I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice . . . who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.,
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963
PART OF WHAT MAKES these memorials and tributes so powerful is that they highlight the courageous successes of ordinary citizens against systems of power and injustice. It is a David-and-Goliath story and David wins. “When the history of this country is written,” Senator Barack Obama eulogized at Rosa Parks’s funeral, “when a final accounting is done, it is this small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered long after the names of senators and presidents have been forgotten.” Such invocations invite all Americans to identify with and be inspired by the power of ordinary people to change the course of the nation.
The danger in such identification is that the forces of injustice, complicity, and complacency—the Goliath—are placed at a distance. With the exception of a few ubervillains like Eugene “Bull” Connor and J. Edgar Hoover, the perpetrators go unmarked. “That’s because so much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice,” writer Gary Younge observed. “Leaders ‘get assassinated,’ patrons ‘are refused’ service, women ‘are ejected’ from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility.”1 Our popular history of the movement largely sidesteps how and by whom racial inequality was perpetrated and maintained. Without understanding how and why a system of racial injustice was propelled not only by people who were yelling but by people who were silent, not just by violence but by state bureaucracy, and by refusing to grapple with the various interests and benefits this system accrued for many and the fears people harbored of standing up against it, we miss a key lesson from this history.
Key to popular understandings of the civil rights movement is a view of racism as personal hatefulness—“Southern backwardness,” as civil rights historian Charles Payne has termed it. Racism is pictured as the governor snarling at the University of Alabama entrance, the Mississippi voter registrar continually slamming the door on would-be Black voters, the white mother spitting at Black children—key embodiments of those who perpetrated racial injustice but not the only manifestations of it. Our image of racism is violent, aggressively personalized, and continually located in the “barbaric South,” historian Heather Ann Thompson argues.2 There has been a tendency to personify racism in the figure of a working-class white redneck who dislikes Black people and spouts hateful things, as opposed to the middle- or upper-class white person who might decry such hatefulness but still embraces racially unjust policies.3
The focus on the redneck racism of the Jim Crow South and its epithets and violence blinds us to the venality of “polite” racism and the “firm” resistance to Black demands, as King aptly characterized it. Other “polite” embodiments of racism were endemic across the country in maintaining white supremacy—public officials and citizens who preferred framings like “separation” and “neighborhood schools”; who utilized sociological theories of crime and “cultural dysfunction” to justify inequalities in city schools, services, housing, and policing; and who denied jobs, limited access to government programs, and maintained segregation through bureaucratic means. Yet these perpetrators find little place in these fables. By making racism only about bombing, blocking, and spitting, the nation gets off easy.
With its roots in the nineteenth century, this “barbaric South” framing of racism was a strategic and purposeful Cold War construct that has carried into our present-day understandings. With the United States seeking to appeal to the hearts and minds of the Third World during the Cold War (and with the Soviet Union highlighting America’s racism), the nation was invested in casting the race problem as a regional Southern anachronism at odds with the liberal American way. In a paradigm born before the Civil War, the Deep South was portrayed as distinct and separate. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, when a movement courageously built by ordinary Black people with support from the courts and the federal government took on these premodern racists, it was increasingly broadcast around the world, as legal historian Mary Dudziak demonstrates.4 In other words, the Southern civil rights movement came to signify the power of American democracy, where ordinary citizens (with the help of Northern liberals) could challenge the antidemocratic elements within it and succeed. To show the Northern struggle, to show racism embedded across the nation in far more liberal places often through more “polite” means, would have disrupted this framework.
The redneckification of racism today provides a form of national catharsis. If racism is pictured as mean Southern ladies who decide they want a separate bathroom for the Black women who work for them (as in Hollywood’s The Help) or as fat Southern sheriffs who block tiny children from entering school buildings, then most Americans can rest easy. In The Help, the main white villain is mean to her own kids and insists on having a separate toilet built for her Black maid. While certainly such people existed, racism also lurked in white people who loved their children and would never expect their Black maid to use a separate bathroom, who liked individual Black people and even were inspired by the Southern civil rights movement but didn’t want change in their own backyard (whether in New York or Alabama).5 Maneuvering and fighting to maintain the status quo, many people treated Black protest as unfair and excessive. Or they stayed silent when bad things happened to others, assuming people must have done something to bring these problems on themselves.
