Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
This was not an easy book to read. The Jim Crow years were some of the worst times in US history, and we seem to be entering yet another period of terrible repression. Yes, it very well can happen again.
The history of this disaster is grim and generally omitted from popular memory. But I actually have read the history, including Kendi, Jsmison, and, for that matter, Treuer. But you don’t have to be a nerd reading 400 page history books: the story was told on network television in 1968. How could anyone not know about it?
Gates has several specific themes in this history. One is the documentation of the vast, vicious, and nauseating flood of racist “sambo” art. As pointed out elsewhere racial prejudice isn’t caused by negative stereotypes, stereotypes are created to justify oppression.
This stuff was really, really hard to read about and see. Prof Gates has a stronger stomach than I do. But this is the reality of history, and Gates insists that “racist representations of black people in the Jim Crow era … must be collected and studied, archived and critiqued, since they played such a key role in the history of the emergence of white supremacy in the war of the interpretations of Reconstruction.” (P. 93)
And current events certainly show that people still don’t get it, and worse, white supremacy is resurgent.
But it’s only images and stories. Obviously, demonstrably, and even ludicrously false images and stories. Why did it matter?
Because, the narrative justified and even encouraged the denial of human rights and human dignity, up to and including terrorism and murder.
“It didn’t matter what the individual black man or woman said and did, how much education he or she had, or whether were form the North or the South, because negative images of them in the popular imagination already existed, and were already fixed, imposed upon them like hoods or masks. This practice of xenophobic masking, as it were, still exists.” (p.132)
In those terrible times, what could be done? Gates documents how some black Americans fought back with positive images and narratives. This, too, is hard to read, because in the effort to counter the tsunami of negative narratives, some victims created excruciating counter narratives that partly validated the lies, in the hopes of winning a little slack, or rolling back a corner of the smothering cloud of hate.
Gates documents the long, sad, history of the “New Negro”, put forward to counter the so-called “Old Negro”. As Reconstruction was rolled back with lies and slander about “the Negro Problem”, some created a story about the “New Negro”, who is different and better than the “Old Negro” of slavery and reconstruction.
This concept evolved over the years. Indeed, each generation created its own “New Negro”.
One version of this was the celebration of fortunate elites, who hoped to be seen as distinct from the unwashed masses of poor blacks. An alternative was the celebration of “uplift” for the bottom up, eschewing elite education in favor of more “appropriate” manual trades. The Harlem Renaissance was another variant, celebrating the production of fine arts and literature, put forward as “just as good” as white culture.
None of this worked, of course, White racism is not about rational discrimination, it is about oppression of a whole race. No amount of talent, civic virtue, or financial success matter to racists and racist politics.
As a son of the sixties and seventies, I know that we learned this lesson over and over. And we are still learning the same lesson in other forms: oppression of any group is not rational, and is not defeated by culture alone. Rolling back oppression takes politics, and that means votes and power.
“[C]ultural constructions not build on or allied with political agency were destined to remain exactly what they’d started as: empty signifiers.” (p. 253)
Some black leaders (and allies) knew this all along. And, after all the “New Negro” messaging, “[e]ventually, politics would win out…” (p. 253)
“Yes, images on both sides of the color line were important, but they were not everything, and whatever power they held paled next to the power of the ballot.” (p. 356)
This, then, is the main point: white supremacy is a political program, that must be fought through political means, “Black America did not need a New Negro, it needed legal and political means to curtail the institutionalization of antiblack racism perpetuated against the Old Negro at every level in post-Reconstruction American society….” (p. 252-3)
What is needed is “a New White Man.”, and the end of the “rogue ideology of white supremacy”.
As I said, this is not an easy book to read. And it is not even especially novel. But it is important to marshall the history for the record, and to make the case as clearly and firmly as possible.
We know what needs to be done. And we must fight on forever.
(I gather that this book is a companion to a PBS documentary which I have not seen. The book was hard to swallow, I’m not sure I could bear a video. But I understand the logic of messaging on as many media as possible.)
- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow, New York, Penguin Press, 2019.
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