How to Be an Antiracist (15 page)

Blackwell directed county boards to limit voters’ access to the provisional ballots that ensured that anyone improperly purged from voting rolls could cast their ballot. He ordered voter-registration forms accepted only on expensive eighty-pound stock paper, a sly technique to exclude newly registered voters (who he almost certainly knew were more likely to be Black). Under Blackwell’s supervision, county boards were falsely telling former prisoners they could not vote. County boards allocated fewer voting machines to heavily Democratic cities. Black Ohio voters on average waited fifty-two minutes to vote, thirty-four minutes longer than White voters, according to one post-election study. Long lines caused 3 percent of Ohio voters to leave before voting, meaning approximately
174,000 potential votes walked away, larger than Bush’s 118,000 margin of victory. “
Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,” Representative John Conyers said after investigating Ohio’s voter suppression, referring to the Florida secretary of state who certified Bush as winner of the election in 2000. But according to the theory that Black people can’t be racist because they lack power, Blackwell didn’t have the power to suppress Black votes. Remember, we are all either racists or antiracists. How can Florida’s Katherine Harris be a racist in 2000 and Blackwell be an antiracist in 2004?

After unsuccessfully running for Ohio governor in 2006 and chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2009, Blackwell joined Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The commission had clearly been set up, although Trump would never admit it, to find new ways to suppress the voting power of Trump’s opponents, especially the Democratic Party’s most loyal voters: Black people. Clearly, even thirteen years later,
Trump officials had not forgotten Blackwell’s state-of-the-art racist work suppressing Black votes for Bush’s reelection.

With the popularity of the powerless defense, Black on Black criminals like Blackwell get away with their racism. Black people call them Uncle Toms, sellouts, Oreos, puppets—everything but the right thing: racist. Black people need to do more than revoke their “Black card,” as we call it. We need to paste the racist card to their foreheads for all the world to see.

The saying “Black people can’t be racist” reproduces the false duality of racist and not-racist promoted by White racists to deny their racism. It merges Black people with White Trump voters who are angry about being called racist but who want to express racist views and support their racist policies while being identified as not-racist, no matter what they say or do. By this theory, Black people can hate them niggers, value Light people over Dark people, support anti-Latinx immigration policies, defend the anti-Native team mascots, back bans against Middle Eastern Muslims, and still escape charges of racism. By this theory, Latinx, Asians, and Natives can fear unknown Black bodies, support mass-incarcerating policies, and still escape charges of racism. By this theory, I can look upon White people as devils and aliens and still escape charges of racism.

When we stop denying the duality of racist and antiracist, we can take an accurate accounting of the racial ideas and policies we support. For the better part of my life I held both racist and antiracist ideas, supported both racist and antiracist policies; I’ve been antiracist one moment, racist in many more moments. To say Black people can’t be racist is to say all Black people are being antiracist at all times. My own story tells me that is not true. History agrees.

T
HE RECORDED HISTORY
of Black racists begins in 1526 in
Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa),
authored by a Moroccan Moor who was kidnapped after he visited sub-Saharan Africa. His enslavers presented him to Pope Leo X, who converted him to Christianity, freed him, and renamed him Leo Africanus.
Description of Africa
was translated into multiple European languages and emerged as the most influential book of anti-Black racist ideas in the sixteenth century, when the British, French, and Dutch were diving into slave trading. “
Negroes…leade a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterities of wit, and of all arts,” Africanus wrote. “They so behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a Forrest among wild beasts.” Africanus may have made up his travels to sub-Saharan Africa to secure favor from the Italian court.

Englishman Richard Ligon may have made up the stories in
A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes,
published in 1657. Led by Sambo, a group of slaves disclose a plot for a slave revolt. They refuse their master’s rewards. A confused master asks why, Ligon narrates. It was “
but an act of Justice,” Sambo says, according to Ligon. Their duty. They are “sufficiently” rewarded “in the Act.”

