Bari Weiss Manhattan Institute Special (2): The Neo-Con African-Americans Take on Critical Race Theory
David Shasha
The False McWhorter vs. Coates Binary: The Neo-Con African-Americans Take on Critical Race Theory
I recently put together a special newsletter on the matter of Robin DiAngelo and what I see as the Corporate Anti-Racism Industry:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tDYNg1a0f39jk-ic1t8KZ_3VfptX4xEhw1U9ayRAMZo/edit
After posting the newsletter I received an e-mail from a thoughtful SHU reader in praise of John McWhorter, whose name appeared in my article as a critic of the Industry.
After I read the e-mail, I realized that it was important to point out to the reader that McWhorter has long been a prominent figure in the world of Black Neo-Conservatism that is reflective of what we have seen in The Tikvah Fund.
So, when I saw the following program on C-Span’s Book TV, featuring McWhorter and hosted by his ally Jason Riley of The Manhattan Institute and FOX News, I saw the chance to clarify what I said in my diatribe against Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and, of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?507008-1/author-discussion-race
When I first became aware of Coates in 2016, he was arguing in a very eloquent and persuasive manner on the matter of Black Reparations:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjop4SsZHeVifMdng70ZxigL2p6i7NdPK9EuYnDlChU/edit
But, of course, it did not take long before the roof caved in and it became quite clear that his activism was not based on the MLK Civil Rights legacy, but on a new form of Black Separatism that wrongly rejected the idea of progress in race relations, obnoxiously asserting that nothing has changed since America’s founding, and nothing ever will.
I found the perfect critique of this Separatism in the work of Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy, which I included in SHU 717:
https://prospect.org/culture/books/ta-nehisi-coates-s-caricature-black-reality/
Indeed, I had previously turned to Kennedy for his attack on the flaccid notion of “Post-Blackness,” sort of the anti-Coates default, from the foolish cultural Poptrash commentator Touré, presented in SHU 506:
https://www.theroot.com/the-fallacy-of-toures-post-blackness-theory-1790865279
Kennedy is one of the participants in the C-Span program on Critical Race Theory (CRT), where he was joined on the panel by Riley’s Manhattan Institute ally Christopher Rufo, as well as by Stanford Law School Professor Ralph Richard Banks.
Before I begin to discuss the very interesting, and deeply biased, program, it is important to address the vexing issue of Black Neo-Conservatism.
First, let us look at the work of Riley himself, and his usefulness to the Trump crowd:
https://limerick1914.medium.com/the-abuse-of-history-681924717930
His profile on FOX News has likely made him a more dangerous figure than both Candace Owens and the YEEZUS combined:
https://www.foxnews.com/person/r/jason-riley
Like so many in the radical Right Wing echo-chamber, he has established very comfortable perches in places like The Wall Street Journal and Manhattan Institute:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/jason-l-riley
https://www.wsj.com/news/author/jason-l-riley
In addition to bringing to the program a friendly Neo-Con voice in McWhorter, he also included his MI colleague Rufo:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/christopher-f-rufo
Naturally, the documentarian Rufo is also on the staff of The Heritage Foundation:
https://www.heritage.org/staff/christopher-rufo
The alliance of Riley and Rufo was buttressed by the lengthy introductory discussion with McWhorter who, tellingly, did not appear on the panel; conveniently allowing him to avoid answering criticism from the other participants.
Black Neo-Cons like Riley and McWhorter have provided an important resource for White Conservatives and their Reverse-Racism ideology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_racism
The following Masters’ Thesis on the subject from Cornell University allows us to see what is happening:
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/4016
Here is the description provided there of the text, Inciting the Counter-Revolution: Black Neoconservatives in the Post-Civil Rights Era:
Black neoconservatism is one of the most contested political ideologies of the Post-Civil Rights era. As a challenge to mainstream Black political thought, Black neoconservatism enjoys a particular celebrity as the bold new voice in American racial discourse. This thesis critically analyzes Black neoconservative ideology as a counter-discourse: a direct opposition to the liberalism of the 1960s and the legacy of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras.
