Tag: racism

The Mirror of Racial Tyranny in The Civil Rights Cases

On the 135th Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s opinion in The Civil Rights Cases, it is worth reflecting on how that opinion — which came after Reconstruction but before Jim Crow—reflects the tensions at play today concerning how constitutional law can, through unrelenting formalism and a preference towards denying the power of the history of slavery and the salience of race, contributes to enduring white supremacy.

This week marks the 135th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). While to some this is a mere historical footnote, the decision is worth remembering because it reflects the tensions at play today concerning how constitutional law can, through unrelenting formalism and a preference towards denying the salience of race, contributes to enduring structural oppression. The reasoning in The Civil Rights Cases is an object study in how to maintain white supremacy—and a mirror to our society today.

The opinion overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It sought to protect recently freed African-American slaves from discrimination in the use of “inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.” In striking down this nineteenth-century public accommodations law, thus allowing private businesses to deny services to African Americans because of their race, Justice Joseph P. Bradley, speaking for the 8-1 Supreme Court majority, made three arguments.

First, the Court held that the power to regulate individuals and corporations fell to the states, not the federal government. Second, to the extent Congress passed the Act under its Fourteenth Amendment authority, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was limited to regulating actions by states and not private actors (a doctrine that still holds today). Finally, the Court interpreted the Thirteenth Amendment, meant to remedy the badges and incidents of slavery, as only allowing Congress to abolish denials of legal rights extending from past slavery.

The Court’s underlying rationale is truly telling: accommodation of ex-slaves in present commerce is irrelevant to past slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment. African Americans complaining of such discrimination should seek state remedies or federal remedies to the extent Congress wishes to make them. This may be true as far as it goes, and by this time we already knew that the ex-Confederate states and their agents had not been aggressive in pursuing remedies for discrimination—the reason for the 1875 law. And we also know that after this act was struck down, Congress passed no other civil rights legislation for over eighty years.

Indeed, the Court denies the possibility that racism may be tied to the caste system that slavery created. Bradley claimed that to treat discrimination in public accommodations as related to bias arising from slavery is to take “the slavery argument” too far:

It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theater, or deal within in other matters of intercourse or business.

This is the kind of slippery-slope argumentation that willingly denies the past of slavery and the (obvious) interconnections between white racism, racial caste, and its more immediate outcomes.

This was done despite the dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, who warned that without the intervention of Congress and a more fulsome interpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, African American citizens will not be able to “take the rank of citizen” rather than subordinated class. One hundred thirty-five years later, and it is this same battle that we fight today. As Harlan put it—and it is worth reading his argument in detail:

The difficulty has been to compel a recognition of their [African American’s] legal right to take that rank [of citizen], and to secure the enjoyment of privileges belonging, under the law, to them as a component part of the people for whose welfare and happiness government is ordained. At every step in this direction the nation has been confronted with class tyranny, which a contemporary English historian says is, of all tyrannies, the most intolerable, ‘for it is ubiquitous in its operation, and weighs, perhaps, most heavily on those whose obscurity or distance would withdraw them from the notice of a single despot.’ Today it is the colored race which is denied, by corporations and individuals wielding public authority, rights fundamental in their freedom and citizenship. At some future time it may be some other race that will fall under the ban. If the constitutional amendments be enforced [as Harlan believed they were meant to be enforced—to end racial discrimination in civil rights based on race or previous servitude] . . . there cannot be, in this republic, any class of human beings in practical subjection to another class, with power in the later to dole out to the former just such privileges as they may choose to grant.

In other words, this class tyranny betrays the values of the Constitution by interfering with the goal of Reconstruction – equality of all citizens. Class tyranny in 1883 was the weapon of those who sought to oppress on the basis of race. Class tyranny intersects with racial tyranny and can target multiple groups over time. Such class tyranny in the service of white supremacy is itself antidemocratic and against the vision of the reconstructed Constitution. And the decision narrowing the power of the national government to stand against such tyranny under the guise of narrow formalism will allow such tyranny to flourish and reinvent itself.

What of these themes do we see in 2018?

We have seen the Roberts Court deny the possibility that the larger harms of voter suppression may be tied to the historical motivations and past racially discriminatory practices of state governments. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court relies on the claim that “the South has changed” to justify nullifying Congress’s judgment that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act ought to be used to continue to supervise the recalcitrant ex-Confederate states in their voting practices.

