AMERICA'S RACIAL POLICY ALLIANCES: A BRIEF REPRISE

Many perspectives offer valuable insights into the numerous factors that contribute to racial inequalities. We have long maintained that it is useful to analyze the overall structure of American racial politics by mapping how political actors have generally felt driven to join with one side or another of what we have termed “racial institutional orders” or “racial policy alliances” (King and Smith Reference King and Smith2005; Reference King and Smith2011). These synonymous terms refer to coalitions joined by their stances on the major racial policy issues defining their eras. We sometimes call those coalitions “alliances” to stress their character as loose networks of groups and actors pushing in the same policy directions, sometimes “institutional orders” to stress that the alliances include governing institutions and officials who authoritatively shape people's lives in line with their racial visions. Until recently, American political development displayed three sets of racial orders or alliances. Pro-slavery versus anti-slavery coalitions did much to drive American politics from the revolution through the civil war. Subsequently, pro-Jim Crow segregation or anti-segregation coalitions arose and were central to American life from the late 19th century through the mid-1960s. From the late 1970s up to now, racial conservatives who formerly supported segregation rebranded themselves as adherents of a “color-blind” approach to any federal reforms tackling racial inequality, in opposition to the “race-conscious” measures that were becoming central to the agendas of many civil rights activists.

Although many of those activists had themselves championed color-blindness in opposition to racial segregation, most soon concluded, as some had long insisted, that real progress for people of color required substantial race-targeted initiatives. That reality shifted the political advantage back to those racial conservatives who were willing to modify their views, at least publicly. “Color-blind” commitments appear race-neutral. Especially in a nation with America's distinctively strong traditions of individualism, it sounds fair for no persons to gain advantages or penalties because of their race. Yet because America has also had strong traditions of white supremacy fostering deeply entrenched inequalities, insisting on color-blindness means in practice the maintenance of many disadvantages of the nation's people of color. As a result, most racial conservatives recognized that they could both defend their interests and regain the high ground in the popular mind by professing principled dedication to color-blindness. They did not entirely prevail. Proponents of color-blindness and race-conscious measures have controlled various contesting American federal, state, and local governing agencies over the last half-century. Still, since the Reagan Revolution of 1980, the color-blind racial policy alliance has had the upper hand.

By the early 21st century, the color-blind policy alliance had achieved considerable success in slowing school desegregation, so that re-segregation rose markedly; limiting affirmative action in university admissions and public hiring and contracting; weakening protections against racially disparate vote suppression; and largely abandoning the use of housing and urban development (HUD) money to enforce affordable housing quotas and affirmatively active fair housing. As Republican presidents succeeded in populating the Supreme Court with a narrow majority favoring color-blind precepts, it aided and abetted all these policy developments, often in 5–4 decisions, such as the ban on school racial integration in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle (2007) and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

In so doing, the color-blind racial policy alliance aided those white Americans who wished to see many of their systemic advantages continue. Consequently, for decades after the passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, even many of those who still identified with the nation's traditions of white supremacy found it politic to join publicly in support of policymaking “without regard to race.” That stance seemed necessary to stave off proponents of measures to lessen the disadvantages of non-white Americans and to insure that even if African-Americans gained great political power, as Barack Obama eventually did, they would be reluctant, as he was, to make race-conscious initiatives central to their governance (Bryant Reference Bryant2017).

So, what has changed? If featuring the principle of color-blindness was already protecting many white advantages, why and how is the color-blind policy alliance now transforming into an openly protectionist alliance for disgruntled white Americans?

THE TURN TO WHITE PROTECTIONISM

Despite Barack Obama's reticence on racial issues, perhaps the single most important factor in changing American racial politics was his election to the White House for what proved to be an eight-year incumbency. Perhaps the second most important was that after 2012, dissatisfactions with slow progress followed on the high hopes had Obama stirred, compounded by mounting undeniable evidence of racist police brutality. The result, starting in 2013, was the Black Lives Movement. Both these developments heightened the fears of many white Americans that the racially conservative era that had prevailed since 1980 was over, putting them and their accustomed advantages in danger.

