FROM THE TIME when slaveholder Thomas Jefferson failed to do the right thing at Monticello, on down to the very present, the relationship between white dissident movements and black America has been a tangled, complex, and often problematic one. Through the centuries of the American story, black interests have been consistent. But white interests have fluctuated, and white support for black aspirations has fluctuated with them. The history of these relationships has been especially shifty due to the very different interests of the different sorts of white people who have, at different times, either sought, or found themselves in, alliance with black America.
We, of all colors and classes, are inheritors of that history, and of its contradictions. Most white readers of this magazine will locate their forebears in that history of relationship and struggle in the historical stream epitomized by the white abolitionists of the mid-19th century. The abolitionists comprised a largely educated and affluent movement heavily concentrated in America's Northeast quadrant. Later successors of the white abolitionists were found among the Northern liberal whites who went south in support of the black freedom movement of the 1960s.
In both historical instances, relatively privileged whites publicly identified themselves with the defense of African-American human rights. This defense was stated in terms of detached moral judgment, or idealism, or conscience, to coin a catch phrase. These two interracial episodes, abolitionism and the civil rights movement, represent the historical ground that we white folks in the Christian peace and justice movement tend to claim as our precedents and to hold up as high-water marks in the development of a religiously rooted movement for social change in America. They comprise the grid through which we conceive politics, race, history, and our places in them.
This perspective is a valuable one. But one with distinct limitations. For one thing it leaves out of white dissident view the whole parallel history of the nationalist tradition within African America. It also omits another, quite different, stream of interracial cooperation for social change in American history. This is the tradition represented by the populist and radical labor movements of the turn of the century and the 1930s in which black, white, and other workers, farmers, and unemployed people joined together in coalitions of shared self-interest.
This other stream is of equal importance with the abolition-civil rights tradition, and it would behoove white middle-class or new-class dissidents to consider it with equal weight. This other stream is usually of less interest to white religious dissidents because "people like us" played less of a role in it. But in the 1990s of America's culturally turbulent economic decline, this other stream of interracial action, which represents the intersection of ethnic and economic interests, may be more relevant than ever.
IN THE LATE 19TH centruy, America was undergoing wrenching social and economic transformations. Slavery had ended. The South was in ruins. Industrialization and mechanization were the order of the day. It was the age of inventions, and the furious rush of new technologies into the marketplace was fueling the growth of huge industrial financial empires and rendering whole industries and their workforces obsolete.
In the Northern cities, this turmoil resulted in the first great wave of labor organizing drives and in widespread strikes and confrontations. In the rural Midwest and South, small farmers, and small businesspeople who depended on the farm trade, were the main group feeling the squeeze. In many places they united under the banner of the Peoples (or Populist) Party to defend themselves against the overwhelming power of the big-city banks and large Eastern trading houses.
In the South a huge percentage of the potential populist constituency was comprised of recently freed, and still-enfranchised, African Americans. The rest was comprised of the poorest, least-educated, and thus most bigoted whites. At great pains, and against great odds, populist organizers managed to forge an alliance between these two groups of the disinherited and to build an organization in which lower-class whites and blacks of the South stood shoulder to shoulder sharing leadership and risks in a struggle for social, economic, and political equality.
Eventually the populist movement was crushed by an alliance of the old landed aristocracy and the Yankee captains of finance and industry. Afterward, at the end of the 19th century, the Southern states enacted the first Jim Crow laws, which mandated separation of the races, and other measures, including the poll tax and the literacy test, to effectively disenfranchise blacks and many poor whites. These measures were designed to ensure that nothing like the populist rebellion would ever arise again.
THE SYSTEM OF INDUSTRIAL capitalism, born in the late 19th century, seemed in the 1930s to be in its terminal crisis. More than a fourth of the nation was unemployed. Families were shattered, homelessness was common, and hunger was widespread.
Again movements arose on the Left to defend the interests of farmers, workers, and the unemployed. In the Northern cities, unemployed councils waged militant direct action campaigns for welfare rights and against evictions. In the mines and factories, the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) took root and flourished. Again, in these struggles, blacks and whites of varying places and circumstances found that their common interests and common plight often outweighed questions of petty prejudice or social custom.
Grassroots organizing during the 1930s was heavily influenced by the role of the U.S. Communist Party which seemed, to many at the time, to represent the best available vehicle for fulfilling America's democratic promise. During this period the Communists gave heavy emphasis to black human rights and equality. Blacks were promoted to high positions in the leadership of the party. All communist-influenced unions and other organizations were required to encourage black participation. And the party went beyond social equality to call for black self-determination including the possible establishment of a separate majority-black nation in the Deep South.
Meanwhile, down in Dixie, a small group of Socialist Party activists were organizing the poorest of the Southern poor into a biracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). The STFU gained nationwide publicity for its strikes and direct-action campaigns on behalf of hungry farmers and farmworkers. Throughout the period it maintained interracial solidarity under the heaviest pressures and in the worst possible circumstances. The STFU even attempted to establish a biracial cooperative farm in the Mississippi Delta.
IN 1968 DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. was attempting to write another chapter in this history of interracial struggle. King's last project, the Poor Peoples Campaign, was intended to forge an alliance of shared self-interest among white, black, red, and brown low-income Americans on behalf of radical social and economic reforms that would benefit them all.
