By any Other Name

  

      I’m going to cite a statement, the source of which I will reveal later, and posit that sadly, it could have been made at almost any time from 1865 to the present by someone somewhere in this country. The 13^th 14^th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution were all part of legislative attempts to blunt the impact of post- Civil War anti-Black sentiments in the South and assure to all Americans equal treatment under the law.         Sadly, 155 years later, we’re still laboring to a large extent under the stigma and inequalities of racially motivated discrimination and bias.

Here's the quote with the writer’s name hidden for the moment:

“XXXXXX XXXXXXX, …. infamously wrote in XXXX that, “The ‘advanced’ white race in the South is justified in taking such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically.”

        The reader might well assume that this was the former Vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who said, “Our new government ( by which he meant the Confederacy’s new constitution) is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”  However, it was not.

 

        Or one might think it was written by any of thousands of Jim Crow era terrorists reacting to passage of the Ku Klux Klan acts and vowing their determination to do whatever they could to continue white domination of Southern politics and therefore economic and social systems as well. It was not.

 

        Or it might have been a reflection by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace on his inauguration day in 1963, when he said, "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." (Note that the “tyranny” in question is the US Constitution and the rule of law) But it wasn’t.

        The sad thing about this statement is that it comes from an individual who was born into wealth, schooled only in private schools, at home and abroad, where he almost certainly never had a peer-to-peer relationship with any non-white individual. William F. Buckley was seen by many as the urbane, literate voice of American conservatism, and he was that. One can debate WFB’s economic and policy beliefs and find things with which to disagree and perhaps some issues on which there is concurrence,

        The underlying evil of Buckley, from my perspective, is that as the suave, urbane editor of a leading conservative news magazine, he had positional cachet, giving him almost axiomatic credibility among fellow conservatives. In truth, his racial outlook moderated somewhat towards the end of his public life, but, at a time when a Northern literate intellectual might have weighed in on the side of racial equality of treatment on the heels of Brown V, Board, in 1954, Buckley wrote this:   

        “The White South has the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races". Buckley then said white Southerners were "entitled" to disenfranchise black voters "because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley characterized Blacks as distinctly ignorant: "The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could."

Note the use of the word “mores” in the above. Its usage in this context is more than “custom or tradition” and carries a tone of moral superiority as well. The great fiction here to which he apparently subscribed is that pigmentation, in and of itself, is a determinant of either intelligence or character.

By now it should be obvious that we are seeing the same actions Buckley sanctions and approves (voter suppression) being taken simply because Southern Whites simply cannot accept that they might not be the dominant political force in the region. Buckley would have understood and said so, 64 years ago. That he was a Yale educated individual with zero personal frame of reference just makes it harder to grasp. What it does do, however, is take the mask off Northern conservatives who, while never issuing specific racist statements, remain strangely silent when others of their party, by act, word, or political initiative, do so. It isn’t new, it’s just disheartening.