Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (67 page)

SEVERAL DOZEN LEGAL
scholars met at a convent outside of Madison, Wisconsin, on July 8, 1989, as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” topped Billboard charts. They came together to forge an antiracist intellectual approach known as “critical race theory.” Thirty-year-old UCLA legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw organized the
summer retreat the same year she penned “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” The essay called for “intersectional theory,” the critical awareness of gender racism (and thereby other intersections, such as queer racism, ethnic racism, and class racism). “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices,” Crenshaw wrote three years later in another pioneering article in the
Stanford Law Review
. Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, the early formulators of critical race theory in law schools, were also in attendance at the 1989 summer coming-out party for critical race theory. One of the greatest offshoots of the theory was critical Whiteness studies, investigating the anatomy of Whiteness, racist ideas, White privileges, and the transition of European immigrants into Whiteness. Critical race theorists, as they came to be called, joined antiracist Black Studies scholars in the forefront of revealing the progression of racism in the 1990s.
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Angela Davis, a professor at San Francisco State University, working from the same antiracist intellectual traditions, was also calling attention to the progression of racism. “African Americans are suffering the most oppression since slavery,” Davis thundered at California State University at Northridge in 1990. Her speech angered believers in racial progress. After all, African Americans possessed 1 percent of the national wealth in 1990, after holding 0.5 percent in 1865, even as the Black population remained at around 10 to 14 percent during that period. “Our country is now replete with many blacks in positions of prestige and power,” which was “certainly a far cry from the ‘worst oppression since slavery,’” someone wrote in a miffed letter to the editor of the
Los Angeles Times
. It was not outside societal forces that were responsible for “impregnating unmarried girls” and forcing “young blacks to drop out of school and into drug-dealing, into gangs and into killing.” No one had compelled Ugandans to “kill and oppress each other,” or caused Ethiopia to make “such a mess of its economy” that its citizens were “dependent on handouts from capitalists to survive.” Apparently, in the United States and Africa, racists were imagining that it was Black-on-Black ethnic warfare and corruption, along with welfare handouts, that were causing global Black poverty
and political instability and the lingering socioeconomic disparities between White and Black Americans and between Europe and Africa. In a much friendlier manner, Ronald Reagan echoed the letter writer’s projection of global African incompetence when he spoke in England following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The end of the Cold War had “robbed much of the West of its common, uplifting purpose,” Reagan declared. Americans and their allies should unite “to impose civilized standards of human decency” on the rest of the world.
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In the United States, it was poor, young Black women whom racists of all races supposed needed the greatest imposition of civilized standards of human decency. Producers and reproducers of racist ideas were saying that it was their loose sexual behavior—and not the actual declining number of Black children to married Black couples—that was causing the increase in the
percentage
of children born to Black single mothers. Assimilationists argued that these young Black women could one day learn to discipline themselves sexually (like White women). Segregationists argued that they could not, advocating sterilization policies or long-term contraceptives. In December 1990, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the long-term contraceptive implant Norplant, despite its gruesome side effects. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
ran an editorial in support of it entitled “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” The paper advocated Norplant—not an urban jobs bill—as a solution to the poverty of Black children.

While antiracists spit outrage at the editorial, Angela Davis emerged as one of the few voices condemning the ongoing denial of the sexual agency of young Black women. But Black and White racists rushed to the
Inquirer
’s defense. Louisiana legislator David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, made a campaign out of it. He ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 on a pledge to reduce the number of Black welfare recipients by funding their implantations of Norplant. Duke’s plan was shrewd. Even though most Blacks eligible for welfare did not utilize it, one study found that 78 percent of White Americans thought Blacks preferred to live on welfare. Duke lost the election
even though the majority of Louisiana Whites voted for him. The next day, the
New York Times
printed a photo of a poor White welfare recipient who had voted for Duke because Blacks, she said, “just have those babies and go on welfare.” The picture symbolized the power of racist ideas. Low-income Whites could be manipulated into voting for politicians who intended to slice their welfare, just as middle-income Whites were being manipulated into voting for politicians whose policies were increasing the socioeconomic inequities between the middle and upper classes.
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INSPIRED BY SOCIOLOGIST
Patricia Hill Collins’s 1990 volume
Black Feminist Thought
, Black feminists led the campaign to ban Norplant. The negative portrayals of young Black women in the Norplant debate never failed to leave them outraged. Some Black feminists were less outraged about the sexist portrayals of women in Hip Hop, viewing “sexism in rap as a necessary evil” or a reflection of sexism in American society, according to Michele Wallace’s report in the
New York Times
on July 29, 1990. Wallace revealed the recent rise of women rappers, such as Salt-n-Pepa, M. C. Lyte, and the “politically sophisticated” Queen Latifah.
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Women rappers fared better than their sisters in Hollywood, because at least their art was in mass circulation. Aside from Julie Dash’s pioneering
Daughters of the Dust
, Black men were the only ones producing major Black films in 1991. These included illustrious films like Mario Van Peebles’s
New Jack City;
John Singleton’s debut antiracist tragedy
Boyz N the Hood;
and Spike Lee’s acclaimed
Jungle Fever. Jungle Fever
got people arguing about Black men cheating on Black women with White women; about interracial relations being “jungle fever,” not love; about the discrimination that interracial couples faced; about whether anything was wrong with Black women (causing Black men to date White women); and about how “there ain’t no good Black men out there,” because all the Black men were “drug addicts, homos,” or “dogs,” to quote one character. Some moviegoers defended the anti-racist truth: that there was nothing wrong with Black women or Black
men as a group. Some consumed Spike Lee’s satire at face value, probably not realizing that no good Black women plus no good Black men equaled no good Black people—equaled racist ideas.