The Poor Peoples Campaign came as a response to an organizational crisis in a civil rights movement threatened by too many too-small victories and the subsequent loss of public interest, political allies, financial support, and momentum. While acknowledging the healthy impulses behind the "Black Power" go-it-alone strategy, King knew that the movement needed white allies. But after voting rights and public accommodations access were won, the movement's white Northern liberal allies began to go their own way.
King saw this drift as inevitable, and, in addition to reaching out to America's other marginalized minorities, he turned to the cultivation of some very different white allies, for example, the white poor and white workers in the union movement and among the unorganized. This alliance was to be the very keystone of the Poor Peoples Movement. Vincent Harding has recalled Dr. King in those last days stating that the truest form of racial integration would come from working together at a common task in a common struggle on behalf of shared needs and interests.
THE POINT TO UNEARTHING this stream of U.S. racial history is not to beat again the nearly dead horse of guilt-stricken and impotent middle-class liberalism. The point is simply to note that racial unity has sometimes worked best when it is not a moralistic sentiment but a liberating means to a larger end. In fact, it can be argued that integration as end-in-itself is in part a means of social control by white elites. It functions as such to the degree that it diverts African-American aspirations with half-measures, dilutes black power by co-opting potential leaders out of the African-American community and into white-led institutions, and sets working-class blacks and whites to war against each other in those very places -- like public schools, workplaces, and trade unions -- which should serve to unite them and advance their common economic and political interests.
We should recall in this regard that integration, or desegregation, as such was never a civil rights movement goal in and of itself. In movement discourse the goals were always much more broadly and bluntly stated: Freedom. Equality. Justice. Power. Now.
Everyone knew that the movement was not just about access to lunch counters, per se, but about unobstructed access to the social, political, and economic levers of power. These levers are the tools that might allow freeborn women and men of all races to shape the terms of their existence. They consist of things such as jobs, education, self-determining organizations, and the ballot.
In the state of Mississippi, except in the very earliest days, the locally rooted Freedom Movement by deliberate choice rarely even raised the question of shared public accommodations. Instead the movement in Mississippi focused on voting rights, jobs, and the organization of co-ops, Freedom Schools, and Head Start centers. Which is to say that it focused on political empowerment and economic survival.
Of course, racial intermingling freely pursued in an atmosphere of mutuality and equality is, as a goal in and of itself, also a good in and of itself. For Christians, pursuing such pan-racial moments is one of the ways in which we can bear witness to the ultimate truth of Christian community and human unity under God. That is a truth that is ultimately greater than the also true truths about our cultural, national, or racial particularities. Contexts in which people of different backgrounds can focus on transcendent ideals is, in fact, as Jackie DeShannon used to sing, "what the world needs now."
THAT SAID, IT MUST also be noted that there are issues to be faced in the forging of a viable multiracial, multicultural democracy in America which do not, in this present age, necessarily yield to transcendent ideals or religious good feeling. Additionally, out in the marketplace motives are never so pure as they might be in a faith context. And to make our spiritual oneness real and concrete in the marketplace, that unity must be mediated through effective economic and political institutions and through negotiated trade-offs of various self-interests.
One of the best contributions "conscious," or self-conscious, or conscientious white folks like us can make to that process is to be clear, beginning with ourselves, about where our interests lie, about why we do what we do, and about how our own interests are served by the things we do. Because they are. However much we may claim that we are acting, and even try to act, purely in a posture of sacrifice on behalf of others, if we're honest we'll usually discover that our "sacrifice" is at least combined with, if not perhaps masking, some other form of self-gratification, and not always a healthy one.
Those are simply the observable facts of human nature. Everybody has self-interest. Everybody acts, most of the time, in their own self-interest -- whether egotistic or enlightened. And those who don't admit those facts are doomed to careen uselessly through life projecting their unexamined self-interest on to other people's problems and making a mess.
Racial integration as a panacea has too often masked white liberal (or radical) self-interests behind abstractions. It may be that our interest is served by the generation of good feeling, or by the search for "authenticity" in the cultural and religious resources of black or other Third World traditions. Or we may be seeking self-validation among a minority community to salve the pain of rejection and marginalization among our own people. None of those are necessarily bad things when you put them out on the table. They're only bad when they are masquerading as altruism.
Once we've cleared the air of all our hidden agendas, we might discover that there is a better goal, or a better name for our goals, than the ideas and language of integration or even reconciliation. I would suggest that the better idea might be democracy. That is the realization of each individual's and group's just aspiration toward self-determination, self-governance, and self-respect.
The attainment of a multicultural American democracy is something that we many stripes of the rainbow can only achieve together -- and separately. I once heard Rev. Joseph Roberts of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, point out that in a rainbow all of the different colored stripes maintain their own special identity. But, he emphasized, they all bend in the same direction.
Democracy, equality, and self-respect: These ideas should form an arc big enough to encompass all of our legitimate self-interests -- from Bensonhurst to Pittston to Watts. That is especially true if you consider, as I do, job security, a family wage, and free health care to be among the minimum requirements for the maintenance of self-respect. A coalition formed around such notions could unite everyone except those very few whose pursuit of unlimited profit seems to require an American electorate, and workforce, torn and deluded by racial alienation and inequality.
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