[Pen-l] Are we in a post-racial America?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Are We In A Post-Racial America?
by Louis Proyect

Book Review

Roediger, David: How Race Survived U.S. History: from settlement and 
slavery to the Obama phenomenon, Verso 2008, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-275-2, 
240 pages.

(Swans - June 1, 2009)   As part of the euphoria surrounding the 
election of Barack Obama, members of the punditocracy speculated that 
the U.S. had entered a "post-racial" epoch. Typical was The Washington 
Post's Jim Hoagland who editorialized on Election Day last year:

    Barack Obama has succeeded brilliantly in casting his candidacy -- 
indeed, his whole life -- as post-racial. Even before the votes have 
been cast, he has written a glorious coda for the civil rights struggle 
that provided this nation with many of the finest, and also most 
horrible, moments of its past 150 years. If the results confirm that 
race was not a decisive factor in the balloting, generations of 
campaigners for racial justice and equality will have seen their work 
vindicated.

After deploying data in his introduction to How Race Survived U.S. 
History to the effect that racism continues unabated (one in three 
children of color lives in poverty as opposed to one in ten of white 
families, etc.), David Roediger poses the question: "How did white 
supremacy in the U.S. not yield to changes that we generally regard as 
constant, dramatic, and, in the main, progressive?" The remainder of his 
brilliantly argued and researched book gives the definitive answer to 
this question. As such, it belongs on the bookshelf next to Howard 
Zinn's People's History of the United States and other such works that 
offer a "revisionist" history of this country in accordance with truth 
and -- more importantly -- justice.

The theme that Roediger keeps coming back appears initially in Chapter 
One on colonial Virginia in the 17th century ("Suddenly White 
Supremacy"); namely, that a white identity was created in order to unite 
men and women of conflicting classes against the most exploited groups 
of the day: the slave and the Indian. And when necessary, blacks were 
also recruited to the master's cause against the Indians. As has always 
been the case, the British -- including the freedom-loving colonists who 
would form a new republic in 1776 -- have been adept at dividing and 
conquering. Roediger writes:

    The most spectacular example of revolt, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, 
took Virginia to the brink of civil war. Broadly arising from the desire 
for good land among European and African servants and ex-servants, the 
rebellion therefore also had anti-Indian dimensions, demanding and 
implementing aggressive policies to speed settlement onto indigenous 
lands. Bondservants joined those who had recently served out "their 
time" under the leadership of the young English lawyer and venture 
capitalist Nathaniel Bacon, laying siege to the capital in Jamestown, 
burning it, driving Governor William Berkeley into exile, and sustaining 
insurrection for months. Authorities offered freedom "from their 
slavery" to "Negroes and servants" who would come over into opposition 
to the rebellion. Rebels, meanwhile, feared that they would all be made 
into "slaves, man, woman & child." Both the promise of liberation and 
the language registering fear of retribution suggest how imperfectly 
class predicaments aligned with any firm sense of racial division.

full: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/lproy55.html
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