Chapter Two

From Civil Rights to Colorblind

If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, “the problem of the color line,” then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.

—Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America

 

In his book Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois described the promise of Reconstruction as a “brief moment in the sun” for Blacks, before its disastrous end moved African Americans “back again toward slavery.”1 The receding of the Black Power insurgency during the 1970s didn’t return Blacks to a state of neo-slavery, but the hope and expectations raised by the movement of the 1960s proved elusive.

By the end of the 1970s, there was little talk about institutional racism or the systemic roots of Black oppression. There was even less talk about the kind of movement necessary to challenge it. Instead, when Ronald Reagan ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, he made a play for the racist vote by complaining about a fictitious “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steak. He famously invented the stereotypical “welfare queen,” who, he said, “used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”2 These were familiar racist baits for the white conservative electorate: lazy Black welfare cheats getting something for nothing. But in the aftermath of the “Black revolution” of the 1960s, politicians no longer felt comfortable displaying their racist credentials upon their sleeves. The “strapping buck” and the “welfare queen” were assumed to be Black—but, politically, Reagan and others could not risk saying so. Even with its coded language, Reagan’s conservatism was at this point considered on the extreme right of mainstream politics—it would take the rest of the decade to become dominant. The Black movement of the 1960s had disgraced outward displays of racial animus, even as race continued to animate American politics by other means. Ultimately, Reagan lost the nomination to Gerald Ford by a narrow margin, but the trajectory of mainstream politics was clear. It was not just the right: the Democratic Party was also moving quickly to abandon its very recent association with the civil rights movement. On a campaign-trail stop in Indiana, Jimmy Carter, who was campaigning for the 1976 Democratic nomination, remarked:

I have nothing against a community that’s made up of people who are Polish, Czechoslovakian, French Canadians or blacks who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. . . . But I don’t think the government ought to deliberately break down an ethnically oriented community deliberately by injecting into it a member of another race. . . . I’m not trying to say that I want to maintain with any kind of government interference the ethnic purity of neighborhoods. What I say is the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood, simply to establish that intrusion.3

The country was entering an era of post–civil rights “colorblindness.” This was not the benign, long-sought absence of “race” from the legal strictures governing the United States. The 1968 Kerner Commission report’s detailed descriptions of racial discrimination by public and private institutions had established a basis upon which African Americans could stake a claim to federal aid.

Instead, “colorblindness” aided politicians in rolling back the welfare state, allowing Congress and the courts to argue that the absence of racism in the law meant that African Americans could not claim racial harm. Not everyone believed this so soon after the Black movement had turned the country upside down demanding an end to racism. But the political framework of colorblindness allowed portions of the political establishment to separate Black hardship from the material conditions that activists had worked so hard to expose. It was as if the signing of civil rights legislation had wiped the slate clean and African Americans had been given a new start. Only ten years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had given his speech declaring that “freedom is not enough” to achieve racial equality, but now those vying for the presidency were contending that formal freedom was more than enough.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Decades of disinvestment and under-resourcing had left African Americans surrounded by substandard and dilapidated housing, poor job options, underfunded schools, and a bevy of other problems that only massive financial investment could repair. The politics of colorblindness helped to shroud not only racism but also its companion: the economic crisis of the early 1970s. At the precise moment when the Black movement was demanding enormous infrastructural investment to revive urban enclaves, the booming American economy of the postwar era was grinding to a halt. With its end came a relentless ideological assault on the kinds of public expenditures needed to attend to deep economic deprivation. Colorblindness helped to explain this retreat from public expenditure as the consequence of moral decay and the rise of criminality in the “inner city.” Nixon cabinet member George Romney would describe it as the “crisis problem people”—using the old “culture of poverty” framework the movement had pilloried in the 1960s. The point was to restore order while defanging continued Black demands on the state. These kinds of political attacks had persisted throughout the 1960s as the right hardened its political opposition to civil rights and welfare legislation. The difference then, however, was that the strength of the movement, in both its Southern and Northern expressions, exerted a tremendous amount of pressure on the federal government to make repeated concessions.

The end of the long postwar economic boom, along with a slowing Black political movement, created the first opportunity in a long while for the political right wing to recalibrate and take the offensive. American politics had been deeply polarized for much of the 1960s, but relentless protests had effectively thwarted the right’s efforts to demobilize the movement. The racial common sense underwriting the “culture of poverty” had been severely compromised by the Black movement and its demands for full citizenship and an end to racial discrimination. It was hard to argue that people putting their lives in harm’s way for the right to vote were “culturally defective.” Not only was the Black movement a threat to the racial status quo but it also acted as a catalyst for many other mobilizations against oppression. From the antiwar movement to the struggle for women’s liberation, the Black movement was a conduit for questioning American democracy and capitalism. Its generative power provided a focal point for the counteroffensive that was soon to come. This counteroffensive, launched by the business class, would affect not only Blacks but everyone who benefited from the expansion of social welfare.

