Community Voices Reflect on the 2023 Civil Rights Agenda: Pressing Issues for the Civil Rights Movement
Editor’s Note – In the fight against white supremacy and for equal rights and opportunities, the battlefield is broad with many issues impacting our lives in the areas of education, employment, voting rights, criminal justice, housing and others. The fight is a broad front with many committed community activists and elected officials engaged in social justice and change from many vantage points. The Capital City Hues asked 16 community voices to lend their perspectives on the most pressing civil rights issues that we face in 2023. Let their voices serve as a King Holiday primer to that which we all face.
Dr. Charles Taylor, Retired Edgewood College Professor and President of ROAR Enterprises
The Eradication of White Supremacy
Historian James Oliver Horton notes that in 50 of the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, a slaveholder was president of the United States. And for the entire time, no president who wasn’t a slaveholder was ever elected to a second term in office.
Justices who made it to the Supreme Court were also slave owners or apologists. For most of this country’s existence, slaveowners held enormous clout in shaping national policies, legislation, and public attitudes. They eventually forced this nation into a civil war not only to protect the enslavement of Black people but also to uphold white supremacy.
The “Challenging White Supremacy Workshop” held in San Francisco, CA defined white supremacy as “a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by White peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.”
Practically this has meant that white people dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups. They control the major social, political, legal, military, educational, and economic institutions. They command the power, and the cultural practices leading to privileges that other groups do not enjoy.
The Civil War did not end white supremacy because the Confederate leaders were not held accountable. In a final proclamation on December 25, 1868, then President Andrew Johnson declared "unconditionally, and without reservation, ... a full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason against the United States, or of adhering to their enemies during the late civil war, with the restoration of all rights, privileges, and immunities under the Constitution and the laws.” This meant that none of the confederate leaders, from Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, was charged with treason against the U.S.
This allowed Confederates to change the narrative from the trauma of the war’s loss to a story of victory and the “Lost Cause” — to make heroes out of treasonous rebels. They were fighting to uphold southern traditions against northern aggression, the lie proclaimed. Although it had supposedly lost the war, the South’s big lie about the war and Blacks allowed it to win the most important argument about the country’s future.
As a result, southerners violently ended Reconstruction and fed the country more lies about Blacks’ unfitness to govern themselves let alone whites. They openly rebelled against the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments of the constitution that were intended to free Blacks, make them US citizens, and give them the right to vote. They imposed a new set of laws for the newly freed, called “Black Codes.” These draconian laws deferred the freedom that Blacks had been promised and forced them into sharecropping or the convict lease system after they were falsely arrested and hired out to plantations, allowing the state to reap a huge profit from free Black labor. With friendly rulings by the Supreme Court, in cases like Plessy v Ferguson, nearly 100 years of Jim Crow legislation and segregation upholding white supremacy became the official law of the land.
Although Blacks and their allies mounted their best challenge to white supremacy during the Civil Rights era, they were only successful in bending it, not breaking it. While contemporary Democratic presidents whittled at the edges and proclaimed support for a multi-racial democracy, former Republican president Donald Trump unapologetically reclaimed the mantle of white supremacy leading to a near coup of the American presidency in 2021.
The January 6, 2021 attack on the nation’s Capital woke many Americans to the necessity of critically examining the threat that white supremacy poses to this country. Our changing demographics and aging white population make white supremacy unsustainable. It can only be sustained by force resulting in either a police-state or fascist form of government. White supremacy is buttressed by a racist ideology that:
- Prevents us from knowing the true story of U.S. history
- Keeps us distracted and unable to unite to fight a corrupt, racist, and anti-democratic system
- Prevents us from supporting our common interests such as affordable health care, livable wages, affordable housing, reproductive rights, and other interests that would make all our lives better
- Maintains the old divide and conquer strategies that worked so well historically in keeping Blacks, other folks of color, and poor whites from uniting. We fight over slices of pie instead of asking, why can’t there be pie for all of us?