Slavery was justified in Sambo’s narrative, because some Black people believed they were supposed to be enslaved. The same was true of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who
authored the first known slave narrative, in 1772. Born to Nigerian royalty, Gronniosaw was enslaved at fifteen by an ivory merchant, who sold him to a Dutch captain. “My master grew very fond of me, and I loved him exceedingly” and “endeavored to convince him, by every action, that my only pleasure was to serve him well.” The ship reached Barbados. A New Yorker purchased Gronniosaw and brought him home, where he came to believe there was “a black man call’d the Devil that lived in hell.” Gronniosaw was sold again to a minister, who transformed him from “a poor heathen” into an enslaved Christian. He was apparently happy to escape the Black Devil.

Slaveowners welcomed ministers preaching the gospel of eternal Black enslavement, derived from the reading of the Bible where all Black people were the cursed descendants of Ham. A fifty-one-year-old free Black carpenter had to first teach away these racist ideas in 1818 as he began recruiting thousands of enslaved Blacks to join his slave revolt around Charleston, South Carolina. Denmark Vesey set the date of the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. The aim of the revolt was to take down slavery, as in the successful 1804 Haitian revolution that inspired Vesey.

But the revolt had to remain a secret, even from some slaves. Don’t mention it “
to those waiting men who receive presents of old coats from their masters,” Vesey’s chief lieutenants told recruiters. “They’ll betray us.” One recruiter did not listen and told house slave Peter Prioleau, who promptly told his master in May. By late June 1822, South Carolina enslavers had destroyed Vesey’s army, which one estimate placed as high as nine thousand strong. Vesey, hung on July 2, 1822, remained defiant to the very end.

The South Carolina legislature emancipated Peter Prioleau on Christmas Day, 1822, and bestowed on him a lifetime annual pension.
By 1840, he’d acquired seven slaves of his own and lived comfortably in Charleston’s free Light community. Even when he was a slave, this Black man had no desire to get rid of his master. He used his power to spoil one of the most well-organized slave revolts in American history. He used his power to fully take on the qualities of his master, to become him: slaves, racist ideas, and all.

P
ETER
P
RIOLEAU RESEMBLED
William Hannibal Thomas, a nineteenth-century Black man who wanted to be accepted by White people as one of their own. But as Jim Crow spread in the 1890s, Thomas was shoved more deeply into Blackness. He finally deployed the tactic self-interested Black racists have been using from the beginning to secure White patronage: He attacked Black people as inferior. When Thomas’s
The American Negro
appeared weeks before Booker T. Washington’s
Up from Slavery
in 1901,
The New York Times
placed Thomas “
next to Mr. Booker T. Washington, the best American authority on the negro question.”

Blacks are an “
intrinsically inferior type of humanity,” Thomas wrote. Black history is a “record of lawless existence.” Blacks are mentally retarded, immoral savages, “unable practically to discern between right and wrong,” Thomas wrote. Ninety percent of Black women are “in bondage to physical pleasure.” The “social degradation of our freedwomen is without parallel in modern civilization.” In the end,
Thomas’s “list of negative qualities of Negroes seemed limitless,” as his biographer concluded.

Thomas believed himself to be among a minority of Light people who had overcome their inferior biological heritage.
But this “saving remnant” was set “apart from their white fellow-men.” We show, Thomas pleaded to White people, that “the redemption of the negro is…possible and assured through a thorough assimilation of the thought and ideals of American civilization.” To speed up this “
national assimilation,” Thomas advised restricting the voting rights of corrupt Blacks, intensely policing natural Black criminals, and placing all Black children with White guardians.

Black people
stamped William Hannibal Thomas as the “Black Judas.” Black critics ruined his credibility and soon White racists could no longer use him, so they tossed him away like a paper plate, as White racists have done to so many disposable Black racists over the years. Thomas found work as a janitor, before dying in obscurity in 1935.

