away. Sound anti-prison activism and ideas were having their effect. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals called the prison system a “failure”—a creator of crime rather than a preventer. The commission recommended
that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”
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After Davis’s acquittal, the more than 250 Free Angela defense committees received a communiqué from Davis. “Stay with us as long as racism and political repression” kept human beings “behind bars.” By May 1973, the defense committees had been organized into the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. President Nixon’s Watergate scandal heightened the contradictions on crime and prisons. All those Americans were serving prison terms, many of them for their political acts and views, while the champion of law and order, Richard Nixon, did not spend a day in prison for the Watergate scandal. When President Gerald Ford took office following Nixon’s resignation, he pardoned and immunized Nixon from prosecution.
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In the fall of 1975, Davis returned to academia. It was five years later, but she was still the center of controversy. Alumni were irate when she joined the faculty of the Claremont Colleges Black Studies Center in southern California. She found that the marketplace of ideas was the same as when she had left: segregationists were still imagining genetic differences between the races, and assimilationists were still trying to ascertain why their only hope for Black uplift—integration—had failed. Assimilationist sociologist Charles Stember argued in
Sexual Racism
(1976) that the White man’s sexual jealousy of the hypersexual Black man was the basis for the failure of integration. Sexual racism—the core of racism—was “largely focused” on the Black man, he maintained.
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At the same time, Stember downgraded the sexual racism faced by Black women and practically ignored the sexual racism faced by Black LGBTs. But LGBTs were hardly waiting on Stember. Since the interracial Stonewall rebellion in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1969, which had kicked off the gay liberation movement, Black LGBTs had two-stepped away from the margins of the women’s liberation, Black Power, and White gay liberation movements, starting their own new integrative dance of queer antiracism in the 1970s. New York native and lesbian writer Audre Lorde brilliantly “gave name” to these “nameless” life dances in her poetry, essays, and speeches. Non-Whites,
women, and LGBTs were “expected to educate” Whites, men, and heterosexuals to appreciate “our humanity,” Lorde said in one of her most famous speeches. “The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
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Black feminist Ntozake Shange used her creative antiracist energy to produce a play,
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf
, which debuted on Broadway on September 15, 1976. Seven Black women, named after colors of the rainbow, poetically and dramatically expressed their experiences of abuse, joy, heartbreak, strength, weakness, love, and longing for love.
For Colored Girls
emerged and reemerged as an artistic phenomenon over the next four decades on stages and screens as the “black feminist bible,” to quote University of Pennsylvania professor Salamishah Tillet. At every stop, Shange stood strong under the naïve crosswinds of the Black portrayals debates. Some were vocal about their fear that the play would strengthen racist conceptions of Black women; others feared it would strengthen racist conceptions of Black men.
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The argument over
For Colored Girls
endured for the rest of the decade. The same record started playing again, but much louder, in 1982 when Alice Walker penned her novel
The Color Purple
(and again in 1985 over Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film adaptation, and again in 1995 over the film
Waiting to Exhale
, a film about four African American women). Set in rural Georgia, Walker’s
The Color Purple
presents a Black woman negotiating (and finding) her way through the rugged confines of abusive Black patriarchs, abusive southern poverty, and abusive racist Whites. As the best-selling novel passed through thousands of hands, some readers (and probably more nonreaders) fumed at the portrayals of Black men. But if viewers of Shange’s play or Walker’s novel (or Spielberg’s film) walked away from the theater or closed the book and generalized Black men as abusers, then they were faulty, not the play, the novel, or the film. There has always been a razor-thin line between the racist portrayer of Black negativity and the antiracist
portrayer of imperfect Black humanity. When consumers have looked upon stereotypical Black portrayals as representative of Black behavior, instead of representative of those individual characters, then the generalizing consumers have been the racist problem, not the racist or antiracist portrayer. But this complex distinction, or the fact that positive Black portrayals hardly undermine racism, could never quite put an end to the senseless media portrayals arguments, which were inflamed yet again by the explosions of Hip Hop videos in the 1980s and 1990s and Black reality television in the twenty-first century.
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“WATCHING A PERFORMANCE
of ‘For Colored Girls’ one sees a collective appetite for Black male blood,” wrote sociologist Robert Staples in 1979 in “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists.” However, the angriest Black feminist of the era was the twenty-seven-year-old Michele Wallace. Ms. magazine presented the young Wallace on its January 1979 cover, advertising her erupting
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
as “the book that will shape the 1980s.” It certainly shaped the Black gender debate. Some hated her, some loved her for posing sexism as a greater concern than racism and for exposing the racist “myth of the black man’s castration” and the racist myth of the Black woman as a “woman of inordinate strength.” Wallace testified, “Even for me, it continues to be difficult to let the myth go” of the Black superwoman.
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But that’s where her antiracism stopped and her racist attacks on both Black women and Black men took over. After tossing out the Black superwoman portrait, Wallace painted the opposite portrait for her readers, the portrait of a Black woman who “forced herself to be submissive and passive” during the 1960s—a pronouncement poet June Jordan blasted in the
New York Times
as “unsubstantiated, self-demeaning,” and “ahistorical.” Angela Davis set the record straight on the meaningful and aggressive activism in the 1960s of Black women and Black men in
Freedomways
. Davis included men because, according to Wallace, “the black [male] revolutionary of the sixties calls to mind nothing so much as a child who is acting for the simple pleasure of the
reaction he will elicit from, the pain he will cause, his father”—“the White man.” In the foreword to the new edition eleven years later, Wallace bravely admitted some mistakes, and she took back her thesis that Black machoism was
the
“crucial factor in the destruction of the Black Power Movement.” To Wallace’s credit, she had still brought awareness to patriarchal Black masculinity as
a
crucial factor in the demise of Black Power.
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Only one woman elicited more debate than Michele Wallace in Black communities in 1979—and it was a White woman, the White woman that many assimilationists saw as the most beautiful woman in the world. In the movie
10
, Bo Derek wore her hair in cornrows with beads, setting off a mad dash of elite White women flocking to salons to get their “Bo Braids.” African Americans were angered reading the media coverage of the mad dash. Cornrows had arrived, media outlets announced, as if Whites were the sole carriers of culture. Around the same time, American Airlines fired ticket agent Renee Rogers for wearing cornrows. Racist Americans considered Afros, braids, locs, and other “natural” styles unprofessional. When Rogers sued for discrimination, the judge evoked “Bo Braids” in rejecting her claim that the style reflected her cultural heritage.
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Quite possibly the most passionate part of the furor over the Bo Braids was the widespread feeling that Bo Derek and her look-a-likes were appropriating from the storehouse of African American culture, a feeling that possibly stemmed from the dusty racist idea that European cultures could overpower African cultures. What was most amazing about the whole uproar—and similar White appropriation uproars that surrounded Eminem (rap music) and Kim Kardashian (bodily physique) decades later—was the hypocrisy of some Black people. Some of those Black people who had permed their hair—an appropriation of European culture—were now ridiculing Bo Derek and other White women for braiding their hair and appropriating African culture.

