Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (72 page)

“U.S. law guarantees the right to participate equally in elections,” the State Department had assured the United Nations. But on November 7, 2000, tens of thousands of Black voters in Governor Jeb Bush’s Florida were barred from voting or had their votes destroyed, allowing George W. Bush to win his brother’s state by fewer than five hundred votes and narrowly take the electoral college. It seemed ironically
normal. After triumphantly proclaiming to the United Nations their commitment to eliminating racism, local officials, state officials, the Supreme Court, and the US Senate executed or validated the racism that won a presidential election. “The tactics have changed, but the goal remains depressingly the same,” concluded
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert. “Do not let them vote! If you can find a way to stop them, stop them.”
¹³

Funding evangelical race healers and personal responsibility advocates, once in office President Bush tried and failed to slow the antiracist momentum of the late 1990s. Trans-Africa executive director Randall Robinson accelerated that momentum in 2000 with his best-selling reparations manifesto,
The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks
. Robinson’s reparations demands came on the heels of African nations demanding debt forgiveness and reparations from Europe. Meanwhile, the antiracist world was gearing up for one of the largest, most serious, most collaborative meetings in history. Nearly 12,000 women and men ventured to beautiful Durban, South Africa, for the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held from August 31 to September 7, 2001. Delegates passed around a report on the prison-industrial complex and women of color that had been coauthored by Angela Davis. They also identified the Internet as the latest mechanism for spreading racist ideas, citing the roughly 60,000 White supremacist sites and the racist statements so often made in comments sections following online stories about Black people. The United States had the largest delegation, and antiracist Americans established fruitful connections with activists from around the world, many of whom wanted to ensure that the conference kicked off a global antiracist movement. As participants started venturing back to Senegal and the United States and Japan, Brazil, and France around September 7, 2001, they carried their antiracist momentum around the world.
¹⁴

Then all this antiracist momentum smashed into a brick wall in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. After more than 3,000 Americans heartbreakingly lost their lives in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush condemned the “evil-doers,” the
insane “terrorists,” all the while promoting anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiments. Color-blind racists exploited the raw feelings in the post-911 moment, playing up a united, patriotic America where national defense had overtaken racial divides, and where antiracists and antiwar activists were threats to national security. But they could not exploit those feelings for long. Only 44 percent of African Americans endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, far less than the 73 percent of Whites or 66 percent of Latina/os.
¹⁵

By then, antiracists had regained their footing, inspired by California Newsreel’s definitive three-part educational documentary,
Race: The Power of an Illusion
, released in April 2003. Months earlier, a comedian known for starring in
Half Baked
(1998) debuted his show on Comedy Central. Dave Chappelle performed a hysterical skit of a blind White supremacist, who thinks he is White, and who spits out anti-Black ideas like tobacco. In the end he tragically—or, for the viewer, comically—learns he is a Black man. Of all the notable antiracist sketches he did, that first sketch of the racist Black man may have been Chappelle’s most clever and memorable. Millions replayed it on YouTube long after its original airing on January 22, 2003. The ever-popular
Chappelle’s Show
aired for three seasons until 2006, routinely demonstrating the absurdity of the New Republicans’ color-blind America.
¹⁶

Many Republicans assumed, given the alleged “end of racism,” that affirmative action would soon be on its way out. But shockingly, on June 23, 2003, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor issued a majority opinion upholding the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy, citing a “compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” Somewhat pleased, supporters of affirmative action reasoned that the Supreme Court had upheld affirmative action because having some Black students around benefited the interests of White students in the increasingly multiethnic nation and globalizing world. O’Connor’s ruling added a time limit to the judgment, saying, “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” O’Connor’s judgment was way off, according to United for a Fair Economy researchers. The racial “parity date” at
the existing pace of gradual equality was not twenty-five years, but five-hundred years, and for some racial disparities, thousands of years from 2003. The defenders of affirmative action were still relieved that O’Connor had saved it, for now.
¹⁷

That pace toward racial parity could be quickened if the racial preferences of standardized testing were eradicated. But the use of standardized testing grew exponentially in K–12 schooling when the Bush administration’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act took effect in 2003. Under the act, the federal government compels states, schools, and teachers to set high standards and goals and to conduct regular testing to assess how well the students are reaching them. It then ties federal funding to the testing scores and progress to ensure that students, teachers, and schools are meeting those standards and goals. The bill professed that its purpose was to keep children from being left behind, but it simultaneously encouraged funding mechanisms that decrease funding to schools when students are not making improvements, thus leaving the neediest students behind. The No Child Left Behind Act was not supposed to make sense. It was the latest and greatest mechanism for placing the blame for funding inequities on Black children, teachers, parents, and public schools. And this victim blaming watered the growth of the quickening “No Excuses” charter school movement, which ordered
children
to rise above their difficult circumstances, and blamed (and expelled) these
children
if they could not.
¹⁸