We see the Court once again relying on manufactured formalism to justify hard lines between state authority and federal authority to supervise voting, immigration, education, and other racial (as well as gendered, class-based, and sexual preference-based) fault lines; and states have taken this opportunity to institute disenfranchising and discriminating practices in this space. We have seen commentators, legislatures, and judges argue that talking about race in and of itself is divisive, and that aspirations towards post-racialism should silence debate around race despite the racist actions that daily remind us about its enduring salience and power.

This post-racialism argument is the modern-day version of the “running the slavery argument into the ground.” The holders of these views (on the right and on the left) decontextualize discrimination, rely on admitted intent rather than see discriminatory actions in and through context, and rest comfortably within deep denial about how subornationist structures still dominate our society.

We can see these things in The Civil Rights Cases. It is a mirror to our 2018 society. This opinion reflects the structures and habits of mind bent towards continued white supremacy today.

(Cross-published at Race Law Prof Blog.)

Constitution Day Cross-Country Tour

I started my Constitution Day tour at my home institution, Marquette, on Monday. There I spoke to the ACS student chapter about constitutional values and the right to vote. Then I hopped on a plane and headed out to Penn State Law School for another discussion of constitutional values and their relationship to voter suppression. That was quite an adventure, as this tweet shows. The final leg of my tour takes me to the left coast and the University of Puget Sound. In fact, I am writing this post just before my flight to Tacoma. If you are in the Tacoma/Seattle area on Thursday at 5:00 pm, I hope you will join me.

Integrity, Equality, & the Fragility of the Right to Vote: A Constitution Day Lecture
University of Puget Sound
Thursday, Sept. 20 5:00 pm in the Rotunda

Constitution Day Lecture Poster2At the heart of the modern battles over the American right to vote is a tension between two constitutional values. On one side is the original Constitution and the autonomy it grants the states over the franchise. On the other are the Reconstruction Amendments and the modern demands for equality. With few textual caveats, the Constitution of 1789 gave states near-autonomy to shape the right to vote. Many states did so in a way that reflected an antebellum vision of citizenship rooted in popular (in its time) eighteenth-century notions of status, wealth, and identity—a definition that excluded many. This value of autonomy, and the social ordering underlying it, continues to influence the modern contours of voting rights despite the social transformations the United States has undergone. Yet these movements toward social transformation put the value of autonomy in tension with the value of equality, so that within a generation of the framing of the Constitution, the identity of the American citizen became a contested concept. This contest led to the post-Civil War amendment of the Constitution to include doctrines geared towards citizenry equality and the practice of federal intervention to insure enforcement of those doctrines. Thus, from a modern perspective, equality of citizens has become an important (and some may argue more important) a value as state autonomy. Yet this proposition remains a contested concept measured against the value of state autonomy. Thus, state autonomy (and its use to hold to the arguable residuary of an antebellum social order) and post-Reconstruction equality (and its use to form a new social order) continue to be at odds. This talk will offer perspectives on this competition of values within the right-to-vote context and describe how these tensions play out in the modern-day voter suppression debates.

On the Alabama Special Senate Election: Meme of Voter Fraud Edition

Late Wednesday night, the campaign to elect Judge Roy Moore to the vacant Alabama Senate seat sought to enjoin the Secretary of State for Alabama from certifying the result of the December 14, 2017 special election where Moore lost to Doug Jones. The basis: allegations of rampant voter fraud apparently among and related to African American voters that need to be investigated. Fortunately for us, an Alabama judge denied the motion to enjoin the certification and dismissed the complaint with prejudice.

It is easy to write this off as a last-ditch attempt of a disgraced candidate to stop the inevitable. But we should reflect on the larger context. Once again, the meme of voter fraud — the rampant supposition without proof that illegal voters (largely voters of color) are distorting our elections through voter impersonation — rears its head again as a direct weapon to suppress the votes for Jones. This use of the specter of voter fraud as weapon against the word of voters, particularly minority voters, is nothing new. And it’s the new normal in the post-Trump world.

As you know, Jones defeated Moore largely due to the significant turnout of the Black vote and anemic moderate Republican vote. The day after the election, I argued that this happened despite voter suppression laws seemingly designed to stymie the transformative power that a fully enabled and mobilized African-American vote would represent.

