Event Summary: Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term

We were pleased to host an event on January 25th with the Washington Monthly to commemorate the release of their January/February issue which focuses on race throughout American history and particularly in light of Obama’s second term. Paul Glastris, the panel’s moderator and the editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly, explained the purpose of the event as breaking the “politically-imposed code of silence” on talking about race in the Obama administration. Few in the administration or even in the wider public are willing to speak openly about race in America, a fact which this event and the accompanying Washington Monthly issue seek to address.

Two authors and historians, Taylor Branch and Douglas Blackmon, joined the panel to offer a historical context to the contemporary debate about race in America. Branch’s biographical work on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights era more broadly permitted comparisons between the “chillingly contemporary” segregationist rhetoric from the middle of the twentieth century and today’s talking points by those who deny the pervasiveness of racial disparities. He calls this denial the “Reconstruction, post-Civil War blindness” that we are still in.

Blackmon offered unsettling revelations about the history of post-Emancipation slavery in the Deep South. As he explained, this shameful and forgotten period in American history was perpetuated by the inaction of an unwilling U.S. Justice Department that lacked statutory authority to enforce the promise of the thirteenth amendment and was fueled by a criminal justice system complicit in the interests of private capital.

The historians were joined by sociologist and author Elijah Anderson, who compared the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 as a way to introduce his concept of the “iconic ghetto” that pervades American assumptions about blacks and that amounts to a “pervasive cultural association” between black men and the ghetto. The lasting effects of slavery can be felt, he argued, through the rise of urban black ghettoes to the “deficit of credibility” experienced by black Americans of all socioeconomic classes today. Anderson described a sophistic, albeit unconscious, reasoning of most Americans: ghettoes are populated mainly by African Americans; so all blacks must be from the ghetto; therefore all blacks are associated with the moral degradation, lawlessness, and counter-cultural elements of the ghetto and so are unable to join the mainstream. Middle-class blacks are largely able to disabuse others of this perceived “deficit of credibility,” but low-income people face almost insurmountable difficulties in escaping a ghetto culture that is “inextricably intertwined” with blackness.

The panel was rounded out by Gail Christopher of the Kellogg Foundation, who offered the disconcerting reflection that because racism is so pervasive in our collective consciousness, we hardly notice it. America is structured around a racial hierarchy that is rarely noticed, especially by those on top, white Americans, who benefit the most from it. The story of black America has been cast as one of victimization, not triumph, she argues, because blacks don’t tell it—others do. To make America more equal, therefore, her work focuses on abolishing those underlying biases and assumptions, so pervasive in the media and in our culture, that contribute to divergent experiences and outcomes.

Watch the full event here and let us know what you think. You can also check out our tweets from the event @AssetsNAF.