Hidden racism in American history

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By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

13 June 2012

A couple weeks back, I discussed the myth that racism in America was something confined to the margins of society — poor rednecks and hillbilly trailer trash:

For a lot of white northerners in the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans were a loud minority engaged in an unwelcome attempt to disrupt the established order. Martin Luther King's protests, characterised by non-violence and middle class respectability, and led by well-dressed young men and women, made the civil rights movement seem ordinary and small-c conservative. It made the white Southern authorities, with their dogs and firehoses, look like the ones disturbing the peace. The Southernness, as well as the uncouthness, of opponents to the civil rights movement made them — not African Americans — seem alien to mainstream American society.

A week later, Ta-Nehisi Coates made a similar point and, as is his wont, made it more elegantly:

But as bigotries are increasingly marginalized we also marginalize evidence of them. One way we do that is by trying to make them the exclusive property of people who are themselves already marginalized. So everyone knows the rough history of segregation in the South, but considerably fewer people know how red-lining, block-busting, and mob violence shaped housing patterns in the North. We all know who George Wallace was. But Orville Hubbard kept the city of Dearborn nearly all-white well into the 70s, at which point he was still saying things like:

"I don't keep the niggers out of Dearborn. I don't keep anybody out of Dearborn. I haven't done anything to encourage 'em. I don't do anything to discourage 'em."

It's satisfying to think that the ugly parts of America's racial history came from marginal, alien forces — people who were rightly outside the bounds of American normalcy. But that's not the way it works.

Tags: Race, The South