While many White Americans supported segregation with their actions, others supported it through their inaction—their unwillingness to see how their home, neighborhood, school, or desire for police protection derived from disparity. Many refused to prioritize antiracism, looking the other way when friends, coworkers, or politicians labored to preserve racially inequitable systems. Still, other Americans knew that this system was deeply wrong but felt there was little they could do about it or feared risking their family’s safety and security, so they hung back. This history is humbling—showing how hard it is to do the right thing and exposing the many barriers to unseating the status quo. It reveals that the perpetration of injustice is not always about hatred but often about indifference, fear, and personal comfort.
Partly, it is easier to think about racism as the provenance of hate-filled individuals—J. Edgar Hoover, or a parade of racist Southern governors, or South Boston mothers who attacked Black children, or Klan members who set fire to churches and homes—because it lets a lot of people off the hook. When racism is portrayed only in spitting and screaming, torches and vigilante justice, many people can rest easy, believing they share little responsibility in its maintenance. When racism is cast as the actions of a small cast of mean individuals, the rest of the people who supported, allowed, or stood aside for it are harder to see, and the solutions often become about changing hearts, about diversity training and tolerance. And when the focus is on individual prejudice, the systems people support that maintain and excuse injustice recede into the background.
But if racism is pictured as parents asserting their rights as taxpayers and questioning whether the Brown decision applies to “their schools”; if it is shown in calls for more “law and order” and “fiscal responsibility”; if it is demonstrated in the lack of public will to address differentials in resources and services in schools, streets, policing, and housing; if it is revealed in the kinds of issues the news media chooses not to cover; if it is illustrated in who stays silent when inequality is brought to light—then it raises questions about where we are today. If racism is understood not just as an affair of the heart but about material advantage and personal comfort, then the remedy is much different because it means it will cost something to alter.
The redneckification of racism also puts the focus on vigilante violence and misses the other ways white supremacy survived. Violence was one tactic in the South and in the North. White citizens made their opposition to movement activism known and sent a message to Black people who “got out of their place.” Black people moving into “their neighborhoods” or “their schools” from Michigan to Mississippi often faced arson, property destruction, and physical attacks.6 But increasingly in the North and in the South, white people turned to state violence and the police to maintain the status quo. Law enforcement—and its use of force and control—held power, legitimacy, and palatability, allowing local citizens to see their own hands as clean.
Economic violence was even more widespread. Many movement activists, North and South, lost their jobs. Historian Charles Payne, in his study of Mississippi, found that every woman he interviewed who was active in the movement lost her job.7 Demonizing dissent was another tactic. The red-baiting most longtime civil rights activists encountered, and the firings that sometimes accompanied it, were convenient weapons of the “civilized,” because they demonized the protester and sent a message to an entire community about the costs of dissent. When Kenneth Clark raised issues about New York’s segregation in the early 1950s, he was called a Communist. When King spoke out against Proposition 14 in California or addressed suburban Detroiters, he was called a Communist. When Rosa Parks helped launch the Montgomery bus boycott, she was called a Communist, and a decade later, when John Conyers hired her to work in his Detroit office, he was slammed for hiring a Communist and the office received voodoo dolls, rotten watermelons, and all sorts of hate mail. Time and again, from north to south to west, those who challenged the racial status quo were called extremists and investigated by local police and the FBI, in part intended to curb and control their activities.