Yet, the day after the election the meme of voter fraud emerged. In this case, the meme apparently starts publicly here, when Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii), who is, apparently, “a famously outspoken Trump supporter,” tweeted this:

Bill Mitchell's tweet alleging voter fraud in the Alabama Senate special election

And there’s the meme of voter fraud in one tweet — the explanation for the higher turnout that swung the election was not lack of enthusiasm for a candidate who allegedly sought sexual relations with teenage girls, or the Alabaman African-American turnout that rivaled 2012 or 2016 turnout (coupled with lagging moderate white conservative turnout). It was voter impersonation — Mississippian voters impersonating Alabaman voters. The comments to this tweet included accusations of election rigging by outsiders, a “mysterious convoy of black buses,” and something completely random about the War on Christmas.

On December 13, Twitter responded with sarcastic comments like this:

Asia Chloe Brown's tweet responding to Bill Mitchell

But with the December 27 complaint by the Moore campaign, the meme is once again elevated to a last-ditch adversarial tool with the apparent end to subvert the will of the people. Yet the campaign’s complaint basically makes the same argument uttered in the tweets and comments. (1) irregular high turnout by black voters raises suspicion of voter fraud; (2) rumors of voter impersonation voter fraud by outsider voters raise concern; (3) outside partisan involvement (what other people call “politics”) raises suspicion; and (4) statistical analyses by election fraud experts raise suspicion. Moreover, in a quite-odd paragraph 22 of the complaint, we also see the Moore campaign seeking vindication of the truthfulness of their candidate in relation to the allegations that he sought sexual relations with teenage girls:

Paragraph 2 of Roy Moore's complaint

This, somehow, bolsters Judge Moore’s credibility.

Clearly this is a last-ditch effort to forestall the conclusion reached by the Alabama Secretary of State, the Republican Party, President Trump, and, in at least this instance, an Alabama judge — that Jones beat Moore fair and square.

And yet, these allegations should be situated in the larger context of the evolution of the meme of voter fraud into a political weapon designed to distort elections, which started as long ago as 2000 in the hotly contested race between then-Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri and the late governor of Missouri, Mel Carnahan. In the face of a loss to a dead man, the Ashcroft camp argued that dead voters in Missouri tipped the balance. Nothing came of this as Ashcroft went on to be Attorney General and, through investigations by his Department of Justice, put in-person voter impersonation voter fraud on the map. And this leant credence to the movement for voter identification laws.

More famously and recently, President Trump argued via Twitter that the participation of “illegal voters” (read, illegal immigrants) were the reason why he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. A year later, President Trump has offered nothing in the way of proof to support this allegation. Also, in the election of 2016, Pat McCrory, who lost the governor’s office in North Carolina to then-Attorney General Roy Cooper, alleged a mass conspiracy of voter fraud denied him the election. Like Moore, McCrory filed objections and when those objections were denied, he sought a recount. The recount, and a subsequent audit by the North Carolina Board of Elections showed few irregularities, including several hundred miscast votes by former felons, some double voting, and one — ONE — vote out of the 4.5 million cast in the North Carolina 2016 gubernatorial race that could have been forestalled by voter identification laws. Voting errors are to be expected, and in North Carolina, those errors certainly did not amount to a grand conspiracy by the Democrats — what McCrory alleged — to steal the election.

Moore’s post-election litigation in the face of the door closing on his campaign fits this same pattern. And, true to form, a judge has declined to equate rumor and innuendo with proof — or even concern — sufficient to stop the mechanisms of democracy from working. The influence of political outsiders, the rumors of black votes being bussed in from Mississippi, and higher than expected African American turnout in predominantly African American counties (which, by the way, was at the same rate as for Clinton last year, as I noted earlier) does not equate to a mass conspiracy of voter fraud.

Alleging a mass conspiracy of voter fraud with nothing but rumor is a bad play. No major state or national election has been reversed because of the meme of voter fraud. Yet it persists because it is a political statement. It is a politics that exists around the idea that the meme is real, and therefore such subversion ought to be opposed. This kind of paranoia can motivate voters. And so, it becomes the equivalent of a party line.

