It’s racism, and they know it

"MY GRANDMOTHER was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals," said South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, making a clear reference to welfare recipients. "You know why? Because they breed! You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much beyond that."

Despite my best efforts to suppress ever having read this quote, I've been thinking a lot about it lately. As Leonard Pitts noted in a recent column:

If he'd said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing. If he'd said it of Blacks, he'd be on BET, begging absolution. If he'd said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame. But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it...The relative silence stands as eloquent testimony to the powerlessness and invisibility of the American poor.

Of course, the comment is also racism in disguise, because who, after all, make up a disproportionate majority of the poor in South Carolina?

I am all too familiar with disguised racism here in Washington state. In a refreshing victory, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that denying felons the right to vote is in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Among other damning statistics presented at the trial, recent Department of Corrections figures show that about 28 percent of the state's prison population is African American, even though they are only about 3 percent of the population at large.

Nonetheless, the Washington state attorney general's office has vowed to fight the ruling, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if need be. In response to a letter from me, their staff responded with the typical legalistic evasion that "the state argues that our law does not discriminate on the basis of race but rather on a voter's decision to commit a felony crime."

I responded by asking why they think people of color would just "decide" to commit felonies at much higher rates. If they recognize this might have something to do with institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system, not to mention housing, employment and education, then in effect "the state is saying that it is unwilling to do anything to rectify this inequality, but in fact will make things worse by denying people the right to vote. Or perhaps you simply believe Black people are genetically predisposed toward crime. Take your pick. Either way it is racist, and you know it."

I WAS thinking about all this in the lead-up to a meeting we had here on the 50th anniversary of the lunch counter sit-ins. In preparation for the meeting, and in honor of his recent passing, I've been reading Howard Zinn's SNCC: The New Abolitionists.

Zinn, who was a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta and outspoken supporter and instigator of his students' activism, became an advisor to the newly formed civil rights organization. The book, first published in 1964, is a breathless, blow-by-blow, on-the-ground report on that movement.

In his characteristic style, Zinn is able to draw out the historic nature of the struggle while never losing sight of humanity of the participants--their courageousness, but also their fears and limitations. He notes that "we are always shy about recognizing the historic worth of events when they take place before our eyes, about recognizing heroes when they are still flesh and blood and not yet transfixed in marble."

This is such an important corrective to the way that the history of the civil rights movement has been defanged and co-opted in recent years. The powers that be always love movements for justice--so long as they happened in the past. When they're happening in the present, it's a different story.

A perfect example was an editorial that ran in the University of Washington student paper last week about the anti-budget cuts coalition, called "Enough already, protesters. Nobody is listening."

"The lunch counter sit-ins in the 1950s and '60s as part of the civil rights movement? Powerful. Meaningful. It sent a message. You holding a picket sign for a couple of hours before you head to your psych lecture and grab a burger at 1101? Um, not so much."

Certainly painting past movements as different than today is useful for those who would like to preserve the status quo, but I've heard similar sentiments from those who do want to see real changes. Namely, there's this idea that Jim Crow segregation was just so obviously morally wrong that it was easier to unite people around fighting it. Today, the argument goes, we face a much more complex situation.

This idea is exactly why we need to read about what really happened during the civil rights movement. Because on the one hand, of course, the situation was unique. There is nothing quite resembling Jim Crow today this side of Gaza, and it was a disgusting, brutal system. But the fact that this is acknowledged today doesn't mean that was the case at the time. If U.S. society as a whole recognized that at the outset, there would have been no need for a civil rights movement.

The reality was very different. Activists faced a relentless campaign of violence from a Southern white majority determined to maintain segregation at all costs. Think the Tea Partiers, times 100, with law enforcement on their side. They also faced liberal politicians, who claimed to be on their side, but weren't actually willing to do anything to change things.

Even among those activists who wholeheartedly believed in full equality, there was an overwhelming sense for a long time that segregation was so ingrained that it would never fall. Many argued that the best they could do was to be patient and make small reforms over time. Of course by the end of the 1960s, the story was different, and millions of young people believed that not just segregation, but the whole capitalist system needed to go.

How this story unfolded is crucial for us learn about. Of course, we face new situations and challenges today, but the need to fight injustice is no less urgent. This history provides us with many lessons, both positive and negative, that we can apply to the work we're involved in.

Perhaps most importantly, it's an inspiring example that, despite tremendous odds and while grappling with their own weaknesses and hesitations, ordinary people can and have acted to change the course of history.