Alongside red-baiting, one of the most potent weapons of racial inequality was disregard. European historian Tony Judt highlights “the dilemmas of incompatible memories” to consider how popular renderings of historical injustice often gloss over how evil is actually perpetrated: “It is hard for us to accept that the Holocaust occupies a more important role in our own lives than it did in the wartime experience of occupied lands. But if we wish to grasp the true significance of evil—what Hannah Arendt intended by calling it ‘banal’—then we must remember that what is truly awful about the destruction of the Jews is not that it mattered so much but that it mattered so little.”8 As Judt illuminates in his examination of World War II and the rise of Nazism, what was required was both many people’s obsession with the Jews and many other people’s indifference about the unjust conditions and suffering Jewish people were encountering. Similarly, the way racial injustice flourished in the United States required people obsessed with racial difference and the maintenance of white rights who were willing to construct whole systems to delineate, hierarchize, and police it. But it also required—and continues to require—many people to care so little, who would not get involved, and who saw little urgency in the fact of Black suffering.9 It required many to believe that they had gained what they had through hard work and that other people hadn’t fared as well because they lacked the right values and work ethic. And it stemmed from the inaction of people who saw inequality and injustice as unfortunate—or even horrible—but out of their control (unconnected to their neighborhood, their school, their municipal services, or their law enforcement). And it rested upon law enforcement and an us-versus-them police culture that produced police abuse; many would find the incidences of law enforcement “overreacting” wrong but consider them the unfortunate aberration of fighting crime.
To understand fully how systems of white supremacy functioned means taking into account all the people who allowed inequality to happen and the practices, policies, and cultures they created and supported that countenanced it. Segregation flourished in part because “polite” people stood back to make room for it. When movement activists pushed desegregation of schools and housing and jobs, some people attacked, but others stood by and let them attack. Many asserted their rights as “parents and taxpayers” and thought a lot about their children and little about other people’s children. They said, “Prove there’s a harm being done; we all just like to live with our own.” Then, faced with a growing movement, they wondered, “Why are those people being so disorderly and angry?” “Polite racism” worked through multiple means: through language that disguised it, through government bureaucracy and the leveraging of channels of power that enabled it, and through sociological framings of cultural dysfunction that explained and justified inequity and the need for punitive approaches.
The first tool of “polite” racism involved language. While many white Southerners in the 1950s and early 1960s defended “segregation now and forever” and “states’ rights” and called Black people horrible names, a different vocabulary of race emerged in the North in the postwar period, and increasingly over the 1960s in Southern metropolises. The lexicon they employed celebrated “color blindness” and expressed “surprise” at Black anger; it cast African American and Latino youth as “problem students” whose behavior (and that of their parents) hampered their educational success and whose communities were filled with “crime;” and it highlighted “property rights” and framed resistance to desegregation in the language of “neighborhood schools,” “taxpayer’s rights,” and “forced busing.” Many of these people decried “racism” and took offense at the notion that their actions and perspectives were at all racist, in part because they too saw racism as being steeped in personal hatred.
Many city leaders knew what they were doing; as seen with New York superintendent of schools William Jansen, political leaders explicitly instructed city officials to use “separation” not “segregation” because of the connotations of the latter and the responsibilities it might entail. Movements to oppose racial equality in large cities like New York and Los Angeles were often described as “backlashes,” or “antibusing” activism, rather than as “segregationist,” conveniently distinguishing them from their Southern counterparts and, ideally, from federal mandates. Such language simultaneously spoke and obscured race, constantly forcing community activists outside the South to prove that racial segregation and inequity in these liberal cities was real and harmful, and that it was the product of official policies.
Historian Karen Miller has documented the ways “color-blind” discourses originated in the early twentieth century among Northern white political leaders eager to distinguish their modern municipal leadership even as they maintained segregationist urban structures.10 “Northern racial liberalism,” Miller contends, “is the notion that all Americans, regardless of race, should be politically equal, but that the state cannot and indeed should not enforce racial equality by interfering with existing social or economic relations.”11 In the early twentieth century, Miller found, white liberal Detroiters saw themselves as “color-blind,” believed their practices would ultimately lead to racial equality, but were willing to accept racial inequality and segregation, even when protests emerged from African Americans highlighting the inequality embedded in city institutions. This frame of color blindness became the Northern way to not see school and housing segregation, differential employment rates, or brutal policing. With public support of racial segregation viewed as the distasteful purview of Southern racists, “color-blind” discourses provided a socially acceptable rhetoric to harness many Northern whites’ contentment with the status quo (and opposition to housing, school, and job desegregation).
Increasingly in the 1950s and 1960s, these discourses provided a supple way for liberals to distinguish themselves from “segregationist” politicians while promoting and maintaining segregationist policies. US racism was a double act; Southern open-call racism provided an alibi for Northern “polite” racism; liberal Northern hypocrisy created a rationale for Southern white defensiveness. Part of the appeal of these “color-blind” discourses, then, is the cloak of deniability they provided for Northerners (a hypocrisy that Southern leaders often called out).