This alone was enough to galvanize the right and all of mainstream politics. It was one thing to identify a political need to absorb some portion of African Americans into the mainstream of society—including through access to middle-class jobs, homeownership, higher education, and electoral politics. It was quite another to continue to acquiesce to Black demands in a way that threatened to compromise core ideological tenets of American capitalism, including the image of the United States as a land of equal opportunity, not “equal outcomes.”4 The battle in the sixties had legitimized Black demands; now that legitimacy had to be rolled back. In 1981, Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater explained how this was to be done and the role that colorblind politics could play:

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. . . . “We want to cut this” is much more abstract than even the busing thing . . . and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”5

It is important to consider that this political attack was intended not only to discipline rebelling African Americans but to reestablish order in a society where demonstrations, illegal strikes, riots, and rebellion had become legitimate means of registering complaints, including those of ordinary working-class white people, against the state and forcing reforms from hostile political forces. This chapter explores the ideological and political restoration of order in efforts to rehabilitate the system itself.

Understanding the “Conservative Backlash”

Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 signaled that not everyone was pleased with the radicalism sweeping across the United States. Nixon articulated the anxiety experienced by many white workers who chafed at the pace at which Blacks were demanding change. He especially embodied the anger of a ruling class that wanted to reestablish control over the direction of the country. This meant ending street protests as well as curtailing public-sector programs and work. The reassertion of Republican control began with binding the loose threads of the party. The GOP had been deeply divided for most of the sixties among the hardcore Goldwater right, the buttoned-up business elite of the Northeastern corridor, and the liberal civil-rights wing of the party. The tumult of social upheaval and the war in Vietnam had blown the existing Democratic Party apart, leaving its segregationist Dixiecrat wing without a home. This gave the GOP an opening to reestablish itself as the political home for conservatives, including the racist Southerners displaced from the Democratic Party.

Integrating the Dixiecrats into the GOP was central to a broader strategy the Republicans referred to as the “Southern strategy,” which at its core was about winning white Democrats, particularly poor and working-class Democrats, to the Republican Party on the basis of racism. The Southern strategy was contingent on two assumptions: that the Democratic Party would implode across the South, and that Republicans could appeal to the racism and resentments of white workers, whom they presumed were chafing at what Blacks were gaining through protest. Nixon referred to all of these potential voters as the “silent majority”—insinuating that those protesting for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam were a vocal minority. In 1969, Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips wrote a book titled The Emerging Republican Majority, which essentially argued that elections are won by focusing on people’s resentments.6 Nixon, once in office, mapped out a strategy to do just that, transforming ordinary whites’ anxieties, brought on by growing economic insecurity, into resentment against Blacks. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, said as much in his diary of daily events in the White House. He wrote that Nixon had “emphasized that 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.”7

There was a grain of truth to this: the Black movement was the nexus of social protest throughout the 1960s. King recognized as much in the months before he was killed: “In these trying circumstances, the Black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.”8 From the movement against the war in Vietnam to a revived movement for women’s liberation, new struggles were unfolding. The gay liberation movement came into being with a riot in New York City in the summer of 1969; a strike wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s had even greater repercussions in American politics. Nixon’s strategy for responding was an old one: divide and conquer.

That strategy, however, would take some time to develop. When Nixon was elected, the country was deeply divided. The last great gasp of urban rebellion came in the spring of 1968, in the aftermath of King’s assassination—but the nation’s elected officials did not know this in the early 1970s and assumed that more was around the corner. The threat of violence, which had propelled social policy for the better part of a decade, still hung thick in the air; nonwhite communities were having enough skirmishes with the police that Nixon had to temper his desire to cut social welfare. San Francisco mayor Joseph Alito reminded his colleagues in 1974 that “there are emotions in the cities that can be as disruptive as 1967, 1968, 1969 . . . [and] it would be a serious mistake to think the cities cannot erupt.”9 Nixon described the country as on the verge of unraveling—and tapped into the resentments and anxieties of white workers, stirring generational resentments between older white workers and the students, Blacks, young workers, and radicals who were taking over the cities and the campuses. Rising crime, rising taxes, and inflation capped the long economic expansion of the postwar period. In the background, the war in Vietnam appeared endless and was on the verge of expanding. Nixon homed in on the uncertainty that ruled the moment and led a charge to link this national sense of insecurity to liberals and the pace at which Blacks were demanding even more.