The emergence of Black neoconservatives as a significant collective in the Post-Civil Rights era correlates with the rise of the New Right in American politics since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The New Right has forcefully disputed the philosophy and strategy of civil rights legislation and the traditional quest for racial equality and justice. Black neoconservatives play an increasingly significant ideological role in conservative politics and public debate in the Post-Civil Rights period. Furthermore, their racial identity lends credence to the New Right's attack on social policy that disproportionately benefits Black people in general and the Black poor particularly.
Black neoconservatives dissent from the prevailing convention that racism and White supremacy have become subtle, but nevertheless remain formidable. They insist that civil rights legislation, government intervention and liberal programs have created a pathological dependency among African Americans. Black neoconservatives contend that this dependency is the true cause for the debilitating conditions of the Black underclass and the slow progress among African Americans.
Essentially, Black neoconservatives blame the Black Power era for instilling a sense of entitlement among African Americans, and they charge civil rights leaders with profiting from the manipulation of racism. The core of Black neoconservative critiques is their presumption that African Americans subscribe to a victim-oriented identity that exaggerates the saliency of racism in order to evoke white guilt. They argue that welfare and affirmative action are two bankrupt policies that perpetuate victimization and dependency among African Americans and impede racial progress. As such, Black neoconservatives maintain that self-help and personal responsibility are the only solutions to the nation's enduring race problems.
Black neoconservatives are presumed to be marginal voices among the vast majority of African Americans. Nonetheless, they are gaining wider currency in the American racial discourse to ultimately shape racial attitudes and change public policy. Furthermore, this thesis posits that Black neoconservatives have taken a political posture that negates the legacy of Black liberation struggles in the United States, which is grounded in an emphasis on Black identity and opposition to racism.
Although Black neoconservatives claim their ideology is rooted in the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, this thesis explores the ideology of archconservative George S. Schuyler as a prototypical progenitor of Black neoconservatism. The thesis details the political positions of Black neoconservatives by examining the works of Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, Star Parker, Stephen Carter, Ward Connerly and Glenn Loury.
As some of these names might be unfamiliar to those who did not live during the polarized Reagan Era, here are some resources on individuals who played an important role in the movement, and who are mentioned by McWhorter himself in his very comfortable discussion with Riley:
There is Ward Connerly, who led the Black Neo-Con march against Affirmative Action in the post-Bakke Era:
For those who might not be familiar with the contentious history of the Affirmative Action movement, here is an article that clarifies the issue and Connerly’s place in it:
https://www.record-bee.com/2020/10/06/proposition-16-a-new-fight-over-affirmative-action/
Next, we move to Shelby Steele, who according to the following two-part article from The American Experiment, has closely adhered to the rejectionist Connerly line:
He believes that “promoting Racism as the greatest barrier to black advancement is liberalism’s greatest source of power.”
Finally, there is Glenn Loury, at one time a militant Black Neo-Con who stood at the forefront of the movement, as we saw at the time of the horrifying Clarence Thomas SCOTUS nomination:
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/13/us/black-conservatives-united-only-by-frustration.html
In that NYT article we also see the aforementioned Shelby Steele, as well as Derrick Bell, both of whom figure prominently in McWhorter’s Neo-Con diatribes.
In a 2002 NYT article, Loury is presented as having had a change of heart on Race matters:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/magazine/about-face.html
Today, Loury, McWhorter, and various others host an Internet video program which addresses a number of these very complex issues:
https://bloggingheads.tv/programs/glenn-show
Having briefly reviewed the matter of Black Neo-Conservatism, I can now address the issue of McWhorter and his complex sense of identity and culture.
The first thing that struck me in his conversation with Riley was the almost complete lack of historical context when it came to the Civil Rights Movement and the political framework of the United States since the passage of historic legislation in the 1960s.
It was Randall Kennedy who actually pointed out, as the second part of the program began, that neither Riley or McWhorter mentioned the name of Donald Trump in their extensive discussion, and did not at all address the issue of the revanchist Alt-Right Fascists.
Kennedy helpfully remarked that much in the CRT debate has to do with how we prioritize issues; who we see as more responsible for the Race Question in today’s America.
