Nixonland

I'm borrowing the title of this post from Rick Perlstein's stellar political history of America from 1965 to 1972.  He began his book about Nixon's rise to power with the 1965 unrest in Watts, and how the reaction to it helped get the likes of Ronald Reagan elected governor of California.  Perlstein deftly pointed out how Nixon used the social divisions of the 1960s, and especially white fears about newly emboldened blacks, to gain and consolidate power.  That original insight of Nixon's has been used by conservatives ever since, from Reagan's talk of "welfare queens" to the War on Drugs to George HW Bush's Willie Horton ad to Fox News' obsession with the New Black Panther Party.

Nixon's calls for "law and order" in the wake of sixties protest set the stage for a now forty-five year escalation of police force and power.  (His associating his opponents with disorder and chaos was most flagrantly expressed in his 1968 campaign's "Convention" ad.)  This escalation has led to America incarcerating its people at a higher level than any other nation in the world and police forces that have been placed above the law.  If you ask me, this is part and parcel of the neoliberal project.  Supply-side economics inevitably means misery for the poor and working class, and to prevent unrest in those quarters, its members have been thrown in jail.  Prisons are then privatized, leading to yet another boon for the wealthy.

The protests related to Ferguson are crucially important for a lot of reasons.  Ultimately, I feel that they are a true challenge to the aforementioned forty-five year counterrevolution, one whose violence has fallen hardest on African Americans.  In response to the protests, the Silent Majority has reared its ugly head yet again.  Since the Clinton era, Democrats have been trying to out-police the Republicans, hoping never again to be accused of being soft on crime.   The broad white middle class population has thus accepted the logic of the counterrevolution, regardless of political party.  Now that the four decade counterrevolution is being challenged, and policing seriously questioned on a national level, they are lashing out.  Just take a look at the anger provoked by the St. Louis Rams when they dared to quietly and peacefully acknowledge the Ferguson protests when they took the field this Sunday.

We are truly at a crossroads.  This country could finally break the spell of that old sorcerer Richard Nixon and repudiate our draconian, unjust, cruel, and racist justice system.  Or it could double down and stay on the same course.  We're still living in Nixonland, but I can only hope not for much longer, even though it looks like the Silent Majority is still alive and kicking.

Ferguson And Why We Need History

There's not much original or insightful I can say about the lack of an indictment yesterday.  I knew it was coming, but still felt horrible last night, similar to the horror I felt the night of George Zimmerman's acquittal.  I came to school today and thought about the young men of color in my classroom and despaired over their safety in a world where a man like Darren Wilson can kill without punishment.  Like a lot of people, I am feeling a whole welter of emotions that I am having a hard time expressing.

Instead of doing the impossible, I'd rather make an observation.  Ferguson, more than anything else in recent years, has convinced me of the importance of history.  Michael Brown's death, Darren Wilson's acquittal, and even the very residential space of Ferguson only make sense when viewed in historical context.  There is a very long, very bloody, and absolutely horrific history of men of color being killed in public by white men without punishment.  That awful history is tied to another history of turning black men into superhuman creatures in need of destruction, or "demons" in the words of Wilson.  There is a similar history, specifically, of police brutality and police violence and a jury rigged to prevent African Americans from getting justice.  There is another history, of redlining, white flight, and disenfranchisement.  There is also a history of urban unrest protesting injustice and brutality. If you try to understand Ferguson as an isolated event, detached from these histories, you will be woefully misled.

But that's what our news media and conventional wisdom does.  That fits the general tenor of white American life, which refuses to grapple with the past unless it is the usual patriotic narrative of freedom triumphant.  The main paradigm of American society sees individuals as the complete masters of their fate, never beholden to larger social and historical structures.  It is a paradigm born out of our vulgar consumer society, where we are constantly reminded of our choices.  That consumerism does political work too, in that encourages colorblind racism, and the inability for so many white people to understand where inequality comes from, among other blindnesses.  Most white Americans look at the nation's urban landscape and seem to think that the black and brown ghettoes, white subdivisions, and gentrified chic neighborhoods are somehow natural occurrences, like the hills and the rivers.

A lot of the ignorance and foolishness I have seen and heard by those unable to comprehend the reaction to Wilson's acquittal is based around seeing the events in Ferguson outside of any historical context.  "Why are "they" so angry?" is what I keep hearing.  Michael Brown's death and Darren Wilson's apparent profiting from that death with contributions and TV interviews ought to be reason enough, but context also really matters.

My fellow historians, your society needs you.  We need to go out and set things straight.  We need to go out in public and interpret the wonderful if obscure academic histories for the masses, who need to know the context of what they are seeing.  We need to do it because no one else will do it.  The price of inaction is too high.

Track of the Week: Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Sonny's Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem)"

The death of Michael Brown and the protests in Ferguson have got me thinking about songs that deal with police brutality and injustice.  One of the more powerful comes from Linton Kwesi Johnson, a Jamaican-British poet and singer who more people ought to know.  His song "Sonny's Lettah" takes the point of view of a young black man writing a letter to his mother from prison.  He had seen his brother being beaten by the police in a random stop on "suspicion" of possessing marijuana, the British equivalent of "stop and frisk," which this song is condemning.  Under the "sus law" the police could arrest anyone they felt might be possibly committing or about to commit a crime, and it was predictably applied in a racist fashion.  Sonny steps in to help his brother and in attacking one of the cops, kills him.

The rhythm to the song is supremely groovy and insistent without burying the words.  Johnson reads them off in the sad and world weary voice of a young person who has experienced too much life too soon.  It is a harrowing song and avoids the maudlin preachiness of so much protest music in favor of bringing to life the story of someone trapped by an unjust system.  It's not just an effective approach from an aesthetic viewpoint, since the sus law was repealed in 1981 in response to outcry against it.  It gives me hope that despite all of the horrible miscarriages of justice we see on the streets year after year, that something can be done about it.

Putting Ferguson In Historical Context

Events in Ferguson have really opened up a public discourse in the mainstream that has usually been left on the margins.  Concerns about the militarization of the police, institutional racism, the violence used by the police against unarmed black men, and restrictions on First Amendment rights are all getting a lot of deserved attention.  It's been particularly interesting for me as a historian to see a lot of talk about historical analogies with the 1960s.

In the more popular discourse, you might see people comparing images of Ferguson in 2014 with those of Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965.  The smarter marks, however, have been thinking about the urban uprisings by African Americans in northern cities during that time, and have returned to the Kerner Commission's report about them.  Northern whites have a tendency to want to blame their Southern counterparts for racism, and thus absolve themselves in the bargain.  One way to dispel this convenient hypocrisy is to make people confront their own history, not just what happened in Alabama, as awful as that was.

If you look at uprisings and riots in northern cities in the 1960s, you'll find more than your share of police brutality a la Bull Connor.  In the first place, as the Kerner Commission report demonstrates, most disturbances came in reaction to incidents of police brutality.  The response to protest and anger over such actions resembles the violent tactics used by police in Ferguson.  In the example of Newark in1967, the brunt of the violence came after state police and the National Guard were called in, who then promptly shot up the place and even targeted black-owned businesses for destruction.  In 1968 during unrest in Chicago after Martin Luther King's assassination, mayor Daley said that police ought to "shoot to kill" potential arsonists and "shoot to maim" looters.

Americans might be the world's foremost historical amnesiacs.  They like to pretend that each person is the master of their own destiny, and thus free from the weight of the past.  That's simply not so, as the events in Ferguson show.  It's good that there are louder discussions of the history of racism, residential segregation, and violent policing in our public discourse.  Until that history is learned, I don't see much hope for those problems to be fixed.