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Black men produced more films in 1991 than during the entire 1980s. But a White man, George Holliday, shot the most influential racial film of the year on March 3 from the balcony of his Los Angeles apartment. He filmed ninety grueling seconds of four Los Angeles Police Department officers savagely striking Rodney King, a Black taxi driver. Holliday sent the footage to TV stations, and TV stations started broadcasting it across the country, from urban communities that had been suffering under the baton of aggressive policing for years to suburban and rural communities that had been cheering the aggressive policing of inner-city communities for years. Charges of assault with a deadly weapon and the use of excessive force were quickly filed against the four LAPD officers. In the emotional swing, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” reemerged with a social vengeance in thumping cars and on screaming televisions. President Bush condemned the beating, but he did not back down from the tough-on-crime mantra that he had ridden to the White House. It was a political mandate that the LAPD had executed on trampled and imprisoned Black bodies as efficiently as any department in the nation. Politicians created law-and-order America, but the police officers were the pawns carrying out the policies.
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Bush’s political dancing on the King beating angered antiracists as spring turned into summer. He fanned the fury on July 1, 1991, when he nominated a Black jurist, Clarence Thomas, to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Thomas saw himself as a paragon of self-reliance, even though he had needed antiracist activism and policies to get him into Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, and even though he had needed his racist Blackness to get him into the Reagan administration in 1981, first as assistant secretary of education for the Office of Civil Rights. He had been the backseat driver of antiracist and racist forces throughout his career. And now, Bush had called Thomas to the Supreme Court, claiming he was the “best qualified at this time,” a judgment that sounded as ridiculous as those officers trying to justify the beating of Rodney King. The “best
qualified” forty-three-year-old Thomas had served as a judge for all of fifteen months.
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During Thomas’s formal confirmation hearings in the Senate that fall, Anita Hill, who had been his assistant at the Education Department and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), testified. She accused Thomas of sexual harassment and gender discrimination during their tenure in government employment. Thomas denied the allegations, framing it a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves.” The frenzied Senate confirmation arguments that followed spilled out into the rest of America, making the summertime arguments over
Jungle Fever
seem mild. Again and again, Hill’s defenders spoke out, arguing that the defamation of Black womanhood and the lack of awareness of sexual harassment was preventing Americans from believing her testimony. Thomas’s defenders, meanwhile, argued that it was another case of the Black man being cut down. Gender racists generalized Thomas and Hill to weigh in on what was wrong with Black men or Black women. In the end, Thomas was narrowly confirmed on October 15, 1991. But the defenders of Hill and of Black women did not walk quietly into the night. “We cannot tolerate this type of dismissal of any one Black woman’s experience,” several hundred Black women wrote in a protest advertisement in the
New York Times
a month later.
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Clarence Thomas joined a US Supreme Court that had gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, compelling Congress to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act over Reagan and Bush vetoes. The teeth of the bill bit down on provable “intentional discrimination,” hardly touching the octopus arms of discrimination that had privately grown in the past three decades, causing very public racial disparities up and down the job market, from Black professionals receiving less pay than their White counterparts to Black workers being forced into the dead-end service industry. White workers and professionals had come to widely believe that they must secretly help their racial fellows in the job market, on the false assumption that government policies were helping Blacks more than Whites. Discriminating Whites had replaced the
“old black-inferiority rationale for exclusion” by a more sophisticated affirmative action rationale for exclusion. It was a new racist theory to justify an old job discrimination. As for the racial disparities in unemployment rates, the newest racist theory was that African Americans’ “refusal to lower their demands helps keep them jobless,” as NYU political scientist Lawrence Mead stated. Racists cleverly avoided the question of whether jobless Whites were more willing to lower their demands. Instead, they dispatched their ethnic racism, regarding African Americans as less industrious, more welfare dependent, and less willing to lower their job demands than non-White immigrants.
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African Americans were making millions in the entertainment industry. But not all was well there, either. On November 7, 1991, HIV-positive Ervin “Magic” Johnson suddenly retired from the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. Vowing to “battle this deadly disease,” he became the overnight heterosexual face of the presumed White gay disease. After a long and torturous and murderously oppressive decade in the 1980s, HIV-positive men and women were finally starting to be seen as innocent victims of a disease by the early 1990s. But Johnson’s public announcement, his face, and his admission of multiple sexual partners instigated a shift in perceptions of HIV and AIDS. The “gay White disease” affecting innocent victims—and necessitating protective politics—transformed into a “Black disease” affecting ignorant, hypersexual, callous marauders, and necessitating punitive policies to control them.
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FOR ANGELA DAVIS
, 1991 began with outrage over the physical lashing of Rodney King and ended with outrage over the verbal lashing of Anita Hill. The year also ended for Davis in an unfamiliar place. She had taken a new professorship at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and she stepped away from the Communist Party after spending twenty-three years as the most recognizable Communist in the heartland of global capitalism. On the eve of the twenty-fifth CPUSA National Convention in Cleveland in December 1991, Davis joined with about eight-hundred other members to draft and sign an
initiative critical of the party’s racism, elitism, and sexism. In a punishing response, none of the signatories were reelected to office. They bolted the CPUSA.
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