Part of the concern was that Black protests were not just affecting legislation: they were also having a direct influence on the economy. Workers’ real wages were being eaten away by inflation (spawned by the war in Vietnam) while workplace conditions were getting worse. The demands of automation in many industries meant laying workers off and expecting those who remained to do more. Black autoworkers in Detroit referred to this process as “niggermation,” describing how one Black worker was expected to be as productive as three white workers. The pace was grueling, the consequences were deadly, and the profits rolled in. According to one report, “In 1946, some 550,000 auto workers had produced a little more than 3 million vehicles, but in 1970 some 750,000 auto workers had produced a little more than 8 million vehicles.”10 “Niggermation,” Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin explain in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, was directly responsible for the deaths of more than 16,000 autoworkers. One 1973 report found “63,000 cases of disabling diseases and about 1,700,000 cases of lost or impaired hearing.”11

The demand for higher wages to offset the corrosive effects of inflation and compensate for the dramatic rise in production helped to spur workplace militancy. This put Black and white workers on the same picket lines. Workplace action also spread to the public sector, even while public-sector strikes were illegal. After President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order in 1960 allowing federal workers to unionize, though not strike, public-employee union membership grew from 400,000 in the late 1950s to four million by the mid-1970s. This opened up enormous access to good, stable jobs because antidiscrimination legislation ensured more fairness in public-sector jobs than in private white-collar employment. However, the inability to strike often meant that federal workers, regardless of their ability to form unions, relied on welfare to supplement their take-home pay. By the mid-1960s, public-sector workers were beginning to engage in illegal strikes to raise their wages and bring dignity to their workplaces. Poverty wages in garbage collection, nursing, teaching, mail delivery, and other public jobs prompted unprecedented and illegal workplace action. The most famous example is the sanitation workers in Memphis, whose attempts at organizing a union brought King to their city; he addressed them the night before he was murdered. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans had participated in social-movement activism over the course of the 1960s, and they did not simply leave their politics at the door when they arrived at work. Instead, the struggle over social conditions in their neighborhoods catalyzed their struggles at work. In 1960, there had been thirty-six public-sector strikes. By 1970, that number had grown to 412. Black sanitation workers and nurses went on strike across the South for union recognition and collective bargaining rights.12

The most dramatic episode of workplace activism during this era was an illegal strike of more than 200,000 postal workers in March 1970. For two weeks, postal workers in more than thirty cities refused to sort or deliver the mail. Instead they walked the picket lines, demanding an increase in wages. The strike began in New York City, where the top salary postal workers could earn after twenty-one years of employment was still less than the average cost of living in the city. In 1968, President Johnson suggested to Congress a modest pay increase for postal workers. Congress took no action, but in 1970 it offered them a puny 4 percent raise—and a week later voted itself a 41 percent salary increase. The ensuing postal strike was the largest workplace action ever taken by federal workers. At one point Nixon mobilized the National Guard to sort and deliver the mail, but postal work was hard, skilled work and untrained soldiers could not easily perform it. The breakdown of discipline was palpable. Of the 26,000 soldiers called up to intervene in the strike, only 16,000 bothered to show.13 Within a matter of two weeks, the disproportionately Black postal workforce won a 14 percent wage increase and the unprecedented right to collectively bargain their wages. Nixon’s labor secretary glumly noted, “There’s only one thing worse than an illegal strike: a wildcat that wins.”14 TIME magazine observed, “The government’s authority was placed in question and the well-being of business, institutions, and individuals in jeopardy.”15

The postal strike was the crest of a wave of workplace actions from 1967 through 1974. During that period there was an average of 5,200 strikes per year, compared with a high of 4,000 strikes in the previous decade. The number of workdays lost to strikes was also growing. From 1967 to 1971, strike days averaged 49.5 million, peaking during the year of the postal strike with 66.4 million days lost in 1970—the highest yearly loss due to labor unrest since 1946.16 It was no coincidence that this strike wave coincided with the most militant phase of the Black insurgency—and it affected the entire workforce, not just Black workers. This was the real threat. As labor journalist Lee Sustar explains:

Several Black caucuses, such as the Society of Afro-American Postal Employees, became centers of agitation for industrial struggle that necessarily involved white workers. Comprising over 20 percent of the 700,000 postal employees, Black workers were central to the weeklong, illegal wildcat postal strike in 1970. Black postal workers were concentrated in cities where the strike was strongest. Organized against the efforts of union leaders, the illegal walkout was broken only when President Richard Nixon sent in the National Guard. The strike, denounced as “labor anarchy” by the Wall Street Journal, almost certainly involved the largest number of Black workers ever in a U.S. labor dispute.17

