My Role, Past and Future, in Our Nation's Racist Legacy

I used to assume — not in a systematically intellectual way, but just casually — that I wasn’t personally involved in this nation’s racist history, especially its legacy of slavery.

After all, my great-great-grandfather from Germany settled in western Pennsylvania — the Union side — in the early 1840s. My paternal ancestors from Norway arrived in Wisconsin in 1870, well after the conclusion of the Civil War. And my mother’s parents immigrated from Japan after the turn of the 20th century, in 1904 and 1911.

So we were all well out of it, I thought, especially once my fore-parents or their descendants had settled in California, Oregon, and Alaska.

Hell, my Mom had her civil rights yanked away without due process and was ordered into a concentration camp for three years with most of the rest of her family due to racist U.S. activities less than 80 years ago.

And yet, I am fairly certain she would readily acknowledge that she too has benefited from white privilege.

We are all enmeshed in the complex matrix of a racist society and history. We are the descendants and not-so-indirect beneficiaries of racist policies, practices, and oppression.

As I learned from Edward E. Baptist’s startling history, The Half Has Never Been Told: slavery and the making of American capitalism, the North participated avidly in the antebellum slave economy, despite the fact that most states above the Mason-Dixon line had outlawed it within their borders, and served as home to free blacks for decades.

But Northern banks funded southern plantations and expansion. They provided financial backing for the expansion of slavery into the new territories and states of Missouri, Kansas, Texas, etc. Northern financiers and companies got rich off the slave economy, which enabled them to fund our further spread west: the transcontinental railroad and homesteaders who settled the rest of the continent.

The federal government brokered these territorial deals, partly out of cowardice and partly from greed . . . just as the Founders had bowed to Southern colonial property owners in 1787 by denying citizenship to blacks, yet allowing them to be counted as 3/5 of a human being in the census, thus granting southern states exaggerated representation in Congress without allowing any of those 3/5 of a person to vote on any matter that governed their lives.

I don’t know what happened to those Southern debts after the Civil War, but it’s likely that banks and wealthy northerners snapped them up cheap, or simply confiscated the properties of exhausted and bankrupt southerners. Follow the money.

Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 explained to me how, after the Civil War, the U.S. Army occupation and federal government agents arranged for proper elections in the South, and black mayors, police chiefs, governors, and U.S. Congressmen (see 1872 group portrait below) duly took office across the former Confederacy . . . 

. . . until the feds moved out a little later — everything was fixed now, and we couldn’t afford to keep pouring money into enforcing civil rights in those states — 

. . . and the state legislatures and cities in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and so on promptly went to work systematically changing their laws to make it more difficult for black Americans to vote, to run for office, and even to serve on juries and seek justice for the wave of lynchings that would follow, well into the 20th century.

For all practical purposes, those states turned back the clock within their borders for the better part of another century, until the feds were compelled by Dr. King, peaceful protesters, and images of violent crackdowns on both (beginning to sound familiar?) in the early 1960s to restore what should have been allowed in the Carolinas and Texas and the rest of them all along.

In his massive, multivolume, still-to-be-completed biography of Lyndon Johnson and his times, Robert Caro describes precisely what it was like for an African-American woman who “wanted to be a citizen” in the nation of her birth at that time. [You’ll find it in volume 3, Master of the Senate, — the story that follows is intended to illustrate how momentous it was for LBJ to ram through Congress the very first civil rights bill it had passed in 82 years — but I read it recounted in a short essay of Caro’s 2019 writing memoir, Working.]

In January 1957, 38-year-old Margaret Frost stood before three white members of the Barbour County Board of Registrars in the town of Eufala, Alabama, to answer a series of questions that would qualify her to vote. The board chair told her she had gotten one answer wrong — but wouldn’t tell her which one — and said, “You all go home and study a little more.”

She drilled with her husband David and returned eight months later with two other applicants. The examiners were standing behind a counter, and they didn’t offer their citizens a chair (apparently because the process wasn’t going to take that long). Margaret Frost was sure she and one of the other applicants answered every question correctly, but the third did not, and the board rejected all three with the same words: “You all go home and study a little more.” She told Caro, “You could see in her eyes they were laughing at us.”

Her husband’s experience was a little different. Previous to his registration to vote, the white people in Eufala had always been friendly, and addressed David Frost as “David” or “Boy.” Once he had registered to vote, however, they called him “Nigger” . . . and when whites learned he actually intended to vote on election day, a car pulled up in front of their house and the men in it shot out the porch lights. David Frost wanted to call the police . . . but as the vehicle pulled away, he saw it was a police car.

All of these people are dead now. But their children and children’s children may still be living all across the U.S. today. How different do you think their attitudes and experiences have been?

Meanwhile, as Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: the epic story of America’s Great Migration showed me, economic recessions, racist oppression, and work opportunities elsewhere drove hundreds of thousands of African-Americans out of the South, which had converted from an openly slave economy to a wage-slave/indentured-servant economy, in which blacks found it difficult if not impossible to vote, own land or the fruits of their labor, obtain an adequate education . . . so they emigrated north and west, to Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the 1930s and 1940s, and beyond — thereby setting the stage for economic and social challenges that persist in those cities and elsewhere across the nation even today.

You could say the South “outsourced” populations and issues it did not wish to deal with, and the rest of the nation has grappled with them ever since.

Thousands of black Americans moved to Portland in the early 1940s to take shipbuilding and other war-economy jobs (which were available to them partly because young white men had joined the service, and Japanese-Americans had been driven into prison camps). Those domestic immigrants braved the Ku Klux Klan here in my home state in the middle of the 20th century . . . and lost their homes and belongings in the Vanport Flood after the war, just 52 years ago. More than 17,000 residents were made homeless; 15 of them drowned.

[The photos below depict Vanport in 1943, five years before the flood, and on June 15, 1948, more than two weeks after it happened — an aerial shot of those barracks, looking west from North Denver Avenue. Both photos are credited to Portland City Photographer or work-for-hire by the Portland Housing Authority].

Part of the reason they lived on that cheap floodplain land — and continue largely to be sequestered to certain neighborhoods of Portland TO THIS DAY — is because banks and real estate agents and white homeowners quietly conspired not to sell or loan to them if they contemplated moving into a “white” neighborhood . . . long after racist practices such as redlining were officially illegal.

Throughout all this, the federal, state, and local governments and authorities — as well as private companies and most of the non-minority population — participated, colluded, allowed, or at best remained silent out of fear or acceptance that it wasn’t their ox being gored.

Where we live, what we can do with our leisure time, how much education we have access to, and so many other choices we are “free” to make — TODAY, IN 2020 — depend partly or substantially on events and procedures that occurred in our nation, our state, our city, anywhere from 50 to 160 years ago and even further back in time. Suppression of voting rights and access to vote clearly occurred in certain states in 2016, and even in the Georgia primary LAST WEEK.

This is how I came to understand that I am personally implicated. I didn’t choose to enjoy white privilege, any more than I sought to be born male, or blessed with good health and great genes, or to be born at all . . . but if I don’t work actively, unceasingly, against how things are, then I remain part of the ongoing problem.

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[ NOTE: I composed most of the foregoing for my Facebook page on the morning of May 31, six days after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis — as protests of historic and ongoing police brutality against African-American citizens were accelerating — and the day before the President’s stunt at Lafayette Park and St. Johns Church in Washingon, DC. Subsequent events and online discussions have caused me repeatedly to refer back to my piece, so I decided to import it to my blog, with supporting links and graphics, where it would be more readily accessible over time. ]