OP-ED: Progress and Backlash
by John Maelan, Washington County Dems Communications Committee Member
I was born into a world where the paradigm was shifting toward justice in a way that seemed unstoppable. What kind of world I’ll die in, however–well, that’s anybody’s guess.
To be clear, I was born in 1967. And, no, that wasn’t so long ago, so you kids can just stay off my lawn!
Think about it: Brown v. Board of Education desegregated schools back in 1954, so that was a done deal before my parents even began to date. Then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing act of 1968, the War on Poverty, and all the other acts that moved America further and further from its racist past at an unprecedented pace. And to be clear, this shift away from racism and toward justice was not just happening in the courts or in our nation’s capital–it was a cultural shift across all of America as well.
By the time I was in elementary school, the miniseries “Roots” was must-see TV for everybody. No longer, it seemed, was America sugar-coating the harsh realities of its past. And when looking to the present, well, every kid in school had to admit that Muhammad Ali was the greatest. This is not to say that racism disappeared during my childhood. I would visit the homes of classmates whose parents still used the “N” word, for instance. However, racism did seem to be on the ropes in our culture, as characters like Archie Bunker were consistently shown the error of their ways and the Klan made a handy villain in any popular entertainment.
And then, something changed.
As I left grade school and entered Junior High, a new and darker paradigm was taking shape—the backlash had finally arrived. It turns out that racism wasn’t dying out in America, as my childhood naivete suggested. Rather, it had simply gone into hiding for a while. The fair housing laws, for instance, never were vigorously enforced. So, despite all the hype, our country remained segregated, with whites living in the suburbs and everyone else in the cities. And new code words started filtering into the American lexicon so that racist policies suddenly sounded more palatable. Ronald Reagan for instance mocked a made-up “Chicago woman” who was living large off of welfare at taxpayer expense—and “taxpayer” was casually assumed to mean white people. Politicians began discussing the “urban problem” of crime and used the “war on drugs” to incarcerate more Black Americans than white by a ratio of thirteen to one!
And of course, once released from prison, these people of color lost their right to vote, which further weakened the power to reverse this trend at the ballot box.
Now, I have to admit, I took a lot of hope from the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I thought that, perhaps as I was maturing, so was my country. Perhaps the Reagan race relations regression was simply an anomaly. Perhaps the trend toward justice that had begun before my birth would continue after all. And perhaps pigs would learn to fly…
First came the “Tea Party,” an openly racist political movement composed of angry white people. And I’ve got to admit, I was shocked. Not by the fact that a bunch of morons would lynch Obama in effigy while waving Confederate flags. Nor was I surprised that simple-minded buffoons would claim our first Black president couldn’t have possibly been born in the USA for… I don’t know what reasons. No, that idiocy, sadly, did not shock me in the slightest, as even in the best of times America has always had its share of stupid people who like to gather in large groups. But what made my jaw hit the floor was the legions of Fox News personalities and Republican political leaders who gave these dopes all the oxygen they could spare. Educated Americans in the highest positions of influence were carrying water for these racists, and painting them with the brush of patriotism, no less! Why? For nothing more than crass political gain and a little ego stroking attention. And you know what? From their point of view, it worked beautifully as Obama got “shellacked” in the 2010 midterm elections, and that was the end of meaningful progressive legislation for the next ten years.
The Republican majorities in congress then slammed on the brakes on even the most modest of reforms proposed by that Black man in the White House, with a hypocrisy that may be unmatched in American life. But I’ve got to say, it was the conservative Supreme Court that did the most damage.
In 2013, the court’s Shelby County decision gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act like a fresh caught Northwest salmon. No longer would Section Five of that Act require states with a history of voter suppression to undergo a federal review of their voting laws. And within hours of the high court’s low decision, Texas lawmakers announced plans to implement a strict voter ID law that had been blocked by a federal court. Naturally, GOP lawmakers in Alabama also pressed forward with a similar law. After reviewing the court’s decision, Franita Tolson, a constitutional and election law expert and co-dean of the University of Southern California School of Law, said, “At that point, you have to ask yourself what’s left of the Voting Rights Act?”
So much for progress.
And as these new regressive state laws went into effect, thousands upon thousands of Black and Brown people suddenly found themselves purged from the voter rolls on trumped up technicalities. In fact, the median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to the 1965 Act was forty percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not. Subsequently, at least seventeen million voters were purged nationwide between 2016 and 2018!
And then came everybody’s favorite year, 2020, and with it the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protest. We all watched in horror as a white police officer suffocated to death a Black man in his custody, and in broad daylight, to boot. And I had to wonder, did that horrible cop think of himself as a racist, or in his mind, was he just trying to solve the “urban problem?” Because, make no mistake, that’s exactly where our coded language has gotten us. And as the nation protested, the pundits on Fox News and their sycophantic allies in DC worked overtime to make excuses for horrible police behavior, just like they did for the Tea Party. Because denial is not just a river in Egypt, but a powerful force that allows us to accept racism in America as long as we can call it something else. For instance, turning the acronym “DEI” into a slur to paint anyone of color as somehow unqualified to hold their job. And tragically, it seems to take something truly horrible, like the death of a Michael Brown, or an Eric Garner, or a George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and on and on, to remind Americans not only that racism still exists, but how persistent and pervasive it is in our nation.
But whether it’s found in the Trump White House, the halls of a MAGA Congress, in a state’s GOP legislature, the conservatively skewed Supreme Court, or in the actions of an angry police officer, racism is and always has been anti-American! It is anti-American because it flies in the face of our founding ideals that all of mankind is created equal. It is anti-American because it denies equal protection under the law to our citizens. And it is anti-American simply because it is immoral and we should flat out be better than that as a people. After all, aren’t we the greatest nation on Earth?
So, Democrats, what are we going to do about it now?
Well, since sitting on our butts and hoping it will go away has proven to be a failing strategy, I recommend we resist racism! We resist racism by voting for people who share our good old American values of justice, fairness, and respect. We resist racism by refusing to make excuses for it or allow others in our circles to do so. And we resist racism by showing up at school board and county commission meetings so that even at the lowest levels of American government, our resistance to racism is known.
And we do not quit.
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