Still, the shifts in America's racial orders emerged in the first two years of the Obama administration, when virulent opposition to the president and his policies erupted, including the overwhelmingly white people's Tea Party, which cost Democrats control of Congress in 2010, and the Donald Trump-led “birther” movement that sought to deny Obama's citizenship (Jardina and Traugott Reference Jardina and Traugott2019). A new or (more probably) latent group of “white identity”-conscious voters believed that whites increasingly were victims of discrimination because Obama's America was excessively “politically correct,” only concerned about racial minorities (Jardina Reference Jardina2019). To be sure, their concerns did not begin with Obama. A 2011 study found that while both black and white Americans believed anti-black bias had declined from the 1950s through the 2000s, many whites thought anti-white bias had been rising through those decades, eventually becoming more extensive, in their eyes, than anti-black bias. By 2017, 55% of whites believed that whites suffer discrimination in modern America (though most believed racial minorities faced discrimination as well) (Gonyea Reference Gonyea2017). Those who viewed whites as discriminated-against opposed not only race-conscious policies but also facially neutral policies that they saw as aimed chiefly at aiding non-whites, thereby victimizing whites.

This rising white ethnic identity was the fodder for the Trump movement's success in 2016. Popular receptivity to three elements of the Trump campaign converted color-blind commitments into white protectionism: a more militant rhetoric that eschewed mention of color-blind principles and spoke often of protection; a new strategic emphasis on the special victimization of white Christians; and a ruthless pursuit of civil right policy reversals.

THE RISE OF RACIAL REPARATIONS

Just as this “white protectionism” represents a significantly new emphasis on a long-present theme of racial conservatives, used to justify more militant policies and tactics, so the new focus on “racial reparations” and “systemic racism” elevates to greater prominence positions long held by advocates for people of color. Black nationalists from Bishop Henry McNeal Turner in the late 19th century through the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party in the 20th have prioritized reparations, invoking the unfulfilled civil war promise of “40 Acres and a Mule.” In 1955, as the modern civil rights movement gained momentum, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore founded the Reparations Committee of Descendants of United States Slaves. Though it had a limited impact, it kept the African American reparations cause alive. Then the push in the late 1980s for Congress to compensate Japanese–American internment camp survivors helped spark the formation of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, active ever since (Biondi Reference Biondi2003, 6–8; Henry Reference Henry2003, 137–42). In 1989, U.S. Representative John Conyers began repeatedly introducing H.R. 40 to create a commission to study and develop reparations (Biondi Reference Biondi2003, 11; Henry Reference Henry2007, 97, 118). Now sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the bill has long had the support of mainstream civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Most Democratic presidential candidates endorsed it in the 2020 campaign, including, after a history of skepticism, eventual nominee Joe Biden (Gambino Reference Gambino2020; Lillis and Wong Reference Lillis and Wong2019).

Nonetheless, reparations calls remained at the margins of American racial politics until recently. Google Trends indicates that after a flurry of attention in the early 2000s stirred by Randall Robinson's book, The Debt (Henry Reference Henry2003, 143–44; Robinson Reference Robinson1999), and his organization with Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, Jr. of the Reparations Coordinating Committee (Newburger Reference Newburger2001), discussion of reparations waned over the next 15 years (Google Trends 2020). The topic has spiked sharply since 2018. Still, few major civil rights group have yet made it a top priority, continuing to urge a more traditional agenda that includes affirmative action in education and employment, criminal justice reforms, health care, voting rights, racial environmental justice, and other issues (e.g. Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights 2020; NAACP 2020).