Are the radicals on the Left more dangerous, or is revanchist Right Wing racism more to blame?
Indeed, not only did Riley and McWhorter avoid mentioning Trump and his murderous minions, but they also avoided speaking about Ronald Reagan; the man whose infamous “States Rights” campaign speech in Neshoba, Mississippi ushered in a new era of racism in this country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair_%22states%27_rights%22_speech
The 1980 speech came after many positive years of Civil Rights advancement, but also pointed to the success of what Richard Nixon and his henchmen called the “Southern Strategy”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
The history of the Republican Party from its 19th century Abolitionist roots to the racism of Nixon and Reagan is a complex one.
It was of course the Democratic Party which was the home of the Slavers:
But over time the Parties’ roles changed, and it was Republicans like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater who led the charge against African-Americans:
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-buckley-racism/
It is understandable that both Riley and McWhorter would ignore this inconvenient history; largely because their Black Neo-Conservatism is rooted in this racist movement.
As I argued in my attack on DiAngelo and the Corporate Anti-Racism Industry, I believe that the new radicalism is a sham that does little to deal with the history and cultural issues that have animated our country; preferring instead to promote a form of Black Separatism that rejects integrationist values and democratic norms.
But it is critical to note here that, in spite of the fact that McWhorter shares this critique, he does not properly value the Liberal tradition of American Humanism with its internal critique of injustice and the debilitating consequences of Systemic Racism over many centuries. Things have changed, but they have not changed to the degree that he would want us to believe.
As I watched Riley and McWhorter patting each other on the back as they pathetically tried to score points against their Black Separatist antagonists, it became ever clearer that they were stuck in an internal feedback loop of the Right Wing echo-chamber talking points.
Central to their discussion was the classic “Blame the Victim” strategy which emphasizes “Personal Responsibility.”
They both repeated ad nauseum the Right Wing dogmas that we hear on FOX News; that Blacks suffer more from violence in their own community, that the police also shoot at White people and not only at Blacks, and that such shootings are aberrations that do not reflect a larger problem of Systemic Racism in American institutions. McWhorter actually called it “badly trained police officers,” as he blithely understated the matter of the George Floyd execution.
It is the usual Right Wing scapegoating strategy that distorts reality in order to justify White Supremacy and mark any pushback as a dangerous chimera.
Naturally the two men viciously attacked the 1619 Project and the larger concern to deal with the racist past of this country’s founders. It was not surprising to see that they did not choose to discuss the issue of Confederate Monuments, even though they were all worked up about the Cancel Culture.
For the sake of completeness, I did check if McWhorter had addressed the Monuments issue at some other time:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/opinions/deciding-what-statues-can-stay-opinion-mcwhorter/index.html
In his typically equivocal fashion, with a soupcon of both-sides-ism, he refuses to fully reject the Trump position:
I support the dismantling of statues of Robert E. Lee, and taking down Confederate flags. However, while Trump’s question as to where this all stops is hardly rooted in a sophisticated take on the matter, it has some validity. I question the idea that any historical figure who profited from slave labor or the slave trade must therefore have their names removed from buildings.
Again, we can see here that he is looking beyond the moral issue of Trumpism, and focusing his attention on the Coates CRT cabal.
He then chooses to defend “Gone With the Wind” on artistic grounds:
However, films like “Gone With the Wind” fail this exclusiveness test. “Gone With the Wind” is set amid a mythic depiction of slavery tragically common in its time. However, the central concerns of the story are romance, adventure and death, not slavery. And more to the point, “Gone With the Wind” resonates not because of its depiction of slavery, but because it is a towering work of Hollywood cinema in terms of direction, cinematography, scoring and acting.
He sums up his ambivalent view of the matter by wrongly assuming that Americans actually “get it,” and that there should be no fear that the current Republican Party under Trump is anything like Nazi Germany:
It insults the intelligence of a modern society to suppose that viewers will not understand that the depiction of slavery is antique. To insist the slavery aspect of the film means the film must be treated the way Germany used to treat “Mein Kampf” is the quintessence of virtue signaling. “The Birth of a Nation,” with its depiction of the Ku Klux Klan as saviors, is a similar case. Its cinematic artfulness, and pioneering status, outweigh the transparently out of date nature of the racism it depicts, which, in itself, stands as a useful lesson in the nasty side of American history.