In this way, New York City school officials praised the Brown decision but claimed they weren’t sure how it applied to them. They gave the matter to a committee to study, miring civil rights activists like Ella Baker and Kenneth Clark in work to demonstrate the problem existed but ultimately refusing to take action on the recommendations in terms of zoning and teacher placement. They said: “This isn’t the South; we don’t have that kind of racism here.” Similarly, in Boston and Los Angeles, civil rights activists spent years on studies to “prove” that the problem existed, even as the segregated nature of schools was evident to the naked eye. And even when they provided reams of documentation, school officials refused to rezone, claiming the problem was not their doing, while offering money for programs to address juvenile delinquency (preferring to cast Black and Latino students and their families as the problem that needed fixing).
These “polite” discourses were also then mobilized to claim plausible deniability. When Black people grew increasingly insistent and angry through the 1960s about the lack of change, and about the dishonesty of being asked to constantly prove injustice, Northern liberals acted surprised. “California is a state where there is no racial discrimination,” California governor Edmund Brown had the gall to claim as he flew home in August 1965, when the Watts uprising was beginning. Such claims of surprise and bewilderment framed these “crises” as reckless and Black grievances as excessive—the veiled language over and over serving to hide and dissemble what was actually occurring. As Martin Luther King observed in 1968,
Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white America at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America, including many of goodwill, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially, it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects retain it. Most abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact.12
The second tool of “polite racism” involved the workings of government bureaucracy and policy, and the use of political sway to maintain it. Historian Carol Anderson has termed this “white rage.” According to Anderson, “White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. . . . It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.”13 Many white Northerners wielded their power and voting pressure at home, even as they might have pressed for desegregation in the South, understanding that you didn’t need a governor at a schoolhouse door if you had BOE officials constantly adjusting school zoning lines to maintain segregated schools. You didn’t need a burning cross if the bank used maps made by the Federal Housing Authority to mark Black neighborhoods as “dangerous” for investment and deny Black people access to home loans. You didn’t need white vigilantes if the police were willing to protect and serve certain communities while containing and controlling others.
School officials used attendance boundaries, feeder patterns, transportation policies, teacher-hiring practices, and other methods to ensure that the vast majority of students of color attended segregated, underresourced schools. And when school officials made moves to adjust those lines even a bit for Black children (from South Gate, California, to Brooklyn, New York), white parents fought back. HOLC ratings, restrictive covenants, veterans’ loan policies, block associations, and banks all worked together to solidify and maintain housing segregation. Many employers refused to hire Black workers or restricted the number or types of jobs they could hold; many unions excluded Blacks altogether, and government officials granting contracts turned a blind eye to the hiring practices of those they awarded. Much of this was done bureaucratically, with the force of the state and of lawmakers who didn’t shout segregation from the rafters but instead used the levers of bureaucracy and intricacies of policy to protect “their constituents’” (read, just their white constituents’) needs.
This was an ongoing, dynamic process. Throughout the 1960s, as court documents later revealed, school officials in Boston and Los Angeles constantly adjusted school-district and zoning lines to preserve segregated schools and used busing to maintain these segregated schools. In Boston, activists encountered an additional barrier: the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Civil rights activists brought a complaint to MCAD hoping for the force of the state commission in pushing forward their cause—and in 1960, MCAD literally declared Boston’s schools not segregated. In 1961, in order to seem compliant with Brown, Boston Public Schools passed an open enrollment policy—which was used initially mostly by white parents to avoid changing schools, while Black parents found it difficult to use. The appearance of adherence, rather than substantive change, was paramount. Four years later, Black Bostonians began Operation Exodus, a busing program that made it possible for Black families to take advantage of open seats in the district. They assumed they would shame the school system into taking over the program, once they demonstrated the need and desire to use this policy. BPS never took over or provided funding for the program but repeatedly cited the existence of Operation Exodus, both publicly and in legal briefs, to appear compliant with federal desegregation mandates. The willfulness was evident.
