Seeing Today in Context
I have been astonished that the Civil War, now over for 155 years, has emerged as a major theme within the unfolding civic upheaval over white supremacy: from the never-ending battle over the display of Confederate monuments (and the related consignment by British protesters of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston back to the ocean over which he transported 84,000 stolen African lives); the decision by various US armed services - and now NASCAR! - to ban displays of the Confederate flag; the controversy over naming US military bases after treasonous generals of the losing cause of slavery; we still debate the legacy of the opposing generals and find apologia for white supremacy in the way their memories are held. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Against that backdrop my wife and I found ourselves in Great Barrington, MA last weekend. We pass that way often, but had never before stopped to pay respects at the historical homestead of the great African American historian and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. As a college student I demonstrated to create a scholarly institute in his name; as a young labor activist I read his monumental history of the seminal years after the Civil War, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. He was born in 1868 in the first years of emancipation and died on the eve of Dr. King’s March on Washington in 1963.
Splitting is the term that psychology applies to the human proclivity to fall back, regress into seeing social systems as divided between “us” and “other”, and to ascribe to “us” all that is good and admirable while the “other” carries everything of which we are afraid. We children are good; the parents are awful. We work so hard in our team, but management are fools who don’t care; this is a great neighborhood, except for them. You get the picture…
Although he was not the first to identify America’s original sin of white supremacy, it was from Du Bois that I learned to see it as our nationally-specific form of regressive splitting and at the root of our failure - refusal, actually - to develop a modern welfare state that could reliably care for the needs of a huge urbanized population:
Non-American friends sometimes ask me why the world’s richest major nation doesn’t have universal health care. The answer is race: we almost got universal coverage in 1947, but segregationists blocked it out of fear that it would lead to integrated hospitals (which Medicare actually did do in the 1960s.) Most of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would bear the great bulk of the cost, are former slave states.
- Paul Krugman, NYT
So my astonishment about seeing the legacy of the Civil War exhumed for re-examination is of the positive kind; the young activists of the Black Lives Matter movement and their allies have found the thread that runs throughout American history and are pulling on that thread hard, wherever it leads. In history and politics as in so much else, as James Baldwin said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
At a very practical level, I think Angela Neal-Barnett’s article, “How Organizations Can Support the Mental Health of Black Employees” is required reading for leaders. She is refreshingly blunt, and the distinction between systemic racism, interpersonal racism and internalized racism is important. Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor of management at INSEAD, enjoins us to be more skeptical of leadership-as-tools and query where leaders are taking us, in the service of what kind of world?
What (Else) I Am Reading: The contemporary historian Heather Cox Richardson has just published How the South Won the Civil War, about the role of white supremacy in subverting American democracy. Her regular newsletters, “Letters From An American”, are one of the most thoughtful sources of reflection on today’s events. In an article of the same name as Richardson’s book more than a year earlier, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik reflected on the Reconstruction period.