Even though we saw images of Nazism at the Insurrection:
And even as we continue to see an appalling judicial double standard when it comes to how the Insurrectionists are being treated:
https://apnews.com/article/congress-storming-black-lives-matter-22983dc91d16bf949efbb60cdda4495d
The matter is indeed a complex one, but too often we see McWhorter bowing to the “Whataboutism” that refuses to take a stand against the New Fascism; preferring instead to carefully appease the racists.
This form of moral relativism does not look to undo the damage of the New Fascism and its deeply racist tendencies, but is far more concerned with prioritizing the CRT radicals for opprobrium, as if it is the Left that is the primary problem rather than the Right.
Where McWhorther is equivocal and somewhat circumspect, Riley has no shame in his support for the Trumpist Confederacy:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/modern-liberalisms-false-obsession-with-civil-war-monuments-1504045658
Indeed, in his WSJ article we can see an unhinged Black Neo-Con who, like Shelby Steele before him, blames everything on the “Liberals” while completely ignoring the depredations of Systemic Racism. It speaks volumes about who Riley is, and how deeply he has imbibed the FOX News Kool-Aid.
Later in the program Riley was confronted by Professor Banks on the matter of opiod addiction in a way that served to undermine the Neo-Con thesis. As we have seen, the values of “Personal Responsibility” have not been deployed in a polemical way with opiods, largely because that scourge involves the White community. Banks correctly showed how the “Personal Responsibility” canard has been used in a racist way in order to demonize Black people.
Even more than this Neo-Con hypocrisy from Riley was the challenge presented by Professor Kennedy on the matter of Voting Rights:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html
In 2013 the Court ruled 5-4 against maintaining a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that has in effect given the Confederate Southern states free license to enact laws to suppress the Black vote. Which they have been more than happy to do.
The logic behind the partisan decision is pertinent to the Black Neo-Con discussion:
The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and the nation’s progress in rooting out racial discrimination in voting. At the core of the disagreement was whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.
Indeed, the current Black Neo-Con discourse is all about “moving on” and proclaiming what is in effect a “Post-Racial” America.
And there is no better example of this lethal stupidity than Uncle Tom Clarence Thomas, whose antipathy to the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights more generally is pretty absolute:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/sfl-mtblog-2009-06-voting_rights_and_uncle_tom-story.html
In 2009, a few years before the infamous Shelby decision, the Court voted 8-1 to maintain the Voting Rights Act. The sole dissenting vote was our friend the Pornographer. The Black Neo-Cons could find no one more committed to the tenets of their belief system, as it continues to undermine the rights of African-Americans and ensure that we will not achieve racial justice in our lifetimes.
Of course, the current clash of racial perspectives and political values has been made that much easier by the oversimplistic binary presented by Coates, Kendi, and the other Separatists, a list to which we can now add Isabel Wilkerson and her new book Caste:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/books/review/caste-isabel-wilkerson.html
In his review of the Wilkerson book, Kwame Anthony Appiah points us to the seminal work of W.E.B. DuBois, which once again brings us back to the matter of culture and history as a means to process American Racism and its role in our society.
At the core of the current problem in my personal view is Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who seems to be routinely ignored in these vicious binary discussions.
I have written two articles on Gates, the first one attacking his PBS celebrity-addled ephemera which lacks the scholarly gravitas of his most important writings:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TyRH24P_e0Qp7EG9hbh93CW6e7VOwc6PJFRaFobUXo8/edit
A short time later I watched his magisterial documentary on Reconstruction and saw my viewpoint validated, as he sought to take on serious issues in a rigorous and not ephemeral manner, as we have seen in many of his other PBS programs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sPfI7cErS-77CXOxoMyHT5d_AvuGAdjvvXodl5lp0hQ/edit
It was Gates who, arguably more than anyone else in African-American intellectual life, found a way to bridge the divide between the older MLK vision with its stubborn optimism and the more cutting critique of Black Power militancy.