Black labor played a prominent role in the strike wave, but its success would have been impossible if millions of white workers had also not taken action. This fact challenges the assumption that white workers were politically monolithic, dutiful adherents to “silent majority” politics. It challenges the simplistic narrative of racial backlash pitting ordinary whites against the Black struggle. None of this is to say that many white workers were not racist during this period; many were indeed resentful, perceiving that Blacks were getting too much at the expense of white families.

The political drift to the right, however, was not linear; it was complicated by changing racial and economic dynamics and by the real impact of the “Black Revolution” throughout the entire country, which provoked or even hardened some resentments and anxieties but also upended negative attitudes toward Blacks that were largely based in racist stereotypes. Black demands for inclusion, including access to the supposed benefits of American citizenship, subverted or, at least, confronted the idea that Blacks were lazy and parasitic.

According to Barbara Ehrenreich, polls taken between 1965 and 1968 showed sharp increases in the number of people who said they “often feel bad” about the way “Negroes [are] treated.” The number of whites willing to vote for a Black president jumped from 38 percent in 1958 to 59 percent in 1965 to 70 percent in 1970.18 Polls found majorities in favor of affirmative action, against the death penalty, and for integrated neighborhoods—the numbers, across the board, were higher in the early 1970s than they would be even a few years later. This speaks to the powerful sway of the social movements of the 1960s, not to an unbridgeable gap between white and Black. Ehrenreich goes on to point out:

America’s blue-collar workers were in revolt in the late sixties and seventies, but not along the right-wing traditionalist lines sketched by the media. The late sixties saw the most severe strike wave since shortly after World War II, and by the early seventies the new militancy had swept up autoworkers, rubber workers, steelworkers, teamsters, city workers, hospital workers, farm workers, tugboat crewmen, grave diggers and postal employees. For all the talk of racial backlash, Black and white workers were marching, picketing and organizing together in a spirit of class solidarity that had not been seen since the thirties. Nixon’s “silent majority” was yelling as loud as it could—not racial epithets but the historic strikers’ chant: “Don’t cross the line!”19

The growth of left-wing consciousness over the course of the 1960s helps to explain why Nixon turned to colorblindness and racial code words as a way to conceal, or at least obscure, later efforts to undo aspects of the Johnson welfare state. If the white majority were as racist as the “conservative backlash” narrative makes them out to be, then why this strategy of codes and subterfuge? There was never any national directive declaring an end to the use of racial epithets in the public utterances of elected officials. Nor had public displays of racism simply become unfashionable. Instead, the Black movement had rendered such behavior completely unacceptable, not least because it had demonstrated, some fifty years before the slogan would appear, that Black lives mattered. It has been the relative strength or, lack thereof, of the movement that would ultimately determine whether or not the public nature of racism would persist. By the end of the sixties and into the early 1970s, the movement made racism unpopular; by the end of the decade this would begin to change.

In addition, Nixon could not unleash a frontal assault on the Johnson welfare state because poor and ordinary whites were also benefiting from the War on Poverty. This foreshadowed a strategy that Reagan and Clinton would employ as well—using racial codes and innuendo to build a case against programs that benefit poor and working-class whites, while undermining the potential for solidarity among those who have the most to gain by uniting and the most to lose by continuing to be divided. These were the politics of race in the new “postracial” era.

Restoring Order

In 1969, Life magazine published a series of articles on revolution. One front cover read:

Revolution:

What are the causes?

How does it start?

Can it happen here?

It may read as a conspiracy theory today, but by the late 1960s these were serious questions confronting the elite, what today we regularly refer to as the 1 percent. This was not an anticommunist rant but evidence of genuine concern of the rising fortunes of the left. The Wall Street Journal raised similar questions in the wake of militant student activism overseas, openly wondering what impact the protests would have in this country:

In a modern world reduced to the size of a village by high-speed communications it is possible to mobilize an international following with such an attractive idea [revolution]. Whether it is possible to foment a worldwide revolution with enough force to destroy the existing balances of power and order is a debatable topic. But this is no doubt the puzzling question that is in the back of the minds of many people when they see, on their TV screens, the forces of disorder at work.20

This continued worry about radicalization was coupled with a looming concern about the state of the economy. The core concern here was not about the economic health of the average American; rather, “capitalists in the early seventies felt threatened by changes in the world economy, by the decline of American hegemony, and by the consequences and implications of domestic political mobilizations.”21