On another level, this use of the meme of voter fraud to attempt to thwart an election is really another battle in the war over American identity. In Alabama, we saw the power of the black vote met with unbelievable conspiracy theories. To make such a claim of voter fraud without tangible proof is to engage in identity politics of the worse kind. It is to delegitimize the votes of citizens because of a set presumption against their citizens’ worthiness through complaining about their votes’ validity. This parrots our too tragic history of violence against minority voting by legislative means. 

But it is also the old tactics of voter suppression coming into their own in the era of Trump. This won’t be the last you will hear of the meme of voter fraud.

Transformations

While on sabbatical this spring, in addition to beginning my book project, I had the opportunity to work on two papers regarding race and voting in the outgrowth of the 2016 election. While these papers take different methodological approaches, they both address the problems of race in politics in the Era of Trump and how race come to shape political considerations in twenty-first century America.

We live in an era that aspires to put the Jim Crow legacy behind us, and yet racial discrimination continues to dominate our political, legal, and cultural conversations. Recognizing that legacy and thinking seriously about how to end it is the dominant theme of these two papers.

Our doctrines mandating antidiscrimination in the law of politics are designed to protect the minority from domination by a racial majority. While this concept is easy to state, the hard questions arise when politicians improperly consider race in politics, as they have in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder. Race consciousness is impossible to avoid in tasks like calibrating voting qualifications and drawing electoral districts, but courts are currently having to determine when the act of drawing the rules of voting is an act that places an impermissible disadvantage on a racial minority in order to maintain one’s political advantage. This problem lies at the heart of my paper, When Political Domination Becomes Racial Discrimination: NAACP v. McCrory and the Inextricable Problem of Race in Politics. Where doctrine has grappled with political racial domination, with the election of Donald Trump, American politics seems to have entered an era of the open re-emergence of white identity politics. But this centering of whiteness is nothing new, and its enduring power comes in part from the fact that its justifications and subordinations are often explained away. And thus, in the words of Sara Ahmed (who’s article prompted the CUNY Law Review’s publication of the collection in which my article appears) racial domination is explained away as “something else.” In Normalizing Domination, I bring this insight to bear in the law of politics.

Article Abstracts and Full-Text Links


South Carolina Law Review logoWhen Political Domination Becomes Racial Discrimination: NAACP v. McCrory and the Inextricable Problem of Race in Politics, South Carolina Law Review Vol. 68 (2017).
In North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. McCrory, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s 2013 omnibus voting law due to its discriminatory effect and the fact it was passed with an intent to abridge the ability of African Americans to vote. This decision represents a landmark victory for voting rights advocates against strict voter identification laws and other similar regulations that foster voter suppression. It also represents a remarkable and extraordinary use of the Arlington Heights doctrine to address the race or politics problem in election law. This Article examines the McCrory decision with an eye towards parsing out how the court arrived at this due care approach. It then confronts the uncertain future of McCrory considering the difficulties in distinguishing impermissible racial motives and permissible political motives, the uncertain judicial future of the post-Shelby County Voting Rights Act, and the academic literature disfavoring race-conscious remedies. The Article concludes optimistically by noting that whether McCrory represents a momentary victory in the larger attack against the Voting Rights Act or whether it stands as good law for the foreseeable future, the opinion offers a well-reasoned approach that accomplishes the ends of the Constitution and  the Voting Rights Act through offering a race-conscious intersectional approach grounded in the reality of voter suppression in North Carolina.

City University of New York Law Review logo
Normalizing Domination, CUNY Law Review Vol. 20: Iss. 20 (2017).
In the 2016 election, a sufficient majority of white voters in key battleground states elected Donald Trump president. In voting for Trump, these voters, as part of the minority of voters that supported Trump, had to, through their vote, either embrace or ignore his racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic rhetoric. Though it is impossible to know which, their votes nonetheless served to “normalize domination”—that is, their act of legitimizing Trump’s rhetoric made the absurd or incendiary commonplace and acceptable. Even before the 2016 election, institutions and individuals have normalized of the ideology of white supremacy by camouflaging it with other normative values while at the same time allowing it to flourish and reinvent itself. It asserts an epistemology of failing to know racism–a key component of what scholars know as post-racialism – as a means of achieving colorblindness. The late great Derrick Bell recognized how the underlying structure of American politics is defined by domination that embraces white identity politics as central. Thus, the institutions that continue American democracy seek to organize the American political and legal structure to protect such domination. This short essay focuses on this problem through a brief examination of the American law of politics and argues for a new race consciousness can be used as a compass to understand the structure of political domination and thus subvert such domination to create an egalitarian society.