And he did this through politically-engaged cultural studies.
As I wrote in the first article, it was Gates’ brilliant 1988 book The Signifying Monkey that helped usher in a new era of African-American literary scholarship, which has now sadly given way to the militant depredations of the New Separatists and the re-emergence of the Neo-Con Blacks; all under the stultifying rubric of Corporate Hip-Hop and ignorant Poptrash as the predominant cultural markers of our society.
And so it is that McWhorter and his Neo-Con allies can take refuge in the debasement of the culture as a way to disqualify the need for continued vigilance when it comes to Systemic Racism that plagues our institutions and politics.
It is far easier to square off against Coates and his rigid polemics, than it is to deal with the arguments made by Gates and allies like Cornel West, who led a movement of enlightened public intellectuals steeped in the texts of both Western and Third World civilizations.
The following 1992 article from The Harvard Crimson reviews some of this history:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1992/5/1/gates-makes-a-strong-defense-of/
It was in the unifying figure of the late Edward Said where a new sense of Multiculturalism, viciously attacked by the Reaganite Neo-Cons who are the forerunners of Riley and McWhorter, was articulated so beautifully.
It began with his attack on Eurocentric racism in the pioneering 1979 classic Orientalism:
https://www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Edward-W-Said/dp/039474067X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)
He carefully refined his thesis in that book’s 1993 companion volume, the epic Culture and Imperialism:
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Imperialism-Edward-W-Said/dp/0679750541
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_and_Imperialism
And in Representations of the Intellectual which presented his 1993 Reith Lectures:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmx4c/episodes/player
There was much work being done in minority literatures and cultures in the post-Black Power era, and it was Said who so brilliantly synthesized many important methodological and institutional breakthroughs in a way that served to reframe how we read and how we see cultural history in the global sense.
A good deal of this forward progress, which, as I have said, was the bete noire of the Neo-Cons, has ironically been reversed by the New Separatists; whose aim is not to reorient our cultural understanding, but to present a reverse binary of the process that began with Buckley and Goldwater, and which has led us to Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump under the Confederate banner of the Insurrectionist Alt-Right.
In this sense it is important to note the tone of snarky arrogance and sad desperation that marked how Riley dealt with the arguments of Kennedy and Banks; who both labored mightily to deal with rigged questions designed to elicit the sort of reactionary Neo-Con answers that Riley wanted.
While Rufo acted the part of the amen chorus, Kennedy and Banks understood what Riley was up to, and did their level best to maintain decorum in the context of rational and civilized debate.
But it was clear that Riley had used the McWhorter discussion as a set-up which was meant to color in a deterministic way all that would follow. Basic “truths” would be enunciated, which would then become the basic template through which the discussion would be filtered.
And here we must hand it to the Neo-Cons, who are always looking for ways to avoid actual debate – as they claim otherwise! – and to proclaim that only they have the “right” answers – which are seen as being as simple as 2+2.
Kennedy was quite emphatic, in his quietly impassioned manner, that he found many important points of value in CRT, and that his past criticisms, seen now in light of the Trump era, were sometimes off the mark.
But this did not dim Riley’s ardor for the Neo-Con echo-chamber dogmas that have for so long been a requirement for Blacks who enter the hallowed halls of the Republican Party. He continued to beat the proverbial dead horse, as he repeated the same questions over and over, and seemed to demand acquiescence by restating the questions with different verbiage in a vain attempt to have his interlocutors say what he wanted them to say.
His doggedness looked even more perverse given the events of January 6th and the way in which the treasonous Trump vision showed itself to be consistent with the values of Riley’s Republican Party since Reagan.
The program was recorded on December 16, 2020, and the space between the two events made Riley and McWhorter looked that much more foolish and malevolent in their devotion to what is now an utterly discredited Conservative movement.
Their positions on the Race Question are utterly bankrupt as we continue to grapple with the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement and the pressing need for new approaches to Systemic Racism.
