Belaboring Juneteenth

Intended to make us more aware of our racial history, Juneteenth could serve the dual purpose of exposing another American history buried far deeper than that of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.

History teachers looking for a textbook to cover it might want to consider the July issue of Harper’s Magazine released this past week. Here’s one paragraph from the cover story, “The History Wars:  1619, 1776, and the Fight to Control the Past”:

At the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, a plaque inscribed with Trump’s name commemorates a gruesome battle:  “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,” it reads.  “The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood’.”  This battle never happened.  In 2015, a reporter from the New York Times informed Trump that historians regarded his plaque as a fabrication.  “How would they know that?” he responded.  “Were they there?”

Concerned with a theme that suggests–convincingly I might add–that both left and right are missing the point in what is rapidly becoming the hottest front in America’s Culture War, author Matthew Karp never mentions something that should jump out for anyone who has listened to the babbling lunatic these past six years:  It foreshadows his infamous “very fine people” pronouncement regarding the KKK and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

And then there’s the dual use of one of his favorite, vapid adjectives “great,” as well as the confused verb tense (“water would… became“). The simpleton wrote the fabrication himself.

At the risk of reading too much into Karp’s intent, I welcome his skepticism regarding the 1619 Project.  No question that an honest history of slavery needs to be added to American education, but putting it entirely in terms of race keeps hidden the underlying crime of unrestrained capitalism.  When the Civil War finally erupted, the South justified itself no so much with claims of “white supremacy” but of “property rights.”

Fast forward a century and a half, and Republican voter suppression laws being passed and pending in many states appear targeted at race.  Take a closer look, and you’ll see that their bullseye is urban. The direct target is lower income. Though still racist, race is coincidental.

Before the Civil War, Southern politicians were able to maintain a gag order on any talk of slavery in the Senate. How? Through a contrived device found nowhere in the Constitution and never mentioned by the founders that allows for minority rule:  The filibuster.

That the filibuster survived the Civil War betrays just how uncommitted the North was to the plight of newly-freed people.  Race may have served as a strategy, and Emancipation was a recruiting tool, but as soon as Lee surrendered, everyone was quite willing, as the song goes, to “look away.”

We like to think of it as a war of freedom, but more to the heart of the matter, the North won a war of capitalism. 

Fast forward again to the present, and listen to Republicans harp on “Critical Race Theory.” In a barrage of public statements and a tidal wave of coverage on Fox Nonsense, they vow to ban it from elementary and secondary schools.  Fox viewers fall for this for the same reason they fall for so much else, because it sounds menacing and anti-American–no matter that it has never been taught or considered for anything other than college, mostly grad school seminars.

Despite that, it’s easy to see why Republicans and their supporters see no contradiction in their something-out-of-nothing crusade.  Critical Race Theory simply holds that, from America’s founding, racism has influenced our laws and institutions. But Republicans willfully ignore the meaning while repeating the ponderous sounding term. To them, Critical Race Theory means any talk at all about race, about slavery, about Jim Crow or Civil Rights, about red-lining or racial profiling, about lynchings in the 1920s or police shootings in the 2020s.

In effect, Republicans are calling for a gag order to go with the filibuster that one or two Democratic senators are willing to let stand, perversely unwilling to see that it protects minority rule. Like their complaints against “cancel culture” and pious invocations of “free speech,” the irony is lost on them.

Since the reports a day after Obama’s inauguration in 2009 that congressional Republicans vowed to obstruct all Democratic attempts at governing, anyone paying attention can easily see the racist designs.  Not so apparent are economic designs.

Harper’s July issue follows its treatise on history with an analysis headlined “Hard Bargain:  How Amazon Turned a Generation against Labor.” May sound like no more than a detailed report on the vote on unionization in a behemoth Amazon warehouse last year, but it is also a history of Bessemer, Alabama, how it was born, how it thrived with unions, and how it imploded when the companies left in search of cheap labor overseas.  “A company town without a company,” it was ready made for Amazon.

Race was and is again a factor.  But only insofar as wages can be manipulated.  For Bessemer Steel, it was divide and conquer by paying the whites more than the blacks. This allowed whites to feel superior while not noticing that their wages were still a pittance. W.E.B. DuBois called it “a psychological wage.”

Fast forward to 2020 and Amazon is using a “unionization-threat heat map application” with a “diversity index” in their hiring to insure a mix of employees “less likely to unionize.” Amazon denies this, but the evidence offered by writer Daniel Brook makes that denial laughable. Once again, the issue of race, real and harsh as it is, disguises the harsher reality of capitalism.

Stands to reason then, that if Republicans can shut down talk of race with minority rule, they can gag any talk of economic justice, unions, consumer protection, occupational safety, financial regulations, even a living wage.  Should be easy in a country that, while it white-washes slavery in school textbooks calling most plantation owners “benevolent,” has kept the Labor Movement entirely out of those same texts.

But Democrats and their allies in what is called “left-leaning” media are not free of blame. Harper’s offers a third essay that critiques historian Jon Meacham’s recent book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels and the HBO documentary based on it. Written by Thomas Frank, an ardent progressive who has focused on the crimes of unrestrained capitalism in books such as What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, it is a damning indictment of an advisor and speechwriter to Joe Biden since the start of his presidential campaign.

While Frank never accuses Meacham of lying, he details countless times that one of MSNBC’s most frequent talking heads reduces history to:

...a struggle between moral categories, the deletion of working-class struggles from the story of progress, the distaste for economic grievance, the obsessive focus on the executive office, and the score-keeping of racist remarks, as if wickedness could be quantified and exorcized in that way.

As Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, once said, the distortion of school text books is not done through lies but through emphasis and omission–which is why Republicans have demonized Zinn and his book which is very much about America’s Labor Movement.

By wild coincidence and with jaw-dropping irony, I write this on the dawn of America’s first observance of Juneteenth, declared federal holiday just this week.  Must be awkward for Republicans to dance around this, although they have a ready-made response for skeptics like me or anyone from Harper’s who might confront them with the historical significance of June 19, 1865:

“How would you know that?  Were you there?”

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