Keeping Up With Atiba: October 2017 Edition

This has been a busy fall semester for me, and it’s only the second week of October! For this fall, I am the Boden Visiting Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. As part of my position I am participating in several local speaking events over the next few weeks. If you are in the Milwaukee area, I would love to see you at one of these events. If you are reading this post from afar, several of my talks will be available online (see below for details).

Lecture on Gill v. Whitfordacs-logo
American Constitution Society
Thursday, October 12, 12:00 pm
Eckstein Hall, Room 363, Marquette University

I will be discussing the Gill v. Whitford case that was argued last week before the U.S. Supreme Court. I will also discuss how gerrymandering poses significant issues for the right to vote in the United States. Event details here.

What Are Athlete’s Rights? Part 1 – Activism SLS-B-W_69
National Sports Law Institute of Marquette University Law School’s Annual Conference: Maintaining the Integrity & Commercial Value of Sports While Protecting Athlete’s Rights
Friday, October 13, 3:05 – 4:15 pm
Eckstein Hall, Room 144

I have the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on athlete’s activism rights with both legal scholars and practicing sports law attorneys. In particular, I will be discussing the First Amendment context in which protests by athletes occurs and how the recent #TakeAKnee protest and similar contemporary activism against racism has shifted this discussion and unearthed underlying American dilemmas regarding race. Learn more at the conference website.

tedx-logoTEDxOshkosh performance: Using Memes to Break Out of Voter Fraud Talk
Saturday, November 4, 8 am – 6 pm
Grand Opera House in Oshkosh, WI

Voter fraud talk has dominated our last two elections, and policy makers and voters have divergent views of the problem. My talk will show us how the lens of memes can help us focus on the first principles of voting and the evidence around what makes voting effective.

To learn more and to register visit the TEDxOshkosh 2017 website. If you can’t attend, my talk will be available on the website after the event and I will post a link here and on Twitter and Facebook when it becomes available.

Lecture on Civil Rights issuesacs-logo
American Constitution Society
November 9, 12:15 pm
Marquette University. Building and room TBA.

The recent resurgence of the rhetoric of white supremacy and the open reversal of recent gains in antidiscrimination doctrine by the current administration has illustrated the importance of civil rights doctrine and the fragility of the constitutional consensus around American equality. At Marquette Law this semester, I have been teaching a course entitled “Contemporary Perspectives on Civil Rights,” which has explored through the lens of race the key principles behind this antidiscrimination consensus and the tensions in their application across a variety of legal contexts. My talk will explore some of these key principles and tensions and the likelihood of their continued applicability in the Era of Trump.

On the Issues: Voting Rights
November 16, 12:15 pm
Eckstein Hall, Marquette University

I will be speaking with Molly McGrath of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project. Together, we will discuss how voting laws have changed in recent years, and what impact those changes might be having on our elections. Since the 2010 election, more than 20 states have enacted new voting laws. They range from photo ID requirements, to limits on early voting, to changes in voter registration rules. Supporters of the changes say the goal of the legislation is to guarantee the integrity of elections and prevent voter fraud. But opponents, such as McGrath and myself, say the new laws make it harder to vote, and have a disproportionate impact on minority communities.

Event is free, but registration is required. The talk might be live-streamed, so check back here and on my social media accounts for details.

Teaching Dred Scott in the Era of Trump

I taught Dred Scott v. Sanford this week. As a teacher and scholar of civil rights, it’s my job to teach the constitutional canon and how Dred Scott, and cases fairly called its progeny, misshaped our idea of equality. And while it is unsurprising to teach this canon in a course at Marquette Law on “Contemporary Perspectives on Civil Rights,” or in any civil rights or constitutional law course, what was different this time is that I taught Dred Scott for the first time in the Era of Trump.