Black people would be betrayed by Black on Black criminals again and again in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the diversifying of America’s police forces was supposed to alleviate the scourge of police brutality against Black victims. The fruit of decades of antiracist activism, a new crop of Black officers were expected to treat Black citizens better than their White counterparts did. But reports immediately surfaced in the 1960s that
Black officers were as abusive as White officers. One report noted “in some places, low-income Negroes prefer white policemen because of the severe conduct of Negro officers.” A 1966 study found Black officers were not as likely to be racist as Whites, but a significant minority expressed anti-Black racist ideas like, “I’m telling you these people are savages. And they’re real dirty.” Or the Black officer who said, “There have always been jobs for Negroes, but the f—— people are too stupid to go out and get an education. They all want the easy way out.”

To color police racism as White on the pretext that only White people can be racist is to ignore the non-White officer’s history of profiling and killing “them niggers.” It is to ignore that the police killer in 2012 of Brooklyn’s Shantel Davis was Black, that three of the six officers involved in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray were Black, that the police killer in 2016 of Charlotte’s Keith Lamont Scott was Black, and that one of the police killers in 2018 of Sacramento’s Stephon Clark was Black. How can the White officers involved in the deaths of Terence Crutcher, Sandra Bland, Walter L. Scott, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, and Decynthia Clements be racist but their Black counterparts be antiracist?

To be fair, one
survey of nearly eight thousand sworn officers in 2017 makes strikingly clear that White officers are far and away more likely to be racist than Black officers these days. Nearly all (92 percent) of White officers surveyed agreed with the post-racial idea that “our country has made the changes needed to give Blacks equal rights with Whites.” Only 6 percent of White officers co-signed the antiracist idea that “our country needs to continue making changes to give Blacks equal rights with Whites,” compared to 69 percent of Black officers. But the disparity shrinks concerning deadly police encounters. Black officers (57 percent) are only twice as likely as White officers (27 percent) to say “the deaths of Blacks during encounters with police in recent years are signs of a broader problem.”

The new crop of Black politicians, judges, police chiefs, and officers in the 1960s and subsequent decades helped to create a new problem. Rising levels of violent crime engulfed impoverished neighborhoods. Black residents bombarbed their politicians and crime fighters with their racist fears of
Black
criminals as opposed to criminals. Neither the residents nor the politicians nor the crime fighters wholly saw the heroin and crack problem as a public-health crisis or the violent-crime problem in poor neighborhoods where Black people lived as a poverty problem. Black people seemed to be more worried about other Black people killing them in drug wars or robberies by the thousands each year than about the cancers, heart diseases, and respiratory diseases killing them by the hundreds of thousands each year. Those illnesses were not mentioned, but “
Black on Black crime has reached a critical level that threatens our existence as a people,” wrote
Ebony
publisher John H. Johnson, in a 1979 special issue on the topic. The Black on Black crime of internalized racism had indeed reached a critical level—this new Black-abetted focus on the crisis of “Black crime” helped feed the growth of the movement toward mass incarceration that would wreck a generation.

The rise of mass incarceration was partially fueled by Black people who, even as they adopted racist ideas, did so ostensibly out of trying to save the Black community in the 1970s. But the 1980s brought a more premeditated form of racism, as channeled through the Black administrators Ronald Reagan appointed to his cabinet. Under Clarence Thomas’s directorship from 1980 to 1986, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
doubled the number of discrimination cases it dismissed as “no cause.” Samuel Pierce, Reagan’s secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD),
redirected billions of dollars in federal funds allotted for low-income housing to corporate interests and Republican donors. Under Pierce’s watch in the first half of the 1980s, the number of public-housing units in non-White neighborhoods dropped severely. Poor Black people faced a housing crisis in the 1980s that Pierce made worse, even though he had the power to alleviate it, setting the stage for future secretaries of HUD like Trump’s appointee, Ben Carson. These were men who used the power they’d been given—no matter how limited and conditional—in inarguably racist ways.