Gordon C. Morse: Virginia’s opportunity to engage the history it avoided
When it comes to racism’s political effects, it sometimes happens that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Other times, you might prefer not to know at all.
Let’s take the first.
An example arrives in the form of a recent paper by Professor Daniel J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington, two University of Pennsylvania researchers, who reached counter-intuitive conclusions after examining the effects of President Trump’s “explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities.”
“Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more or less prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through changing norms around racial prejudice or other mechanisms?” they asked.
In other words, did Trump’s rhetoric “authorize” white Americans with prejudiced views to express them openly? In a 2018 survey, 54% of respondents agreed that “President Trump has emboldened people who hold racist beliefs”
But Hopkins and Washington found that things went the other way. “White Americans’ expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after Trump’s political emergence, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice.”
It wasn’t a neutral reaction, either. White Americans heard what Trump was saying, absorbed its meaning and didn’t like it. They reacted against it.
These findings were published in the newest edition of Public Opinion Quarterly and it’s both a head-scratcher and a source of optimism.
The head scratching is OK. You want to be surprised. Especially if that means the awful patterns of the past are not going to be the patterns of the future.
And, if it’s true, if people yearn for the light over the darkness, and would do better by their fellow human beings, then that is reason for optimism and could be good for Virginia.
Which is to say that Virginia’s racial history could become a source of instruction — that a sufficient mass, white and Black, finally set out to do this better, based on what’s known.
As opposed, that is, to a depressing parade of things you just as soon forget. Wasn’t it Friedrich Nietzsche, the great German critic, who argued the utility in life of forgetfulness?
“The benefit of active forgetfulness,” he wrote, “like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette: from which can immediately see how there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness.”
That has been the way of things in Virginia. In the 1970s, when I first worked in the General Assembly, it was best not to remember who was a segregationist. It just wasn’t polite to mention the subject in casual conversation and downright rude to do so in a political campaign.
Massive Resistance and all the rest had been hard enough to politically manage and survive. Time to move on. I heard this. Many times.
But what if we do resurrect the past? What if we bravely go the other direction, examine the particulars of what Virginia once enacted, codified and maintained. The details are astounding.
After all, if you want to discover structural racism, you’ve come to the right place. No other state in the nation brought a higher level of sophistication to the work of white supremacy.
It wasn’t just the literacy tests and the poll taxes, which diminished Virginia’s electorate to a point where less than 10% of the voters could control the outcomes. That was standard stuff in the South.
Virginia went further and conjured up a racial commissar of sorts, in the person of Walter Ashby Pleckler. A Hampton doctor in his early days, Plecker came to run the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics for 34 years and, in his thinking, the “Vital” was underlined.
Pleckler was on a crusade. He helped establish Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act and then proceeded, in his bureaucratic capacity, to ferret out anyone claiming to be “white” who, in his view, wasn’t.
He particularly targeted Native Americans classified as white. He got hold of their birth certificates and wrote on the back his own opinion of their race. The law didn’t sanction that, but he got away with it and for far too long.
Plecker just happened to be one of the more infamous figures of that period. There were others.
If we do this, if we go beyond the street demonstrations and plunge into Virginia’s history, it could be painful and difficult.
But the University of Pennsylvania research suggests another outcome: that we may be ready to examine the specifics of Virginia’s racial history and, with that knowledge, turn in the right direction.
After writing editorials for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co. and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.
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