Of course, I’ve taught the case before in first-year Property, in my Race Racism & American Law seminar, in public lectures at WVU Law, and in seminars on three different continents. I’ve written about Dred Scott in articulating my view of “tiered personhood” and blogged about its contemporary relevance. And it is fair to say that, after teaching for over 10 years, on some level, I was used to rehearsing the case often called “pure constitutional evil.”

But this time was different.

I walked into class, ready with my practiced confrontation of this intellectual monument to Chief Justice Roger Tawny. And after answering follow-up questions from last class about a case that enforced the racial classification system on which slavery depended, I began Dred Scott by reminding my students that we were studying the origin story of American white supremacy.

But before opening the casebook, I recalled that a student suggested we frame the conversation by watching a recent viral video of Univision News journalist Ilia Calderón. I had attempted to show the video in the class prior, but due to technical difficulties, this video prefaced our discussion of Dred Scott—which was not my original plan but proved more than appropriate for discussing the case in today’s political climate.

After the video ended, I found myself dumbstruck. This Klansman and his wife had the audacity to claim his superiority based purely on the color of his skin (which echoed the race classification cases from last class). He called her a “mongrel” and a “n**ger” and threatened to burn her out of his land. And despite their claims of racial superiority, religious exceptionalism, and entitled grievance, accompanied by threats of rebellion against a government that attacks their heritage and takes their stuff, the couple claimed they are not racist and the Klan is not a hate group.

In that moment, I remembered that Dred Scott is more than precedent. It is the anti-gospel of slavery, echoed anew by this Klansman, as an effort to tell Ms. Calderón (and all of us who can imagine her situation) to keep our place or be ready to burn. My own anger welled up, and my sadness too because that Klansman’s words reminded me of the times I had been called “n**ger” by white people, or told during an internship that “deliveries were around back,” or called “Big boy” by a white senior partner in front of my peers. Watching this Klan couple’s loathing reminded me that their hearts are full of twisted grievance and their minds are the heirs of the racial hierarchy enforced by Dred Scott.

To calm myself after the video ended, I had to let silence overcome the room. As far as I could tell, the students felt some mix of anger, pity, and shock. After this pause, I explained in both legal and moral terms that the structures of racism and the ideology of white supremacy cannot be thought of in isolation. The anti-gospel of the Klan and the words of Chief Justice Tawney must be thought of as parts of a whole.

Indeed, to read Dred Scott is to read a blueprint for structural racism. American citizenship is defined to exclude all black people. Slaves are a property that can be treated with near impunity. People of color do not belong in the American political community. A black person was “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” These are the lessons of Dred Scott, which followed through on the seeds sown in the Constitution of 1789, and which took amendment and 160 years of activism, struggle, and needless death to reverse.

And though the law has changed, the reversal is incomplete. This era—these times we live in now—echo that evil. The boundaries of personhood continue to be drawn to exclude not only race, but also gender and sexual orientation. The borders of the political community are being redrawn to wall off children who live up to the egalitarian American creed but have imperfect immigration status. The Klan and Nazis march with the impunity offered through mealy-mouthed accommodation from the White House. The structures of mass incarceration, disenfranchisement, and police brutality were built according to the same blueprint of white supremacy as Dred Scott, yet there are those who defend these still-functional monuments to slavery and Jim Crow as “law and order.”

Dred Scott and its ideological and doctrinal progeny are still with us. As much as we have moved away from being an apartheid state, as much as we have asserted through the Constitution and laws that we believe in equality, there are those of us who, by their torches, their twisted ideologies, and their policies seek to bring us back to that time. Their fire and fury—both cultural and legal—still try to burn out equality in the name of nativism and racial superiority. This is the era in which we live.

On Overstating the Case for Confederate Monuments

It is that values question we should really be asking. As far as I can tell, those who object to the removal of the statutes seem to be saying that those Confederate generals who defended slavery, secession, and white supremacy represent the values of a twenty-first century America that is becoming more egalitarian and diverse.

The Robert Edward Lee statue in Emancipation Park
The Robert Edward Lee statue in Emancipation Park

It is overstatement to say that by removing monuments to Confederate generals one is erasing all history. Commentators have wondered aloud whether this will become a long-term movement towards total eradication of history of the South. The president even suggested this by asking when this will stop. He called the removal of Confederate monuments the destruction of culture. These claims incorrectly conflate crafting historical memory with the fact that honorific statuary in public places signals the values of the modern-day community.

