Slavery was no accident.
We didn't trip and fall into black subjugation.
Racism wasn't a bad joke that just never went away.
It was all on purpose.
Every bit of it was on purpose.
Racial injustices, like slavery and our system of mass incarceration, were purposeful inventions, but instead of seeking to understand how we got here, the national narrative remains filled with comforting myths, patchwork time lines, and colonial ideals....
Brown goes on to discuss how we (the royal "we") have been complicit in racism and how our expressed memory of and the way we talk about race and racism obfuscate the systematic nature of oppression.
I have some disagreements with Brown's take on history. But first, I should point out that Brown's book is a memoir. Her goal is to discuss her personal encounters with racism and her experiences concerning how racism works and is perpetuated. My criticisms don't undermine the value of her book, which I think deserves a close read by anyone interested in the issue.
Professional history has long addressed the issue
I'll start with a pedantic quibble. Professionally trained historians have long documented exactly what Brown says is commonly denied. At least since the "new" histories of the 1960s and 1970s, professionally trained historians have investigated the many policies and decisions that have created and enabled racism. When they've disagreed, it's almost always been over issues like whether racism is sui generis (that is, it's own thing) or epiphenomenal (that is, ultimately caused by something else, like class oppression).That's not to say all professionally trained historians are onboard. Some schools of professional history, like diplomatic history, are latecomers. And we might occasionally identify a small number of professionally trained historians who reject that racism is a thing or who do in fact claim that it's something that "just happened" without any decisions being made. Even more professionally trained historians are like me. We recognize the importance of race and racism in understanding U.S. history. We believe it needs to be studied. But we individually choose to study something else. For example, my dissertation focuses on a group of people who were almost all male and all white. Race sometimes explicitly entered the statements of theirs that have come to the public record and was implicit in many more ways. I, however, focused on different things, mostly on their relation to the state and certain policies. Even those features had some relation to race and racism, but I chose not to focus on them.
My criticism is a little unfair because Brown isn't talking about "professionally trained historians." She's talking about national and local narratives and about how we as a society treat the history of race and racism. She's also presumably talking about how history is taught in primary and secondary school, although I don't recall if she makes that explicit.
Choices are always constrained
My second criticism more directly challenges Brown's argument that "[e]very bit of [racism] was on purpose." I'd say it was and it wasn't. All of us play a role in crafting what our society is like, none of us crafts it completely. Some have a big say, and others have little or almost no say. Those who have the greatest say still must work with the world as they find it. They don't encounter it anew.Positive choice
Brown's argument is strongest when it comes to positive choice. By "positive," I mean the decision to do something instead of the decision not to do something. When it comes to the positive decisions people have mad, it is clear that much of racism and the antecedents of racism (slavery and Jim Crow, for example) weren't accidents at all.People chose to import slaves to the Americas. People chose to enact laws that made slavery heritable and that defined it closely with race. People chose to take positive measures to perpetuate slavery as it faced numerous challenges. People chose to join vigilante groups like the KKK and that people chose to enact Jim Crow legislation. ,People chose to protest and violently attack others who protested against racism. People chose to bomb black churches.
Negative choice
Most of the examples above were explicit choices to do certain things that didn't have to be done. But there's another type of choice. That is the decision not to do something.We can say that few people chose to lodge a meaningful challenge to slavery throughout most of its existence in the U.S. and its predecessor colonies. "Meaningful" is a work of art, of course, and at an everyday level many, many people, perhaps a majority, challenged slavery. Sometimes, as with Thomas Jefferson, all they did was give lip service to the idea that slavery was wrong. Sometimes, as with most of the emancipation schemes in the north during and after the Revolutionary War, the decision to end slavery was so gradual that some people were legally enslaved as late as the 1830s or 1840s. Sometimes, as with the "good" slaveholders, a paternalistic attitude toward slaves was predicated on recognizing slaves' humanity in a way that undermined the justification for slavery even as it perpetuated the continuation of slavery. Sometimes, as with those who proposed gradual emancipation, the efforts were more substantive. And sometimes, as with the thousands of slaves who resisted fully buying into their masters' paternalistic pretensions, the challenge to slavery was greater.