Riley is ultimately just another FOX pundit stooge, mindlessly following the Trump crowd. The real problem is the academic McWhorter who remains implacably hostile to contemporary Cultural Studies with its expansively Liberal approach to social issues; preferring instead to recapitulate the 1980s Culture Wars battle, as he feeds off the hateful rhetoric of the New Separatists.
And while the attack on the nihilistic Coates cabal is one that needs to be continually made, it is equally important, as Professor Kennedy noted, to understand that there remain many important issues about Systemic Racism and historical injustice that we must address.
McWhorter did make an important and quite valid point on the nefarious influence of Social Media in raising the temperature of the discourse and its dumbing-down. But, as with the silence on Reagan and Trump, he refused to acknowledge the way that his Right Wing allies have dominated this Social Media space and how the CRT counter-movement in so many ways has vainly tried to replicate the shoddy thinking and debased animus of their perceived enemies.
And in this it is important to note that the program, while it often sought to address the legal issues in a Social Science framework, completely ignored the matter of culture and literature. It is in the nexus of Corporate Hip-Hop and pop culture phenomena like “Black Panther” that we can see how both sides of the political divide swim in the same fetid echo-system.
Black Neo-Cons like Riley and McWhorter speak in the anti-PC language of unfettered markets and government deregulation as their Reaganite forerunners did, just as Coates and his acolytes bask in the Corporate debasement of Black Hip-Hop Minstrelsy and the magical fantasy world of Trumpist Ike Perlmutter’s Wakanda.
Both sides actually have more in common than they would probably like to admit.
In the end, it is now all the more necessary for us to look back at the magnificent cultural achievements of African-Americans in the face of brutality and oppression, and how these achievements play into our future attempts to re-align our society in more egalitarian ways.
It is in Jazz, in the Black Church and Gospel, in literature, and in the legacy of socially-conscious Protest Music that we can find a way out of this painful binary. It is about more democracy, more inclusion, and more tolerance, which will allow us to ameliorate the racial problems, so that we can rise up in dignity and make a better world for all.
We will emphatically not find that way if we continue to listen to reactionaries like Riley and McWhorter on the one side, or Coates and Kendi on the other. Each side presents a false binary that can be bypassed if we find a way to bring back Duke Ellington and Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong and Zora Neale Hurston, and Marvin Gaye and Albert Murray under the umbrella of civic equality.
This rich cultural history is now being ignored by polemicists who hungrily seek book publishing deals and Internet fame, rather than doing the hard work of socially-grounded cultural reclamation in an era that has been poisoned by the toxic combination of Systemic Racism and Corporatist debasement.
Addendum: Canceling “Gone With The Wind” with a Personal Note on “Wilson”
In my article I looked at John McWhorter’s ambivalent attitude towards the Confederate Monuments, which included his attempted exoneration of the 1939 movie “Gone With The Wind.”
Before I expound on GWTW and Cancel Culture, let me first, as the cup-bearer said to Pharaoh before he helped save Joseph from stir, “recall my sins today.”
One of my favorite Golden Age Hollywood movies was the little-known 1944 portrait of Woodrow Wilson directed by the great Henry King:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lrqnZTGgJJSvYBHPh3BtXbSNhHyYDww5nKG24K7HsNs/edit
I wrongly rationalized my love of the movie – and of Wilson, who was beloved in the Arab world for his Fourteen Points – by ignoring his racism; the shocking depths of which I did not fully know.
I was not aware that he re-segregated the Federal government offices:
https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/shfgpr00
Wilson was a strange sort – a “Progressive” Democrat with severely racist tendencies, who shafted African-Americans in the worst way:
During the 1912 presidential campaign Wilson, a progressive Southern Democrat, had encouraged Negro support with vague promises to be "President of the whole nation" and to provide Negroes with "absolute fair dealing." He specifically promised that he would at least match past Republican appointments of Negroes to patronage positions. The NAACP endorsed Wilson and Negro groups worked vigorously for his election. Wilson's victory was mainly attributable to the Taft-Roosevelt split and the Negro vote was not decisive. Yet Negroes were proud of their involvement in the campaign and, heartened by the idealism of Wilson's inaugural address, looked forward to turning vague campaign promises into concrete advances for working Negroes and the whole race.