Many Southerners at the time reacted angrily to this hypocrisy, seeing Northern liberals as eager to criticize the South without being willing to examine, much less change, their systems. During the bus boycott, for instance, Montgomery’s main newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser (which was opposed to the boycott), took to running stories on segregated Northern locales to demonstrate that the racial systems in Montgomery that were highlighted by outside media were actually rife throughout the country.14 Southern congressmen decried the hypocrisy of Civil Rights Act section 401(b) provisions on school desegregation, correctly realizing that the enforcement was purposely designed to target them and leave Northern schools untouched. But it was easy to dismiss these Southerners as hypocrites themselves—since they cared little about Black people in Detroit or Boston or New York—and sidestep the nugget of truth in their complaints.
Shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which gave the federal government the power to withhold federal funds if a district was found noncompliant, civil rights advocates in Chicago filed a complaint with the US Office of Education. They laid out how the Chicago Board of Education had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act: 90 percent of Black students attended segregated schools in Chicago, and these schools were more overcrowded, had more uncredentialed teachers, and had fewer educational resources or honors classes than other schools in the city. The US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare briefly withheld $30 million from the city, but as historian Matthew Delmont powerfully documents, the full weight of the Chicago and Illinois political classes came down upon them.15 Ultimately, HEW retreated, and Chicago’s schools remained as segregated as they had been. Following HEW’s capitulation, New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell aptly observed, “When the United States Office of Education was pressured into restoring Federal funds to Chicago’s segregated public school system, it represented the first abject surrender to the principle that separate but equal is wrong in the South, but acceptable in the North—particularly if a city can muster enough Northern politicians and educators with a segregationist mentality to practice this shameful hypocrisy.”16 Boston rested easy seeing how Chicago had prevailed. Indeed, Northerners repeatedly used political power and pressure to evade desegregation and federal mandates, with white parents using discourses of “neighborhood schools” and “forced busing” to assert their political will to defend their segregated schools.
In their manipulation of the Civil Rights Act, Northern liberals used the veiled language of “racial imbalance” and “neighborhood schools” and applied their political power to keep desegregation away from their schools. In time, Southerners came to follow suit. Suburban Southern whites, as historian Kevin Kruse argues, “abandon[ed] their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery [by the late 1960s], and instead craft[ed] a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.”17 Thus, in many ways, Northerners developed the tactics that are now associated with some of the reddest Southern states in the union.
These strategies paved the way for Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to win the White House in 1968. This is an oft-cited misnomer historians and political scientists have repeated over the last fifty years to describe how Nixon and Republican Party operatives learned from Barry Goldwater’s resounding defeat in 1964 and adjusted their racial approach to win the White House four years later. Given how Goldwater’s stark racial appeals had proven unsuccessful, Nixon savvily repackaged racially driven policy goals in more polite, obscured language palatable to American Cold War sensibilities to win areas that hadn’t been traditional Republican strongholds.18
As Lee Atwater explained, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”19 These cloaked racial politics proved effective for Nixon, but it wasn’t a particularly Southern strategy that won him the White House. In 1968, George Wallace won the Deep South. Nixon secured the presidency by winning swaths of the Midwest, Northeast, West, and border states—including Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, New Jersey, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon, and California. What proved successful in this Northern-Midwestern-Western-Southern-border-state strategy was an appeal to voters who still wanted racial policy but wanted it cloaked in euphemistic frames of “law and order,” “forced busing,” and “cultural deprivation.”20 As Nixon explained to his domestic advisor H. R. Haldeman, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”21 What Nixon introduced to the national stage, and what Ronald Reagan later crystallized with the “Reagan Democrats,” were strategies that Northern politicians already had employed successfully for two decades. Professions of the value and importance of equality, married with sustained resistance to the methods by which it might be implemented, were a political gold mine to be tapped by both Republicans and Democrats—and criminalization and cultural arguments were instrumental to explaining away existing inequalities.22
Perhaps the most important tool of “polite racism” was the mobilization of a discourse seemingly steeped in the objectivity of social science that posited the dysfunctional cultural adaptations Black people had developed in the urban North as key to existing social and economic inequities. The need to address “cultural deprivation,” as it was often termed in the 1950s and 1960s, provided a way to explain and deflect movements for racial equality by saying that the most important task was to change the behaviors and values of Black people themselves. With public support for racial segregation and discrimination viewed as the distasteful purview of Southern racists, “culture of poverty” explanations provided a socially acceptable rationale to harness many Northern whites’ virulent opposition to housing, school, and job desegregation. A way to blame Black people for their own situation in the “neutral” language of social science, “culture of poverty” framings necessitated strategies to “uplift” the Black community, rather than desegregation, which, political officials claimed, wouldn’t address the real problem. Rather, what was needed were programs to address “juvenile delinquency,” teach positive cultural adaptations and good work habits, and support family values. And if these didn’t work, more punitive approaches would be required.
