A
beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the
United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook
Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the
notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision,
he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.
Danville
is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had
been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so Jefferson Davis had
proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis stayed a week, but
then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the
Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to Danville, they didn’t
find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover hundreds of Union
prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. The
bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town.
Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came
thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.
In
the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many
other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Anderson, an
African-American master’s student from Hampton University, would not
have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, would hire him. To put
people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great
Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction
workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers
and students were hired to interview older Americans—like Lorenzo Ivy,
the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer
Anderson’s knock.
Anderson had found Ivy’s name in the Hampton
University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850,
when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university
nor a city called Hampton—just an American fort named after a
slaveholder president. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a
narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James
River. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the
had
sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a
few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first
permanent English- speaking settlement in North America. Twelve years
later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed,
seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty- odd enslaved Africans
(captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.
After
that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans
would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Lying in chains in the holds
of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up
on deck to be sold. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United
States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed
the point. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at
Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go
by sea to the Mississippi Valley.
By the time a dark night came in
late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over
slavery in the South. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from
the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of
indecision in the wake of South Carolina’s rude exit from the Union.
Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-
borne invaders, became the Union’s last toehold in eastern Virginia.
Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fort’s landward
approaches. Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed
enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegers’ cannon. But late
this night, Union sentries on the fort’s seaward side saw a small skiff
emerging slowly from the darkness. Frank Baker and Townshend rowed with
muffled oars. Sheppard Mallory held the tiller. They were setting
themselves free.
A few days later, Charles Mallory showed up at
the gates of the Union fort. He demanded that the commanding federal
officer, Benjamin Butler, return his property. Butler, a politician from
Massachusetts, was an incompetent battlefield commander, but a clever
lawyer. He replied that if the men were Mallory’s property, and he was
using them to wage war against the US government, then logically the men
were therefore contraband of war.
Those first three “contrabands”
struck a crack in slavery’s centuries-old wall. Over the next four
years, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people widened the crack into
a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines. Their movement weakened the
Confederate war effort and made it easier for the United States and its
president to avow mass emancipation as a tool of war. Eventually the
Union Army began to welcome formerly enslaved men into its ranks,
turning refugee camps into recruiting stations—and those
African-American soldiers would make the difference between victory and
defeat for the North, which by late 1863 was exhausted and uncertain.
After
the war, Union officer Samuel Armstrong organized literacy
programs that had sprung up in the refugee camp at Old Point Comfort to
form Hampton Institute. In 1875, Lorenzo Ivy traveled down to study
there, on the ground zero of African- American history. At Hampton, he
acquired an education that enabled him to return to Danville as a
trained schoolteacher. He educated generations of African-American
children. He built the house on Holbrook Street with his own
Hampton-trained hands, and there he sheltered his father, his brother,
his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. In April 1937, Ivy opened
the door he’d made with hands and saw and plane, and it swung clear for
Claude Anderson without rubbing the frame.
Anderson’s notepads,
however, were accumulating evidence of two very different stories of the
American past—halves that did not fit together neatly. And he was about
to hear more. Somewhere in the midst of the notepads was a typed list
of questions supplied by the WPA. Questions often reveal the desired
answer. By the 1930s, most white Americans had been demanding
for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past into
which Lorenzo Ivy had been born. This might seem strange. In the middle
of the nineteenth century, white Americans had gone to war with each
other over the future of slavery in their country, and slavery had lost.
Indeed, for a few years after 1865, many white northerners celebrated
emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. Yet whites’ belief in
the emancipation made permanent by the Thirteenth Amendment, much less
in the race- neutral citizenship that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments had written into the Constitution, was never that deep. Many
northerners had only supported Benjamin Butler and Abraham Lincoln’s
moves against slavery because they hated the arrogance of slaveholders
like Charles Mallory. And after 1876, northern allies abandoned southern
black voters.