Bo Derek and her braided look-a-likes seemed to be everywhere in the early 1980s, annoying Black people. But the fashion trend did not nearly have the lasting power of the latest reinvention of ruling White masculinity. If
Planet of the Apes
epitomized racists’ defeated
sentiments in 1968, then the highest-grossing film of 1976, which won an Oscar for Best Picture, epitomized their fighting sentiment that year.
Rocky
portrayed a poor, kind, slow-talking, slow-punching, humble, hard-working, steel-jawed Italian journeyman boxer in Philadelphia facing off against the unkind, fast-talking, fast-punching, cocky African American World Heavy Champion. Rocky’s opponent, Apollo Creed, with his amazing avalanche of punches, symbolized the empowerment movements, the rising Black middle class, and the real-life heavyweight champion of the world in 1976, the pride of Black Power masculinity, Muhammad Ali. Rocky Balboa—as played by Sylvester Stallone—came to symbolize the pride of White supremacist masculinity’s refusal to be knocked out from the avalanche of civil rights and Black Power protests and policies.
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Weeks before Americans ran out to see
Rocky
, though, they ran out to buy Alex Haley’s
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
. And those who did not want to slog through the 704-page tome that claimed the No. 1 spot on the
New York Times
Best Seller List watched the even more popular television adaptation that started airing on ABC in January 1977, becoming the most watched show in US television history.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
shared the thrilling, tragic, and tumultuous story of Kunta Kinte, from his kidnapping in Gambia to his brutal crippling, which ended his incessant runaway attempts in Virginia. Claiming Kinte as his actual ancestor, Haley followed his life and the life of his descendants in US history down to himself. For African Americans in the radiance of Black Power’s broadening turn to antiracist Pan-African ideas, and starved for knowledge about their life before and during slavery,
Roots
was a megahit, one of the most influential works of the twentieth century.
Roots
unearthed legions of racist ideas of backward Africa, of civilizing American slavery, of the contented slave, of stupid and imbruted slaves, of loose enslaved women, and of African American roots in slavery. The plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind.
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But the new plantation genre of lazy Black rioters who knocked down Whites’ livelihoods—the poor through welfare, the upwardly
mobile through affirmative action—remained in the wind in the late 1970s. Thus, as much as antiracist Black Americans loved their roots, racist White Americans loved—on and off screen—their other Rocky, with his unrelenting fight for the law and order of racism. And then, in 1976, their Rocky ran for president.

CHAPTER 33

Reagan’s Drugs

IRONICALLY, IT WAS
a former Hollywood star who came to embody Rocky Balboa in real life; and at the same time, to embody the racist backlash to Black Power in politics. This real-life Rocky decided to challenge incumbent Gerald Ford for the presidential seat on the Republican ticket in 1976. Reagan fought down all those empowerment movements fomenting in his home state of California and across the nation. Hardly any other Republican politician could match his law-and-order credentials, and hardly any other Republican politician was more despised by antiracists. When Reagan had first campaigned for governor of California in 1966, he had pledged “to send the welfare bums back to work.” By 1976, he had advanced his fictional welfare problem enough to attract Nixon’s undercover racists to his candidacy, gaining their support in cutting the social programs that helped the poor. On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago’s Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. “Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000,” Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of $8,000, an exceptional amount for something that rarely happened. But truth did not matter to the Reagan campaign as much as feeding the White backlash to Black Power.
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