Things did not turn out as expected:
Anti-Negro forces soon held the upper hand in Washington and Jim Crow began to hold sway. Negro patronage declined markedly from the low, token levels of previous Administrations. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan broke a precedent of many years by appointing a white as ambassador to Haiti. Wilson himself appointed only two Negroes in his first two years in office while allowing a total of 12 positions filled by Negroes appointed by President Taft to lapse into white hands.
Patronage had an important but largely symbolic value to the Negro community, whereas the government's treatment of its own Negro workers had a direct impact. At a Cabinet meeting early in the Administration, Southern members expressed disingenuous concern over alleged friction between Negro and white government employees. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, a Texan, proposed segregating the races to eliminate the supposed problem. Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo supported him. Burleson also claimed support for the idea from moderate Negro leaders such as Bishop Alexander Walters, president of the National Colored Democratic League. The rest of the Cabinet, along with the President, while not explicitly endorsing segregation, did not oppose it.
Some departments adopted the policy with a vengeance. Burleson immediately set out on a program to segregate, downgrade and, in some cases, discharge Negro workers. All of them but one were transferred to the dead letter office, and the Negro who remained had the humiliating experience of being surrounded by screens so that white workers would not have to look at him. Burleson also ordered segregated window service to the public. Fortunately segregation was not widely adopted elsewhere in the federal government. Many departments either failed to institute the practice or actively resisted it. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post was a founder of the NAACP and his department was another that remained relatively free of the taint of Jim Crow.
By the end of 1913 the segregationist wave broke after coming up against a wall of resistance from the Negro community. In August 1913 the NAACP filed a formal protest against the practice. By late September the campaign against segregation was in full swing and the Negro press was filled with it. Wilson finally agreed to receive a delegation from the National Independent Equal Rights League which presented a petition signed by 20,000 opponents of segregation and discrimination. Wilson was evasive but cordial at the meeting and after that, while segregation remained entrenched in a few departments, the growth of the practice was largely halted by the end of 1913.
Wilson vigorously promoted the KKK and, most importantly for this discussion, praised D.W. Griffith’s notorious racist movie “The Birth of a Nation,” which he had screened with great fanfare at the White House:
https://www.history.com/news/woodrow-wilson-racial-segregation-jim-crow-ku-klux-klan
The movie “Wilson,” like so many other Hollywood movies of the era, was a whitewash (sic) that made no mention of the racism. If you know nothing of Wilson’s racism, you would not learn it from the movie.
But, still, it is important for all of us to re-examine our values and beliefs – and sometimes decide that things need to be cancelled.
After all, it’s only a movie.
In the case of “The Birth of a Nation” we have already come to see that its perniciousness has marked it as an outlier. And as McWhorter argued on behalf of GWTW, “Nation” has lasting artistic merit and must remain part of our historical understanding of cinema and its development.
But unlike GWTW, “Nation” is so offensively racist that only current KKK members and other Trumpists could embrace it.
In this sense it is similar to Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film “Triumph of the Will,” which recounts the Nazis’ Nuremberg Rally, with Hitler at its center:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Will
In both cases I believe that the KKK homage and the Nazi documentary present students of history with very important tools to better understand the racist madness that grips some people and brings them to violence; and yet at the same time, both movies have rightly been put in quarantine and are only let out into the public under rare and very specific circumstances.
In this sense TCM, our great purveyor of old movies, has recently decided to put GWTW into this category:
In its marketing deal with HBO Max, TCM assigned film historian Jacqueline Stewart the task of providing a critical introduction to the movie whenever it is screened to the public.
McWhorter could not have known this in 2016 when he wrote his equivocal article on Confederate Monuments, but his apologetic attitude towards the film is still less than satisfactory:
However, films like “Gone With the Wind” fail this exclusiveness test. “Gone With the Wind” is set amid a mythic depiction of slavery tragically common in its time. However, the central concerns of the story are romance, adventure and death, not slavery. And more to the point, “Gone With the Wind” resonates not because of its depiction of slavery, but because it is a towering work of Hollywood cinema in terms of direction, cinematography, scoring and acting.