Within half a century after Butler sent Charles
Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white
Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political
and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern
whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise
African- American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the
lynch- mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed
increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non- Confederate
states, many restaurants wouldn’t serve black customers. Stores and
factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern
communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became
“sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”). Most
whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there
were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members
of the superior one. Anglo- Americans even believed that they were
distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks,
Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of
northern urban centers.
By the early twentieth century, America’s
first generation of professional historians were justifying the
exclusions of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the
nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many
white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary. Above
all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery
was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In
so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre–Civil War
debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic
realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed
economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free- labor
capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about
the psychopathy, but by the 1850s they agreed that enslavers were first
and foremost not profit-seekers. For them, planters were caring masters
who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. So although
anti- and proslavery conclusions about slavery’s morality were
different, their premises about slavery-as- a-business model matched.
Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old,
static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was
inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep
pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern
profit- seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or
changed to thrive in the new industrial economy—let alone to play a
premier role as a driver of economic expansion—and had been little more
than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United
States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of
these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free
labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.
It didn’t.
But even though the data of declining productivity over the
ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been
the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop, no
one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of
Woodrow Wilson’s generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on
the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social
transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century.
After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its
unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social
arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back
toward them with contempt—or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now
proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were
intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior,
looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with
whips and chains. Granted, slavery as an economic system was not
modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the
modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion. But to an openly
racist historical profession—and a white history- reading,
history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control—the
white South’s desire to whitewash slavery in the past, and maintain
segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control
over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people.
Such stories
about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the
1930s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into
the recipe of every American textbook. You could find it in
popular novels, politicians’ speeches, plantation-nostalgia advertising,
and even the first blockbuster American film:
Birth of a Nation.
As president, Woodrow Wilson—a southern-born history professor—called
this paean to white supremacy “history written with lightning,” and
screened it at the White House. Such ideas became soaked into the way
America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that
they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a
plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters. Abolitionists
were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds
of thousands of white people died. Maybe the end of slavery had to come
for the South to achieve economic modernity, but it didn’t have to come
that way, they said.
The way that Americans remember slavery has
changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation
of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years
between World War II and the 1990s came a new understanding of the
experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe
slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained
irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude. Slavery’s
denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved
people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that
developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.
But
perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the
surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for
instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be
impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not
be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the
history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to
backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans
together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters
and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that
assertive resistance undermined enslavers’ power, and a focus on the
development of an independent black culture, led some to believe
that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from
successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a
quasi-symmetry with post–Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed
gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at
civilizing Africans.
Thus, even after historians of the civil
rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists’
stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were
still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental
assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United
States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that,
as an economic system—a way of producing and trading
commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest
of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about
industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but
they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies
not only that slavery didn’t change, but that slavery and enslaved
African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the
United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the
nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the
world’s largest economy—one of the central stories of American history.
The
second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was
fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems
of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be
resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery
would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is
a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome
isn’t a story at all.
Third, the worst thing about slavery as an
experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans
the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did
those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks
with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in
large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the
massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from
their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make
them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a
commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery
that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on
maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern
ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And
once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper,
saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were
denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.
All
these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape
attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside
of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket
booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in
US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive
quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed
to African Americans. Ideas about slavery’s history determine the ways
in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the
claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity,
on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal
treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history
have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the
worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the
liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of
citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends. Then the issue
will be put to rest forever.
Slavery’s story gets told in ways
that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five
decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture.
Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather
on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real
purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under
the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the
“symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those
weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story
by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in
rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or
die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery
knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure:
many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most
of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.
The
truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back
in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of
leading ones, designed by white officials—some well- meaning, some not
so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled
him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. “Did slaves mind being
called ‘nigger’?” “What did slaves call master or mistress?” “Have you
been happier in slavery or free?” “Was the mansion house pretty?”
Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully
asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.
Ivy
listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: “My
mother’s master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was
only one good thing he did, and I don’t reckon he intended to do that.
He sold our family to my father’s master George H. Gilman.”