Repeatedly, in cities including Boston and Los Angeles, cultural arguments were used directly to thwart demands for desegregation. When the NAACP subcommittee took its case against Boston’s school segregation to the school committee, “they told us our kids were stupid,” Batson recalled, “and this was why they didn’t learn.”23 When William O’Connor became the new Boston School Committee chair, in 1964, he declared, “We have no inferior education in our schools. What we have been getting is an inferior type of student.”24 Three thousand miles away, Los Angeles Board of Education members expressed similar sentiments around the “negative attitudes towards education” that Black and Latino families supposedly held. School officials didn’t publicly endorse segregation; they found a more palatable way to criticize certain families for their “negative attitudes” and “lack of motivation” and to use that to explain away disparities in schooling. Over and over, from Boston to Los Angeles to New York to Detroit, Black parents’ demands for equity and desegregation were met with resistance from school officials who said their kids lacked the proper cultural habits to learn and who would only provide money for programs for cultural remediation and to fight juvenile delinquency.
The use of cultural arguments to deflect demands for policy change was not limited to struggles relating to schools. When the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality began a campaign highlighting disparate practices of sanitation removal in Bedford-Stuyvesant from other parts of the borough, the habits of Black working-class communities were blamed. CORE activists discovered that other, predominantly white neighborhoods in Brooklyn (with less population density) got five-day pickup, while the pickup in Bedford-Stuyvesant was two days a week and substandard, with garbage often left strewn on the streets, even after the trucks went through. As historian Brian Purnell demonstrates, after protracted attempts to demonstrate the inequity of sanitation services and numerous unsuccessful meetings with city officials, Brooklyn CORE launched Operation Cleansweep on September 25, 1962. Activists followed sanitation trucks through Bedford-Stuyvesant, picking up the piles of trash the trucks left behind, then dumping the garbage on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to demonstrate the poor quality of sanitation removal in the neighborhoods. The city responded that people in Bedford-Stuyvesant didn’t understand how to keep their neighborhood clean and suggested classes to instruct them on how to use garbage cans.25
These cultural explanations were taken up by certain Black voices who also sought to further Black progress and foreground Black agency. The politics of respectability had a long history across the twentieth century as many Black elites focused on remediating the behaviors of the Black poor as a way to uplift the community. But this took on heightened power and danger as those discourses and strategies moved into public policy.26 With biological arguments discredited after World War II, culture became the way to talk about race, in part aided by the rise of academic social science.27 Deriving partly from the rise of midcentury sociological theories of some Black and white social scientists (which gained further prominence in 1965 with the publication of the US Department of Labor’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, known as the Moynihan Report), this formulation cast Northern Blacks as undone by the structural barriers of the Northern urban landscape.28 These scholars argued that, untethered from the values of religion, family, and community that anchored Southern Black communities and faced with the racist structures of urban political economies, Northern Black people developed cultural responses that led to educational and job underattainment.29
By the 1960s, urban social science was booming, and scholar after scholar went to the “ghetto” to investigate this “other America.”30 While many portrayed these cultural adaptations in the context of systemic discrimination, poverty, and disfranchisement, they still depicted a dysfunctional culture holding Black people back.31 They lamented the “tangle of pathologies,” “family structures,” and “cultural deprivation/dysfunction” that were said to explain persistent inequalities and promote particular policy solutions. Political expediencies led many public officials to focus on the cultural part and jettison the focus on structural factors such as unemployment and unequal public services.32 As the Moynihan Report put it so starkly, “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.”33 This set of Black and white academic voices dovetailed with white political elites’ notions of the problem, and so their approaches were elevated. What followed was the idea that the Black community needed uplift, mentoring initiatives, programs to encourage cultural success, marriage, and jobs for men (the report’s main author, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recommended the military).