But more often, we see accommodation to slavery. That accommodation ranged from reluctant to eager and was strongly linked to the constraints under which the accommodaters acted. A slaveholder might have had a hard time emancipating his slaves even if he wanted to. The southern economy was based on a credit system which involved a series of interlocking claims, obligations, and debts. Even if we disregard laws that forbade manumission, this credit system often meant a slaveholder couldn't simply free his slaves. A "lien" of sorts was on his property and simply freeing his property would have been very difficult. Add to that the reality that a person who lives in a slave society would be freeing his slaves into that society. The slaves would still have to find a way to survive, to work, and while there were free communities of color in the slave south, survival was precarious. Moving to the north or elsewhere was not always an option. Some states forbade freed slaves to enter, and even where such prohibitions did not apply, it's hard to move to a different area where one has few connections.
Slaves, too, chose often not to challenge slavery. In the short and medium term, it would have been hard for them to predict slavery's end, and so they had to manage within the system. As Eugene Genovese documents in Roll, Jordan, Roll, slaves asserted their everyday "rights" in a way that ultimately affirmed the hegemony of the planer class. One needn't sign on to Genovese's Marxist argument in its entirety, and in my opinion, Genovese suffers from the reductionism characteristic of most Marxist scholars. But the problem he is addressing is real. Slaves, like anyone, have had to work with what they got. Slaves had to survive somehow in a system which probably seemed more or less permanent, where revolt was never a plausible possibility, and where escape was difficult and involved tremendous risks.
I've emphasized slavery, but the same dynamic could be applied to the Jim Crow era and to today. While people chose to attack civil rights protestors, many, many others chose not to get involved. It wasn't only a question of apathy. It was also a fear of violence. For some business owners, challenging Jim Crow and treating customers equally might have led to prosecution for violating segregation statutes. (I realize it's possible to overemphasize that last point and claim that white business owners were "the real victims" of Jim Crow. It's also possible that the threat of prosecution for a white business owner violating segregation laws may have been more theoretical than actual (i.e., I'm not an expert in that area). But the fact remains that if such business owners wanted to be racially progressive, the laws were on the books and in theory could be used against them.)
The positive-negative spectrum
Of course, I've presented the issue too starkly. The distinction between "positive choice" and "negative choice" is not a bright line. It's a spectrum. Negative choice is still a choice. And as the song says, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Negative choice is almost always the safest and easiest thing to do, especially in the short term.We should remember that "negative choice" often obfuscates the actual positive choices people make.A slaveholder on a large plantation may have inherited a set of property of which he couldn't easily divest himself and lived in a society that constrained his actions, but he could have written a letter to the legislature urging more liberal emancipation laws. Or if he wrote one, he could have written two. He could have shared some of his "profits," when he had profits, with his slaves. Or if he already did, he could have done it more often or less grudgingly. There are usually good choices that can be made along some margin. The frog may never actually get a chance to jump off the cliff, but it can get closer and closer.
Sometimes, however, the best we can do is to choose not to participate in evil, or as Dr. Rieux said in The Plague, do the least amount of evil possible.
Sendoff
I haven't really disproven Brown's claim, quoted above. I have qualified it, however. It's worth remembering that even when we discern others' actions to be evil and when we discern certain structures of society to be evil, it behooves us to remember that we all exist in a context and within constraints that channel the options available to us and sort them into what is relatively easy and what is relatively difficult. I do want to stress that my qualifications aside, I believe Brown's claim about choice is fundamentally correct, and it's worthwhile to learn and interrogate the choices historical actors have made, just like it's worthwhile to learn from and interrogate the choices each of us makes.It's also worthwhile to read her book, and I recommend it.
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