Perhaps
the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the
spring sun: “Old Tunstall caught the ‘cotton fever.’ There was a fever
going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to
get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated
families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands
up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One
woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took ‘em all down south with him to
Georgia and Alabama.”
Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines
on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he
also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it
could’ve been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money
drove their decisions. No, this wasn’t the story the books told.
So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.
For
more than a century, white people in the United States had been
singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class
outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble
precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas
Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave
trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians’ tellings, the
1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery,
ringing in the “Old South,” as it has been called since before the Civil
War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new,
created
after a
revolution, and growing more rapidly
than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could
be considered “old.” But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading
after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the “Old South,” and to
how America as a whole was shaped. America’s modernization was about
entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change.
Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or
moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make
cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with
each other.
But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words.
“They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes
brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an
old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it. Over the hills
they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in
double lines chained together by twos. They walk ‘em here to the
railroad and shipped ’em south like cattle.”
Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”
To
this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how
slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy’s time, and
that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime
after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out
plantations to a subcontinental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved
more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that
survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in
the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their
Native American inhabitants. From 1783 at the end of the American
Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased
five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For
white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to
pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their
practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the
dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s
most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material
during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from
cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American
economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become
the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact,
slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and
politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but
also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional
identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.
The
idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African
Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an
idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.
And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the
custodianship of those who survived slavery’s expansion—whether they had
been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped
their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and
the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled
to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk
about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and
named was a slavery that didn’t fit the comfortable boxes into which
other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.
I
read Lorenzo Ivy’s words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that
the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American
history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look
actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery
constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was
both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who
lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I
discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris
of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man
and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of
pre–Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the
half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur- killing
asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex- slaves, such as
Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an
epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.
For a
long time I wasn’t sure how to tell the story of this muscular,
dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was
simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the
story of
everything in the pre–Civil War United States.
Enslavers’ surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave
sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor
camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in
land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in
how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence
that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and
bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought
from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of
slavery’s expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a
battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a
different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions
about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and
whether that expansion could continue.
The story seemed too big to
fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained
lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the
vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1
million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from
making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds
of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the
story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the
United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium
addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do
Lorenzo Ivy’s insight justice? It would have to avoid the old
platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a
collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on
women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating
heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process
of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what
had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response.
No, this had to be a
story,
and one couldn’t tell it solely from the perspective of powerful
actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the
movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even
remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as
a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking
over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped
the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants
stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their
individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a
brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent
themselves every day. Enslaved people’s creativity enabled their
survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever- growing cotton
productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South
at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern
United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious
and hidden.
One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel
Invisible Man. But
in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them
he wrote, “On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American
life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed
up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within
which the action unfolds.”
The image fit the story that Ivy’s
words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem
was that Ellison’s image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth,
the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and
the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the
twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the
American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend
slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of
slavery’s giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation,
commodification, and torture of enslaved people’s bodies, enslavers and
other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood
of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor
camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic
change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to
find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of
their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.
Excerpted from “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by
Edward E. Baptist. Published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus
Books Group. Copyright 2014 by Edward E. Baptist. Reprinted with
permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Dog
whistling emerged at the same time that colorblindness was slipping
from progressive to reactionary. Naked appeals to racial solidarity had
been common in Southern politics, but the civil rights movement made
them unacceptable, prompting politicians to shift to new, coded terms
just as race baiting became national in scope. In the shift to veiled
entreaties, the co-opted version of colorblindness provided protection.
What racism, dog whistlers could ask, if they never directly mentioned
race when railing against forced busing, welfare queens, gang bangers,
illegal aliens, and terrorists? And weren’t their critics the real
racists, they could demand to know, for always talking about race?
Anticipating today’s Fox pundits, back in 1968 a dog whistle pioneer
slammed his critics as the actual fiends: “You know who the biggest
bigots in the world are? They’re the ones who call others bigots.”
