Race: The Enduring Problem of the 20th Century

Julian Bond is Chairman of the Board of the NAACP. The following article is reprinted with permission from Double Exposure: Poverty and Race in America, Chester Hartman, Ed., M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

The scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois accurately predicted that "The problem of the 20th Century will be the problem of the color line." Not only was he correct, but his forecast is easily carried over to the century to come; race will continue to mark our society. The evidence of race's salience is everywhere.

The 1994 congressional election results were the product of an electorate divided even more than usual by race and gender. That Congress's new leadership was more hostile to equality than the Democrats they replaced. On a civil rights report card prepared by the NAACP, they fail: with 100 percent as a perfect grade, they averaged 21 percent in the House and 36 percent in the Senate. For racial minorities, the results have meant at least two years--maybe more-- revisiting and refighting battles many thought had already been fought and won.

That political shift will further segment Americans by race and wealth: tax cuts for the well-to do; a noose around the neck of programs to aid low-income persons; slamming shut the courthouse door for poor Americans; a cutback in aid to cities, where most minorities live; and an assault on the laws and regulations that require fair hiring and equal opportunity.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have carried forward the assault on fairness, attacking affirmative action, limiting the scope of the historic 1954 school integration decision, and restricting application of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Incidents of racial animus are everywhere, from church burnings to racially motivated denials of jobs, housing, education, and even service at fast-food restaurants.

The modern movement for civil rights and racial justice is rightly called the Second Reconstruction, named after the single period in modern American history, following the Civil War, when the national government insisted on and enforced civil rights for Black Americans. Today, Black Americans face prospects eerily similar to those they faced in the period following the first Reconstruction.

Then, white Americans grew tired of worrying about the welfare of the newly freed slaves, tired of fighting to secure their right to vote.

Then, as now, scientific racism and social Darwinism were in vogue.

Then, as now, a race-weary nation decided problems of race could best be solved if left to the individual states.

Then, as now, minorities and immigrants became scapegoats for real and imagined economic distress.

Then, a reign of state-sanctioned and private terror, including ritual human sacrifice, swept across the South to reinforce white supremacy. The heavy hand of legal racial segregation descended across the region, a cruel cotton curtain that separated Blacks from every opportunity. The modern civil rights movement vanquished legal racial exclusion by the mid-1960s. Blacks won access to public places and the voting booth, and the fabric of segregation began to come undone. The modern civil rights movement's origins lay in a bitter struggle for elemental civil rights. In the post-segregation era, it has largely become a movement for economic and political power. Today, Black women and men hold office and wield power in numbers barely dreamed of before.

But despite impressive increases in the number of Black people holding public office, despite the hard-won ability to eat, ride, vote, and go to school in places that used to bar Black faces, in some important ways nonwhite Americans face restrictions more difficult to attack now than in all preceding years.

Despite its victories, the modern civil rights movement foundered in several ways. The McCarthy period of the 1950s made anticommunism a secular religion; it permeated the popular discourse and isolated the civil rights movement from any economic critiques of the American order. The movement had wrongly classified segregation and racism as the same evil; banishing the first would shortly eliminate the second, advocates believed. By underestimating the endurance of racial supremacy the movement celebrated too swiftly. It could not mount battles against extralegal white supremacy as effectively as it had against state-authorized apartheid.

While the movement floundered, race remained the organizing principle of American politics. As long ago as 1964, the Republican Party began to remake itself as the white people's party.

Today, the United Nations, Washington bureaucrats, homosexuals, and advocates for women's rights have replaced the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. Neoracists found a winning electoral formula at the intersection of race and activist government.

The civil rights movement's very successes were its undoing. As more minorities and women pushed for, and gained, entry to the academy, media, business, and other traditionally white male institutions, a backlash was created in the discourse over race. The previously privileged majority exploded in angry resentment at having to cede space to the formerly excluded. Suddenly, white men became a victim class. Aggressive Blacks and pushy women were blamed for America's demise. Any indictment of white America was abandoned. Instead, a "Susan Smith defense" was adopted --Black people did it, did it to the country, did it to themselves. Black behavior, not white racism, became the reason why Blacks and whites lived in separate worlds. Racism retreated, and pathology advanced. The burden of racial problem-solving shifted from racism's creators to its victims. The failure of the lesser breeds to enjoy society's fruits became their fault alone.

In the 1890s, bruised and beaten, the movement for social justice and racial equality reached a nadir, seemingly devoid of hope. It rebounded, fought noble fights, and won great victories. But those victories need to be secured. Many of the battles must be fought and won again.

Yesterday's battlefield had many combatants who represented America's diversity. Today's battles cannot become fights of Blacks and other nonwhites against whites.

No one will win that fight.