Fortunately, the 2022 mid-term elections left us with a glimmer of hope. The multiracial coalition that emerged nationally put the racists and anti-democratic forces on notice that we want an America that represents all of us — that provides a place at the table regardless of our race, religion, gender, or whom we love.
We’re tired of the inequities that white supremacy creates in our daily lives and are working for a country that practices a higher level of human decency. That’s why we must remain vigilant and recommit to eradicating white supremacy so we all can return to just being human and understanding that we are all connected.
The Problem of the 21st Century?
In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois declared, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” DuBois went on to say, “the question of how far differences of race . . . will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.” I assert that DuBois had no idea how prophetic his words would be. Many Americans declared the nation “post-racial” in 2008 based on the presidential election of Barack Obama. But a short eight years later we saw how entrenched race was in the nation. The so-called “Make America Great Again” movement was a thinly disguised attempt to roll back every hard-fought civil rights effort championed by the man whose name is synonymous with freedom, justice, and equality — Martin Luther King, Jr. Race remains the problem of yet another century, but it now morphs and changes into a variety of forms. For the purpose of this essay, I would like to focus on three — race and the COVID-19 pandemic, race and our schools, and race as a part of our political process.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit US shores, most Americans were unsure how the virus would spread and replicate. We had seen horrific numbers in places like China and Italy, but initially believed our “superior” healthcare system would guard us from disaster. It did not. When the mortality rates started appearing, it became clear that Black, Latinx, Indigenous peoples, and South Asians were most at risk. Their risks multiplied because their numbers among the most vulnerable jobs was proportionately higher. As bus drivers, sanitation workers, grocery store and small business clerks, they were forced to continue working while many white-collar workers transitioned to working at home. Initially, vaccine hesitancy also caused COVID mortality to skyrocket in those vulnerable communities. Fortunately, the work of churches and community service agencies made it possible for communities of color to access protective vaccines, but for many families it was too late. They had already lost precious family members and loved ones.
Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin
The second place that race continues to play out is in education. Because of COVID-19, schools were forced to shut down. For more affluent families, that shut down forced them to pivot to homeschooling and remote learning because of their access to computers and internet connectivity. Not so for the poorest among us, for whom people of color are overrepresented. Students who were already behind began falling further behind. But it was not just COVID-19 that was the racialized culprit in education. Since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. Unfortunately, most of these bills have little or nothing to do with critical race theory. Instead, they are attempts to outlaw any teaching about race, racism, slavery, or inequality. Claiming that teaching about these topics is “divisive” and make White students “feel bad,” they represent an organized attempt to deny the reality of the nation and to minimize the degree to which Black people (as well as other people of color) were forced to fight for basic freedoms that are allegedly guaranteed to all.
The third area where race reared its head was in the complex and difficult arena known as politics. While it is tempting to look at the manipulation of Herschel Walker (a clearly inferior candidate who still got 1.7 million votes) in his Senate run against Raphael Warnock, I choose to stay closer to home and look at the campaign Senate Republicans ran against Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes. While Barnes seemed determined to run a positive campaign based on his record of protecting the environment and fighting for the working class, Senator Johnson’s campaign began airing ads that were reminiscent of the “Willie Horton” ads that former President George H.W. Bush ran. One could not help but see how ads against Barnes not only called him soft on crime, but also associated him with lawlessness, failure to pay taxes, and contained photographs that made him visibly “darker,” much like the media did when it posted photos of OJ Simpson after his arrest. While Wisconsinites were fine crossing party lines to vote for Governor, for many, Barnes would be a “bridge too far.” Despite knowing that Johnson played a part in trying to subvert the peaceful transition of power in the 2020 presidential election, that he spread inaccurate information about the COVID-19 vaccine, and championed restrictions on a woman’s right to choose, people did not reject him.
Sadly, DuBois remains prescient. The problem of the 21st Century remains the problem of the color line.
