Posted by David Bernstein: The End of Jim Crow: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_02-2008_11_08.shtml#1225859887
Much as I didn't want Obama to win on ideological grounds, I am nonetheless thrilled that the American voters elected their first black president. I've spent a fair chunk of the last two decades writing about post-Civil War African-American history, a history replete with segregation, lynchings, intimidation, humiliation, exclusion and so forth. I can't tell you how disgusted I am when I read this history, and I'm not sure that those of us who haven't studied the history really understand the pervasiveness and invidiousness of the mistreatment of African Americans. And this mistreatment crossed ideological lines. As late as the 1930s, liberal Democrats had few if any compunctions about intentionally creating massive unemployment among African American farmers and industrial workers in pursuit of New Deal goals they considered far more important. Adlai Stevenson, as I recall, ran with two separate segregationist running mates in the 1950s! Just forty years ago, the Supreme Court had to force Virginia to allow interracial marriage. Now we see the son of a black African father and white mother carrying Virginia in a presidential election. Amazing! Prejudice, of course, hasn't disappeared, not will it disappear under an Obama presidency. But all American ethnic groups have faced prejudice, sometimes severe prejudice, and thrived nevertheless. What was special about American post-slavery prejudice against African Americans, as opposed to the prejudice against other groups, was that it manifested itself in a system of white supremacy that dictated that blacks always be placed in an inferior position to whites. In the South, this was formalized under the law by Jim Crow statutes, and also enforced by "whitecapping" against "uppity" black business owners and others who "didn't know their place." Things were never quite so bad in the North, but there was still tremendous resistance until relatively recently among whites to, for example, allowing blacks serving in supervisory positions over whites. Until fairly recently, most construction unions blatantly refused to accept African American members, mainly because they did not want to acknowledge equality with them on a social level. Obama's victory tells us that the ideology of white supremacy is over and done with, kaput. Again, while blacks still face a fair amount of prejudice, there's a big difference between prejudice and a widespread ideology among the majority population that members of a particular group must stay in "their place," by custom, law, and violence. "Their place" is now all the same positions whites occupy, up to and including the most powerful office in the land. So congratulations to Senator Obama, and to America. _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