Scientists know that, developmentally, when children are sick or hurt, or confused or angry, one of the ways they express those feelings is through acting out, because children have difficulty identifying and communicating complex feelings (over things like hunger or parental incarceration or police harassment). While misbehaving White children have received compassion and tolerance—as they should—misbehaving Black children have been more likely to hear “No Excuses” and to be on the receiving end of zero tolerance and handcuffs. More than 70 percent of students arrested at school during the 2009–2010 school year were Black or Latina/o, according to Department of Education statistics.
¹⁹

Assimilationists hailed the No Child Left Behind Act’s explicit goal of narrowing the racial achievement gap, drowning out segregationists, who were saying that Black children were incapable of closing the achievement gap, and antiracists, who did not believe in the existence of an achievement gap, since it was predicated on standardized test scores, which they viewed as invalid. In the early 1970s, many Americans were imagining a world without prisons. In the early 1980s, many Americans were imagining a world without standardized tests. But racism had progressed since then. On the fiftieth anniversary of the
Brown
decision in 2004, a world without standardized testing seemed to many as unimaginable as a world without prisons, despite both keeping millions of Black young people behind bars.

And the anniversary of the
Brown
decision and discourse on Black education invariably brought out the racist ideas about what was wrong with Black parents. No one was better suited to that task than Bill Cosby, who had once been considered the model Black parent during the run of
The Cosby Show
. “The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting,” Cosby said in Washington, DC, after being honored at an NAACP gala in May 2004. “They are buying things for kids. $500 sneakers for what? And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics. I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.”

Bill Cosby took his racist ideas on the road, causing a rash of debates between racists and antiracists. Sociologist Michael Eric Dyson shot back, knocking Cosby down from his high horse in his acclaimed 2005 book,
Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?
“All the self-help in the world will not eliminate poverty or create the number of good jobs needed to employ the African American community,” historian Robin D.G. Kelley added.
²⁰

During Cosby’s “blame-the-poor tour,” as Dyson termed it, the rising star of the Democratic Party subverted Cosby’s message during his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 27, 2004. His star had appeared across the political landscape back in March, at the time of his stunning victory in the Illinois
Democratic primary for a US Senate seat. But it was his convention address before 9 million viewers that solidified his stardom. Working people of all kinds, from “small towns and big cities,” were already taking responsibility, Barack Obama declared. “Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.” A booming applause interrupted Obama as his rebuke of the lecturing Cosby settled in. Also settling in were his affirmations of No Child Left Behind’s high expectations, instead of high funding, and his pronouncement of the never-proven “acting white” achievement theory.

Barack Obama presented himself as the embodiment of racial reconciliation and American exceptionalism. He had had humble beginnings and a lofty ascent, and in him both native and immigrant ancestry and African and European ancestry came together. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story . . . and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” he declared. “America, tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do, if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country . . . the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president.”
²¹

Bush’s Republicans, intent on stopping that rise, took their Black voter suppression techniques from Florida to Ohio in 2004. Kerry lost the election, of course, and Bush and his tactics seemed poised to embody the future of the Republican Party. But Barack Obama seemed poised to embody the future of the Democratic Party.

CHAPTER 37

The Extraordinary Negro

TWO WEEKS AFTER
his exhilarating keynote address, Barack Obama’s memoir,
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
, was republished. It rushed up the charts and snatched rave reviews in the final months of 2004. Toni Morrison, the queen of American letters, and the editor of Angela Davis’s iconic memoir three decades earlier, deemed
Dreams from My Father
“quite extraordinary.” Obama had written the memoir in the racially packed year of 1995 as he prepared to begin his political career in the Illinois Senate. In his most antiracist passage, Obama reflected on assimilated biracial Blacks like “poor Joyce,” his friend at Occidental College. In Joyce and other Black students, he “kept recognizing pieces of myself,” he wrote. People “like Joyce” spoke about “the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective.’ Only white culture could be ‘nonracial.’ . . . Only white culture had ‘individuals.’”

Obama’s antiracist litany continued in his critical revelation of the “extraordinary Negro” complex. “We, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, . . . [are] never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less
fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives—although that’s what we tell ourselves—but because [we] . . . have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don’t you know who I am? I’m an
individual
!”
¹

Ironically, racist Americans of all colors would in 2004 begin hailing Barack Obama, with all his public intelligence, morality, speaking ability, and political success, as the extraordinary Negro. The extraordinary-Negro hallmark had come a mighty long way from Phillis Wheatley to Barack Obama, who became the nation’s only African American in the US Senate in 2005. Since Wheatley, segregationists had despised these extraordinary-Negro exhibits of Black capability and had done everything to take them down. But Obama—or rather Obama’s era—was different. Segregationists turned their backs on their predecessors and adored the Obama exhibit as a proclamation of the end of racism. They wanted to end the discourse on discrimination.