Yet it is not too soon to say that talk of reparations is moving to the center of the political stage. An important spur came from Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2014 Atlantic article, “A Case for Reparations” (Coates Reference Coates2014)—published a month before the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. Both events propelled the remarkable growth of the Black Lives Movement. It is now a familiar story about how a Twitter hashtag formed in 2013 by Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi out of outrage at the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin soon blossomed into an enduring nationwide, indeed global movement (Rickford Reference Rickford2016, 34). Though its tactics, decentralized organization, and agenda all have critics from the left as well as the right, the BLM Global Network now includes 16 chapters in the United States and allied groups throughout much of the world (Black Lives Matter 2020a; Szetela Reference Szetela2019). Some analysts contend that the protests in its name during 2020 have been the largest in U.S. history (Buchanan, Bui, and Patel Reference Buchanan, Bui and Patel2020). Polls show, moreover, that in the summer of 2020, over 60% of all Americans expressed support for BLM, and even more saw their nation's criminal justice system as marred by racial injustices—though most Republicans disagreed, and over 60% of all Americans expressed opposition to reparations (Langer Reference Langer2020).

That opposition remains significant because as its support has grown, the agenda of BLM has expanded to include activism against all forms of systemic racism. Confronted by a seemingly endless stream of camera-recorded horrors, including the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, the movement has never lost its original focus on police brutality toward African Americans. Its goals now go beyond criminal justice, however, to encompass all that can help Black people around the world to gain “the social, economic, and political power to thrive;” and it condemns sexism, ageism, and homophobia as well as racism (Black Lives Matter 2020b). It is also a partner with roughly 50 other groups in an umbrella organization, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). In 2016, M4BL adopted a broad-ranging platform that explicitly features reparations, along with demands for black self-determination, community control, restructuring of the economy to serve people and not corporations, investment in health care, housing, and education in black communities, and more (Movement for Black Lives 2020).

The platform also defines reparations expansively. It does not focus on individual payments to those directly harmed by slavery or segregation. Instead, it calls for free access to higher education and forgiveness of student loans, a guaranteed minimum income for all black people, corporate and government payments to black communities to support health care, housing, food, and land, and revisions in public school curricula and cultural and historical sites to recognize enslavement, segregation, and discrimination and to honor struggles against them. When journalists write that “systemic racism” has become the “phrase du jour,” they mean that the black protest agenda has become more visibly concerned to address the racial injustices that are built into a wide range of economic, political, medical, educational, cultural, and social systems (Worland Reference Worland2020). Though some proponents of reparations such as Nikole Hannah-Jones still include individual payments among their priorities, most now are willing to regard all means of combatting systemic racism as reparations (Hannah-Jones Reference Hannah-Jones2020).

Both M4BL and BLM stress how black oppression is a global phenomenon, rooted in the age of white-imperialism and pervasive in the nominally postcolonial era (Black Lives Movement 2020b; Movement for Black Lives 2020). They are allied with hundreds of organizations around the world, and the slogan of BLM has been prominent in protests in South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand (Harris Reference Harris2020; Kirby Reference Kirby2020). As in the case of white protectionists, confidence that they are part of a surging global phenomenon has heightened the boldness of proponents of reparations in the United States, while persuading many to join them.

Though at this point both the language of reparations and many proposals urged under that heading still go too far for a majority of Americans, receptivity toward them is on the rise. In addition to cities such as Asheville and Evanston, higher education institutions such as Georgetown University and the Princeton Theological Seminary have acknowledged their past complicity in slavery and sought to aid those victimized by the institution, in Georgetown's case by directly paying descendants of people it owned and sold. Catholic nuns in Louisiana are doing the same (Jones Reference Jones2020). Many of the progressive Democratic candidates who have fared well against establishment figures in 2020, such as New York's Jamaal Bowman, have strongly affirmed the justice of reparations (Lee Reference Lee2020). Sociologist William Darity therefore calls the surge in political receptivity to reparations a “sea change,” even if America remains far from the federal action he sees as needed (Darity and Mullen Reference Darity and Mullen2020; Goldberg Reference Goldberg2020). In agreement, we conclude that in the 2020s, most allying in pursuit of egalitarian racial reforms in America will feel empowered and impelled to advance a demanding agenda that merits the label “racial reparations.”