Once More unto the Heights: Race, Class and Conflict in America

According to the myth, in the late summer of 1862, President Lincoln faced a dire challenge. His valiant effort to preserve the union was stymied by the forces of white Southern resistance in Northern Virginia. His strategic position was deteriorating as the European powers began to lose faith in the viability of the Northern cause, and it was broadly whispered that the British were on the verge of recognizing the Confederate States of America, thereby emboldening the separatists and validating in law and custom the divisions that had taken hold on the field of battle. Lincoln needed a demonstration of power written in blood and iron that would help him to close the action of the first act—of the larger drama of American freedom—and open another. After three bloody days along the banks of Antietam creek, Lincoln proclaimed on September 22 of that fateful year that if the rebels did not cease in their efforts to divide the country, all the slaves held in those southern territories would be freed—which is of course just what happened.

As in many of the efforts that marked the progress of the great status reversion that began with this moment of transvaluation in race relations, a moment of tenuous triumph was followed in quick succession with a tragic reversal of fortune born of strategic obtuseness. The tactical stalemate of Antietam was followed by the strategic disaster of the Battle of Fredericksburg. As anyone who has visited that haunting battlefield will know, the centerpiece of the disaster for the forces of freedom came as General Ambrose Burnside sent one brigade after another of foolhardy veterans up the slopes of a steep and impossibly fortified hill called Marye’s Heights. On the surrounding property of what is now the residence of the President of Mary Washington University, thousands of union soldiers would fall in that field like ripe crops before a thresher. The general cause was good, but the specific plan was a desperate failure. Marye’s Heights should now be seen as an axial moment in the cause of global solidarity and ethnoracial reconciliation, but it should also be recognized as the strategic blunder it was. I see it as the master metaphor for understanding the vicissitudes of racial conflict in America.

Now I would like to shift the conversation from the distant past to the onrushing present. This spring I had the luxury of checking out of the American news cycle for a couple of weeks while teaching in Malta about identity and conflict. I took the opportunity to detoxify from the vitriol that characterizes our public sphere, with greater salience in election years. Coming back into the conversation I was shocked to find how escalated the debate about the death of Trayvon Martin had become in my absence. As in many similar incidents in the aftermath of the “Reagan revolution” of neo-conservative principles, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other important African American leaders were charging up the hill with fierce urgency to demonstrate how unjust our system remains with respect to race subordination. It is not difficult to see how one of the fruits of the civil rights struggle is a criminal justice system that lionizes cruelty in pursuit of abstract security. The language I heard was hot and visceral and it was difficult not to be swept along in its wake. After several weeks of mostly calm reflection, augmented by several exhibits of what might understandably be labeled white backlash (John Derbyshire’s “The Talk: Nonblack version” stands out here), I now feel the moment is ripe to provide a theoretical perspective on this most recent episode of racial conflict that helps to explain what we are doing when we talk about race in America. It is important that we begin asking ourselves why it is that we always talk past one another while at the same time sacrificing the efforts of good people in a struggle for racial justice that is poorly grounded in a plausible discursive strategy.

To extend the analogy, the way we talk about race is to send another brigade up Marye’s Heights where we should instead fight on other ground. As difficult as it is to accept, the forces of reaction (even members of this host who fail to see themselves in this light) occupy the discursive high ground. Desperate as it is to long run civil society, to attempt to take the remaining entrenchments of racial intolerance by direct assault will be extraordinarily costly. The twilight struggle against racial intolerance and eurosupremacy will continue in this world even as we leave it, but if we are to leave it well, it will be because we also paid attention to seemingly old fashioned ideas.

Progressives often struggle as part of what are called new social movements which focus on the abuses of power that orbit issues of identity. They are fighting the last war. The new energy is in the area of the old social movements and the revolutions, which took as their objects unequal opportunity structures and oppressive state systems as their respective objects. Respect for women, the LGBTQ, people of color and the disabled have developed at a shocking pace over my relatively short lifetime, but at the same time we have seen the erosion of the moral economy—which is the reason that I am lucky enough to be writing to you today—around the world. Members of the birth cohorts that follow mine will find it more difficult to get a quality education and a good job than I did, and only the most successful of them can ever look forward to the kinds of savings that will lead to an end of life lived with the dignity of independent means. As we have admirably focused on dividing the middle class pie more equitably, cynical forces have made sure to capitalize on the opportunity to shrink the middle of the pie. President Lyndon Johnson famously quipped after he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that he had lost the South for a generation. What he did not anticipate was that those southerners would be clever enough (as they have always been) to ensure that he had buried the American Left for the next three. Having lost the resource of the more cunning Southern mind in the arena of politics, the Democratic Party has yet to realize how tragic its lack of strategic generalship has become.

My argument in brief is that the big fight for racial justice (and for other forms of acsriptive equality) in the twenty-first century will be won, if it is to be won, on the plains of rhetoric of equality—economic equality conceived in universalistic and de-racialized language—through an anti-exploitation framing, not an anti-supremacy framing. Convincing demoralized and desperate white folk that they are subtle bigots in the era after Obama will simply be too difficult, and as long as the unwitting heirs of the white South can meet the forces of progress on a ground of their choosing, i.e. in debates about culture that employ the tropes of diversity and inclusion, they can gleefully anticipate a stalemate at the mythical Rappahannock River that has characterized our conversation since about 1978.

My advice (which I realize is provocative) to those who would transform the bitter conflict around race in America is to adopt an older idiom that disentangles the rhetoric of race and class—to de-Katrina our debate if you will—thereby building an emboldened coalition of progressive forces that can carry a majority sufficiently large to enable legislation to pass the Senate. Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas and their allies have fortified the high ground of our national conversation with metaphorical cannons of freedom talk behind the stone wall of neoliberal ideology. An appeal to cultural tolerance, though helpful in many cases, will not be sufficient to reconquer the perennial Virginia of the American imaginary. Culture war is the wrong ground on which to fight. The beloved community will only arise through another round of the American version of class politics—one that clings fiercely to the imagery of free enterprise, equal opportunity (not equal outcomes) and fair competition. The great status reversion begun in the 1860s has not taken its final course toward the end of history, but the question before us is, do we have the courage not to try once again to take the hill?