Using this framing, many white liberals, with support from some Black middle-class leaders, sponsored programs addressing juvenile delinquency, job readiness skills, and cultural remediation to facilitate Black educational and economic attainment and remediate these “cultural adaptations.” In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., in his speech to the American Psychological Association, took American social science to task for its role in maintaining injustice: “All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions—the Negro himself.” King faulted the “white majority . . . [for] producing chaos,” while blaming the chaos on Black people and claiming that if they behaved better, success would come.34
These “cultural” framings were slippery because they focused on Black people’s agency to change their situation. At the same time, they legitimated remedial and punitive responses. Because certain people’s behaviors were the problem, if they proved unwilling to change, the solution was further order and control, thus legitimating the role of discipline and policing to maintain such control. More extreme forms of school punishment came to school districts including Los Angeles’s in the wake of the Brown decision, as did more policing. As Northern liberals took pains to make clear, this policing was not like those racist Southern cops putting hoses on schoolchildren. It was modernized, targeted, and employed through rationalized systems because some people required more control; not all Black people, they made clear, just certain “dangerous” types who were menacing the good Black people.35 Cultural framings provided a way to understand the kind of “help” and “protection” Black people needed and to provide further systems of control for those who continued on this dangerous path. As such, cultural approaches continued to dominate social science, by white and Black academics, in the 1980s and 1990s, and this narrative of Black urban pathology became a reigning national common sense.36
These “cultural” explanations then turned up in contemporary memorializations of the civil rights movement but were framed as a new problem—as a younger generation having gone astray from the strong values and behaviors of the civil rights generation. Bill Cosby’s speech at the NAACP’s fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the Brown decision lambasted Black youth and their parents (“It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.”). And many of Obama’s movement tributes, from his campaign speech in Selma in 2007 to his March on Washington fiftieth-anniversary speech, included exhortations about the need for Black people to change certain dysfunctional cultural practices that now held them back.37
As they functioned over the course of the twentieth century, these culture-of-poverty formulations absolved the nation of primary responsibility for the inequalities still rife in American society and put the responsibility back on the Black community to fix them. And as writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates make clear, these formulations also accrued political benefits for Black leaders willing to talk tough to Black people.38
Seeing the ways “cultural” explanations were used to thwart demands for desegregation and explain inequity in the civil rights era, particularly by many Northerners seeking to distinguish their opposition from that of Southerners, provides a much different window on their contemporary use. Today, they are often employed in claims of a new “crisis in Black America”—that the current generation of Black youth has lost its way since the civil rights generation and needs to right itself. Seeing how these “cultural” explanations have been prevalent throughout the twentieth century as a way of explaining existing disparities reveals the lie in castigating this current generation of Black young people as so different from the civil rights generation, many of whom were similarly disparaged. Rather, this “cultural” explanation has recurred decade after decade to explain and justify disparity—and has proved disturbingly effective in disparaging Black demands for equity and justice by placing the solution on changing Black people’s values and behaviors and deflecting public responsibility in ways palatable to liberal sensibilities.
Recognizing the centrality of polite racism—of silence, coded language, and the demonization of dissent; the leveraging of bureaucracy and political power; and the use of cultural explanations to account for disparities—also reveals the enduring use of these strategies in maintaining racial inequality from the civil rights era to the present. These methods are slippery; many who employ them will assert that they hate racism and fight hard against racial demagogues like Bull Connor or former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke. The civil rights movement struggled with this over and over. Alone in a Birmingham jail in 1963, King noted that the “Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom” was not necessarily the Ku Klux Klan but the moderate who “is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice . . . who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek but I cannot agree with your methods.’” So too for us today: silence, disregard, political influence, and cultural explanations are key tools for maintaining racial injustice then and now. This history asks us to refuse the comfort redneck racism allows and confront the responsibility of a much broader swath of American society who continue to prefer “order” to justice.