Reconstructing the past

In the wake of Donald’s winning of the electoral vote, the Democratic party and leftists in general have been pointing to the problem of focusing on “identity politics.” From Bernie Sanders promising to be an “ally” to Donald in taking on corporate America to the New York Times Review running a front page article about the “end of identity liberalism,” the importance of focusing on the “white working class” is the hip new Left trend. There have been some excellent analysis of why this is the wrong direction for the Democratic party  to go in right now, and I don’t think I can add to this. What I want to talk about is history.

We all learned about the Civil War in American history class. After that unit, usually squeezed in between winter break and finals is the Reconstruction unit. It’s short--part of the decidedly unglamourous gap between the Civil War and the First World War. It’s often misrepresented as a time in which the poor innocent white Southerners were victims of corruption and abuse from carpetbaggers and African Americans. It wasn’t. Gone With The Wind lied to you.

The Reconstruction period was a time in which America came closer to true democracy then it would for decades. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment gave new rights to African Americans (only men got the right to vote, but my personal suspicion is that things had continued in the direction they were going, women wouldn’t have been far behind.) Black men were elected into government positions. New social programs helped freed slaves get educations and prepared to move the South into a future that didn’t involve owning other human beings (wild, right?) Black Americans and their white progressive allies were on their way to building a future for America that might not have centered around oppression. It wasn’t perfect. I don’t want to romanticize it--but there was hope. Real hope.  So what happened?

Textbooks often present the failure of Reconstruction as the fault of African Americans who just couldn’t learn how to be citizens. But that’s just not the case. Black Americans weren't the problem. Racism was. Southern whites reacted to the abolishment of slavery by beating and murdering African Americans and other Republicans, threatening and disenfranchising African American voters and generally fighting back tooth and nail against any attempts to change the racism that the Southern “traditional way of life” was built on.

And after a decade, white Republicans made a deal with the devil--Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for ending reforms in the South. They wanted to move on from trying to fix the problem of racism. It had been ten years and things were improving slowly. Besides, they didn’t really need African American voters if they could win the white working class in the North and East. It was too much effort.

From there, racism ran rampant in America. People of color--African American, Native American, Asian--were victims of oppression on every possible level, from disenfranchisement to segregation to lynching. Race relations in America reached a low point or “nadir” as historian Rayford Logan calls it. What happened after the Reconstruction era ingrained horrific racism into almost every element of society.

There is a direct parallel from then to now. America is again on the edge of an event that could undo the progress that took years in the making. Once again, our country is on the verge of abandoning any semblance of valuing justice and instead embracing racism. And once again, white progressives have a choice to make. By abandoning “identity politics” and focusing instead on issues like “class” and “the economy,” white progressives are again complicit in violence against people of color. Perhaps it will win a few more votes in the short term--unlikely, considering Clinton’s superior jobs plan in this election didn’t sway the “white working class.” But by saving our own skin, (pun intended) we leave the populations Donald has promised to target the hardest open to attack.

I’d like to take this moment to bust out a rad map.

Credit to Mother Jones.

Democrats succeed because of people of color (especially women of color). They campaigned on a promise to make America a more equal country, promising to be a voice for those facing marginalization and oppression. Not just people of color, but women, LGBT folk, the disabled, religious minorities, and especially people for whom these identities intersect. Abandoning “identity politics” is a betrayal of those who are the most faithful progressives, people who are counting on the Democrats to defend them from a man who promises to hurt them in every possible way.

To elected Democrats and other powerful progressives speaking of compromise, I say this. The lives of the people you promised to protect matter more than budgets and photo opps. They matter more than the “moral high ground” that means trying to “work with” a fascist.

We can’t go back in time and change what happened with Reconstruction. But now is a time that we--white liberal America can do better. White progressives let down African Americans in the 1870s. Now in 2016 we have another chance to show that we can do better.

Originally published on December 2, 2016