Chapter 17: “Progress” Ibram X. Kendi

1. Trump
   • The Trump presidency represents a move backwards to America’s racist past
     • Endorsed by KKK, White nationalists.  T. was the lead birther.  Saw America needing to be made great again after first Black president.
2. The myth of progress is mythic at best and has not translated into measurable progress on the ground.
   • The mantra of steady incremental change has long been a part of the American creed. (p. 422)
   • Kendi provides a good list of the laws and individual Black citizens who have been installed into positions of authority and achieved fame.  This culminated with Obama’s election.
   • Obama’s election suggested that racism in America had ceased to be a serious problem.
3. The Civil Rights Era
   • Even at a time when Black employment was increasing and racial barriers were coming down, there were street rebellions and MLK was assassinated.
4. Progress and Regress Examples
   • Emancipation in 1863 was answered by a resurgence in violence toward Blacks, voter suppression, and the like
   • In the late 1860s, Radical Republican congressmen abolished these Black Codes, reconstructed Southern states, and extended civil and voting rights to Black men—another step forward for lynchings and Jim Crow reconstructed white supremacy and rescinded some civil and voting rights by the 1890s.
   • John Roberts argued that racial progress justified the Supreme court’s majority in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 where the government ceased requiring southern states to submit to the federal government before they passed voting legislation.
     • This is an example of racial progress stimulating racial regress.
     • Several states have followed this decision with legislation that limits access to the ballot box and makes it more difficult for Blacks to vote. Progress followed by regress.
   • Americans have been fooled into thinking that racial progress in inevitable and that it has always moved inexorably forward.
5. Racial “progress” through American history
   • Colonial Era
     • Richard Baxter argued that slavery in America was an improvement on African life.
     • Some clergy thought slavery in America was beneficial to Africans because they were evangelized
   • Thomas Jefferson, in a draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain for preventing the abolition of slavery.
   • George Washington refused to sign a petition circulated by Methodist leader, Coke.  Washington thought that slavery was already fading away.
   • The founders knew the wrongness of slavery and left the words slave and slavery out of the constitution.
   • Slavery was profitable and it grew. There were 1,191,362 enslaved persons in 1810, and 4M in 1860.
   • In the 19^th century abolition was not in favor of deporting Blacks.
   • Colonization was popular.  Northerners favored colonization for all African descent Americans; southerners wanted only (troublesome) free northern blacks to be sent back.
   • Jefferson argued, would “carry back to” Africa “the seeds of civilization, which might render their sojournment here a blessing in the end to that country.”
6. Abolitionists
   • These were fading in the late 1700’s
   • After a quiet period the abolitionist movement surged in 1930’s and 40’s.  This time abolitionists wanted immediate cessation of slavery.
   • The War with Mexico (1846 to 1848) raised the prospect of a large expansion of the slave states, a prospect that many northerners, even those who would tolerate slavery, didn’t like.
   • Alexis de Tocqueville 1830’s observed that racial hatred was stronger in the north than in the slave states.
   • William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, on a speaking tour discovered the truth of de Tocqueville’s observation when they saw in Ohio voter suppression and other forms of racial oppression.
   • Lincoln held both racist and anti-slavery ideas.  He affirmed his commitment to White supremacy in the Lincoln Douglas debates.  And he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
7. Radical Reconstruction
   • This period saw the ratification of the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments (p. 432)
   • From this point forward, white Americans were ready to blame Black behavior, and not racism and the deprivations of 250 years of enslavement, for persisting racial inequities.
   • Violence from white terrorist groups like the new Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts allowed white supremacists to regain power in the early 1870s.
   • Jim Crow was born in 1877 with the Compromise of the 1877 which reached a negotiated resolution to a disputed presidential election.
8. Civil Rights Era in Post WWII America (p. 433)
9. In the Cold War, when Communist countries could criticize America’s racism, the government moved to improve the countries record on race.
   • In 1947, the Truman administration issued To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which gave a strong statement on the race situation in the USA.
   • In the immediate post WWII America a discouraging number of Americans did not think that Blacks should be brought into equality with their White counterparts.
10. (p. 434) Pamphlet: “The Negro in American Life” celebrated Black progress in many areas.
    • Americans in early 1950’s still did not favor integration in schools.
    • The pamphlet looked at progress in racial attitudes since the turn of the century (1900)
11. Racial progress in the Civil Rights era
    • Supreme Court desegrated public schools
    • The Montgomery bus boycott
    • Federal troops escorted students in Little Rock
    • Lunch counter sit-ins
    • The Freedom riders desegrated bus terminals
    • The March on Washington (1963)
12. Racial Regress happened with the disappointments of Reconstruction
    • We now stand in need of a 3^rd Reconstruction
    • 6 days after the voting rights act came the Watts riots over police brutality
    • Over 100 urban rebellions in 1967
13. Kerner Commission
    • The problem was not crime, but racism and national drift toward two societies
14. Civil Rights Act of 1968 (p. 437)
15. Americans look back and see racial progress, which implies that we’re on the right track.  But we tend not to look at the present and see the racism that undermines lasting transformation.
16. In the 1970’s new conservatives proclaimed that America was finished with the Civil Rights quest
    • All initiatives were framed as reverse racism
    • Dinesh D’Souza’s book The End of Racism
    • Rodney King 1995
    • We were reaching the apex of mass incarceration
17. At the end of the 1990’s arose the expression “color blind.”
    • There was a mentality that racial problems were over
18. Obama’s election in 2008 was the capstone on Americans success in alleviating racial problems

Summary: Chapter 17: “Progress” Ibram X. Kendi

This essay is a concise rearticulation of his theory of the twin impulses in America where racial progress and racial regress occur concurrently.  The singular racial history of the United States is therefore a dual racial history of two opposing forces: historical steps toward equity and justice and historical steps toward inequity and injustice.  The assumption that racial progress is inevitable and inexorable invites racial regress.  The chapter illustrates this dynamic with examples from the reconstruction and Jim Crow periods and especially from the Civil Rights era.  Kendi’s essay lists the many early 1960’s steps towards racial justice.  This list includes the Freedom Riders and Lunch counter sitins.  Then Kendi observes that these steps were countered by evidence of regress a few years later, notably the urban rebellions in 1967.  The great benefit of this insight is that it provides a framework for understanding current events.  America’s current fascination and drift toward authoritarian control may be aptly interpreted as racial regress.