I must admit frankly that I have never liked GWTW, as its sappy melodramatics and bloated length have always represented Golden Age Hollywood at its indulgent worst. While I have admired the Clark Gable performance – which ultimately dominated his career and hurt his ability to stretch out as an actor in other roles – and remain in awe of the “Burning of Atlanta” sequence, which continues to be one of the great moments in classic film – the rest of the movie is cloying and overbearing as entertainment.
I understand that reflects my own personal opinion, and that many other people do not share it.
And that is fine.
But GWTW, in the final assessment, is a conscious witness to the so-called “Lost Cause” mythology, and was intended to be so by the novel’s author Margaret Mitchell:
In fact, in many ways it is today even worse than “Nation”; largely because it represents Slavery as a wonderfully idyllic institution, rather than offensively portraying African-Americans in the post-Bellum era as mad rapists fully deserving of lynching. Its gauzily romantic aspect makes its deplorable racism that much more dangerous, as the whole thing is sugar-coated for soothing effect.
Again, it is critical to note that “Nation” has for all intents and purposes been deservedly cancelled for many years. Watching it is a traumatic experience, and rightly so. It is rarely screened, and when it is screened there is always a stern introduction warning the viewers of its lethal toxicity.
GWTW certainly, like that other pop movie icon “Casablanca,” has immense cultural significance, but far less artistic importance than “Nation.”
And for this it should definitely be quarantined as “Nation” is. Not that it should be fully banned, but that it should be treated as a racist product of a dark period in American history, rather than as a light and uplifting slice of romantic sludge.
More than this, as I wrote in my article, we now have an actively seditious Confederate-loving faction which has been – as Wilson aided the KKK – re-energized and given a new lease on life by an American president:
And while there will likely be hardcore racists who will go to great lengths to find copies of “Nation” for their personal viewing, GWTW is not a movie for hardcore racists. It is a mass market phenomenon that for many years was routinely screened on network TV – pre-TCM – and found its way into general first-run theaters in a way that other old movies – save “Casablanca” and precious few others – did not.
In other words, GWTW is a clear and present danger that goes beyond D.W. Griffith and Leni Riefenstahl; it is a sugary confection that essentially functions as a love letter to the debased institution of Slavery. It glamorizes it, as it forces the viewer to identify with a female protagonist whose mission is to support the Confederacy.
Yet it is still important to affirm what McWhorter says about the racism of most Hollywood movies of the Golden Age.
The more of these movies I see, the more I have come to understand – contrary to the ongoing Jewish complaint that Hollywood’s primary sin at that time was to collaborate with the Nazis in order to secure the German market – that the “Lost Cause” is really everywhere. The moguls saw the South as far more important than the Rhineland as far as their bank accounts were concerned.
When you watch an old Western – especially the good ones like John Ford’s “The Searchers” – it is quite typical to see Union soldiers demonized, while the Grey coats are more often than not seen as objects of great character who should be both pitied and admired.
And, as McWhorter also correctly notes, it would be impossible to cancel every one of those movies.
But GWTW is such an obvious candidate for cancellation that we must make an example of it. Again, it is not that the movie should not be screened at all, but that if and when it is screened, it be treated like “Nation,” as an enemy combatant.
To reiterate what I previously said in my article, the problem with McWhorter’s position is that he has his priorities in the wrong order. We are all for Free Speech, as we should all be for attacking Hateful Speech, as is our right. We need to pick our spots judiciously, and fight the greater danger, understanding the enormity of the risk that it presents to us as a country.
We are now living in very precarious times, as the “Lost Cause” ideology is now an active part of a very living political movement; a movement whose leader has just left the White House, and which has sought to bring down our government in the name of the very principles upon which GWTW was built.
In the same way that Woodrow Wilson committed a seditious act by having “Nation” screened in the White House, in turn unleashing the forces of KKK treason in the South, so too it is important that anti-Racist activists be free to speak out against GWTW and turn it in a Scarlet Letter.
David Shasha
From SHU 995, April 21, 2021