Memory of the Civil War and its aftermath will not suddenly be completely erased forever because statues are torn down, street names changed, buildings renamed, and the like. Culture will not be destroyed. (And as an aside, one should ask, “Who’s culture is being protected by protecting these monuments?”) The consequences of the Civil War, for good and ill, linger. Moreover, history’s memory is a lot longer than the beginning and ending of a statue, and history will continue to be useful as long as scholars, schools, and society have open and honest conversations about the past.

History is dynamic. Honorary statues are not. Communities change and values evolve and those who are honored yesterday may be disfavored tomorrow. Think about it this way–when the American Revolution concluded, as my friend and Marquette colleague Edward Fallone points out, no one objected that the history of British rule over the colonies would be erased forever when the statues of George III were torn down. Two hundred forty one years later, we literally still sing songs to sold-out audiences about the American Revolution. And Hamilton the Musical! still gets the facts right.

The communal choice of determining who is and who is not to be honored in the present day is a completely different conversation than one about the state of history. We shouldn’t confuse the two.

Who gets honored in community space ought to be a democratic conversation for each generation. Before the revolution, George III was King. After the Revolution, George III did not represent what America means anymore to the majority of Americans, so statues to him had to go. Similarly, if the representatives of the public and private will in twenty-first century America have arrived at the decision that the twentieth century images of those who committed treason and insurrection to protect nineteenth century chattel slavery no longer deserve public places of honor because those communities see themselves as dedicated to egalitarian democratic values, then it does not follow that for some sense of static history the statues should not come down. That would privilege the ideology of the nineteenth century over the reality of the voices of the twenty-first. (And, as evidence is showing, the statues at issue now went up precisely to signal the ascendancy of white supremacy, both in the 1920s at the height of Jim Crow and 1950s in mass resistance to the racial integration demanded by Brown v. Board of Education.)

One may object that the judgments of history are cruel. The vicissitudes of the future may be such that one day, Martin Luther King, Jr. memorials and street names may be arbitrarily torn down, that today’s egalitarian heroes may end up tomorrow’s villains. The people who win this argument today and see the statues torn down, the argument goes, will end up losing the argument tomorrow. That slippery-slope reasoning misses the point. To quote Hamilton the Musical, once you and I are extinct, neither of us has control over “who tells our story.” That’s just the reality. All we can do is live our lives now in a way that makes our values clear and be content to let history be the judge of that.

It is that values question we should really be asking. As far as I can tell, those who object to the removal of the statutes seem to be saying that those Confederate generals who defended slavery, secession, and white supremacy represent the values of a twenty-first century America that is becoming more egalitarian and diverse.

As to that, all I can say is those folks have a lot of convincing to do. I think I have made clear that I’m not persuaded by this. But, in the spirit of free speech, those who support the statues get to make the argument. And short of turning the protest to violence—which they did—they even get to light their citronella tiki-torches and march in Charlottesville, Boston, and wherever else. And those of us who disagree should do so, and peacefully point out the error of their ways. (Remember: the First Amendment may protect your right to object from state sanction, but it doesn’t protect you from the consequences of disagreement.)

But as the supporters of letting the legacy of the Confederacy continue to be central to our twenty-first century places of honor make that argument, my advice is to not overstate the claim by saying the removal of the Confederate generals’ statues erases history. That argument will likely cost you a lot of your audience. And they won’t forget.

Election Law Open Class November 9, 2016: Post-Election Discussion

The following video is from my Election Law and Policy class meeting on November 9, 2016. I opened the class to an extended question and answer session to address the aftermath of the presidential election. It was open to the community at the West Virginia University College of Law and to my social media networks. To date, it has received nearly 1,000 views.

The discussion covered topics including the pros and cons of the Electoral College, the challenges the political system continues to face after this election, and the possibilities and limits of the rule of law in the Trump era. Probably the highlight of this discussion is the discussion between two of my students – a white male and a African American female – about her feelings of racial threat in this “era of Trump” and his view that the rule of law will be sufficient to protect her and other minorities.

The discussion is provocative, informative, and a useful tool for reflecting on the election.  And to the extent you found this discussion useful, please let me know, and let me know whether you’d like more live chats and/or podcasts facilitated by me to have more conversations in this new political era.