White Supremacy, Madison Grant, and Richard Cohen's Anxieties About Race Mongrelization

 

I was meditating some more on Richard Cohen's column in The Washington Post where he described interracial couples in the following terms:

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

One of my favorite basement party college songs was "Memories" by Beenie Man. There is so much wisdom in its chorus:

Memories don't live like people do

They always 'member you

Whether things are good or bad

It's just the memories that you have

America is a racist society. The United States was founded on white supremacy. It is part of our society's cultural fabric, ether, and living memory.

The Constitution of the United States is a white supremacist document. The land was stolen from First Nations people who were then subjected to genocide and put in concentration camps. Black Americans died by the millions during chattel slavery, had tens of trillions of dollars of labor and wealth stolen from them, as they quite literally built America. Decades of Jim and Jane Crow were their reward after taking freedom during the Civil War. And as we expand our view of the colorline beyond the black white binary, it is clear that white supremacy impacted all people of color--and also created a deep rot in the heart, mind, and spirit of White America.

The United States has also made amazing progress in correcting a democracy, one that was and remains a work in progress, to ensure that the bounties and rights of full-citizenship are expanded to all peoples. White supremacy and racism are poltergeists that haunt American political and social life.

America has many of these disturbed spirits. They manifest themselves in the Tea Party GOP's overt bigotry, Confederate flag waving neo-secessionist trash outside of the White House, Birtherism, as well as Richard Cohen's hostility towards "race mixing" and concerns about a threat to "conventional views"--read "white", "conservative", and "reactionary"--in the post civil rights era.

Richard Cohen is a white supremacist. Of course, such a label conjures up caricaturized images of mouth frothing neo-Nazis, KKK lynching parties, and police who beat down black and brown people with batons in the street while spewing racial epithets.

White supremacy is so much more complex and nuanced than such ironically comforting images. The latter does the practical work of colorblind racism in the post civil rights era by framing white supremacy as something absurd, anachronistic, and an outlier. This is a wonderfully comforting thought for white folks and others. An acceptance of the fact that white supremacy is quotidian, common, and manifests itself in America's social and political institutions, collective psyche, and a deep sense of white entitlement and white privilege, is verboten for a country which wants to embrace a public narrative of racial progress while denying how far it has yet to go.

In all, for post civil rights America, the "nice" and "polite" racists are a much greater threat, in mass, than the "mean" and "vicious" ones.

Richard Cohen may not know the root or intellectual origins of his public career as an editorial writer who is a master painter in the metaphorical color pallet that is the white racial frame and white supremacy. Thus, the power of memories and ideas in a white supremacist society. Racism is part of the ether. To varying degrees, those of us who are American (and those others who consume its popular culture) understand and have internalized racist cultural scripts, tropes, and rules as a type of "common sense".

Richard Cohen may not know that his concerns about "traditional" American values and miscegenation mirror those of nativist race scientists such as Madison Grant.

The latter famously wrote in 1918 that:

...These new immigrants were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions. The transportation lines ad­vertised America as a land flowing with milk and honey and the European govern­ments took the opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy and hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums. 

The result was that the new im­migration . . . contained a large and in-creasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, to­gether with hordes of the wretched, sub-merged populations of the Polish ghettos. Our jails, insane asylums and almshouses are filled with their human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and 'political has been lowered and vulgarized by them. 

With a pathetic and fatuous belief in the efficacy of American institutions and environment to reverse or obliterate im­memorial hereditary tendencies, these new-comers were welcomed and given a share in our land and prosperity. The American taxed himself to sanitate and educate these poor helots and as soon as they could speak English, encouraged, them to enter into the political life, first of municipalities and then of the nation.... 

These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race....
It is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will en­tirely disappear. 

He will not intermarry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York . . .will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel... 

Cohen was also not thinking about the deep connections between American race scientists, eugenicists, and the architects of the mass horrors which became the Nazi race project in Germany.

Memories don't live like people do. White supremacy and racism are part of the American cultural creed. Richard Cohen is simply a part of that long tradition.