When a New York Times journalist and a graduate student were allowed to sit in on a series of retreats for business executives in 1974 and 1975, “they found a mood of vulnerability and a concern about the long range implications of recent social and economic policies.” In their book Ethics and Profits: The Crisis of Confidence in American Business, Leonard Silk and David Vogel conducted a wide-ranging survey of 360 anonymous executives from some of the most powerful corporations in the nation about their attitudes concerning the health of business and free enterprise. They found a range of emotions, from anxiety to contempt, directed at the great mass of American society. One executive suggested, “The American capitalist system is confronting its darkest hour. . . . If we don’t take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy.”22 Another bemoaned the role of Congress and stressed that business had to lead the country: “It is up to each of us, not some prostitute of a Congressman pandering to get reelected, to decide what should be done.”23 They debated whether or not American democracy had gone too far, asking, “Can we still afford one man, one vote? One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War Two.”24 Some discussed how to jolt the public out of its dependence on social welfare spending: “The recession will bring about the healthy respect for economic values that the Depression did. . . . It would be better if the recession were allowed to weaken more than it will, so that we would have a sense of sobriety . . . we need a sharp recession.”25

These insights from the stewards of American business showcased concern, but also the lengths to which some capitalists were willing to go to reinvigorate their profits. These business leaders were not wholly confident in American politicians’ ability to lead the economy. The challenge for Nixon was to restore confidence and profitability by quieting the decade-long social and political instability. Since the Black movement had been the nexus for social activism, would an attack on the Black movement have the same generalizing effect? This was a multipronged strategy that included physical repression of the movement through the use and expansion of the policing state; an ideological attack on poor and working-class African Americans as undeserving, lazy, and violent; and eventually the cultivation of a functioning Black middle class that could politically discipline poorer African Americans while also rehabilitating the idea that everyone could prosper in the United States.

Freedom and Choices

Nixon’s first term functioned as a bridge between the civil rights era and a burgeoning period of postracial, colorblind political paradigms. The Nixon administration was reluctant to fully dismantle Johnson’s programs, fearing that the cities would reignite, but it was also limited by the Democrats’ control of Congress. Nixon worked to close the civil rights period not by being antagonistic but by changing the terms of the debate. Where the Black movement had, as a result of protests and theorization, succeeded in defining racism as systemic and institutional, Nixon officials worked to narrow the definition of racism to the intentions of individual actors while countering the idea of institutional racism by focusing on “freedom of choice” as a way to explain differential outcomes. Nixon made clear that his administration would fight against “intentional racism,” but differentiated this from disparate outcomes produced by institutional discrimination that was harder to identify. For example, Nixon and others called the division between rich and poor “economic discrimination” but defended it, citing the right of property owners, in particular, to protect and maintain their property values by limiting the incursion of the poor into their communities (referencing the ongoing debate concerning the placement of low-income housing). But Nixon was addressing much larger issues as well. In a little-discussed 1971 statement on housing, he spelled out the logic of the post–civil rights “colorblind” paradigm:

The goal of this administration is a free and open society. In saying this, I use the words “free” and “open” quite precisely. . . . Freedom has two essential elements: the right to choose and the ability to choose.
. . . Similarly, an “open” society is one of open choices and one in which the individual has the mobility to take advantage of these choices. An open society does not need to be homogenous, or even fully integrated. There is room within it for many communities. In terms of an open society, what matters is mobility. The right and the ability of each person to decide for himself where and how he wants to live, whether as part of an ethnic enclave or as part of a larger society—or as many do, who share the life of both. We are richer for our cultural diversity; mobility is what allows us to enjoy it. Instead of making man’s decisions for him, we aim to give him both the right and the ability to choose for himself—and the mobility to move upward.26

He ended the statement by attempting to separate economic discrimination from racial discrimination: “What is essential is that all citizens be able to choose among reasonable locational alternatives within their economic means, and that racial nondiscrimination be scrupulously and rigorously enforced. We will not seek to impose economic integration upon an existing local jurisdiction; at the same time, we will not countenance any use of economic measures as a subterfuge for racial discrimination.”27

This statement bears all of the hallmarks of colorblind logic: from the absence of racist language, we are expected to infer the absence of racist action. The statement in its entirety ignores the effects of the recent past when it comes to discrimination—particularly in the housing market. There is no accounting for the ways in which historic patterns of housing discrimination—which had only legally ended three years prior to this statement—shaped the contemporary metropolitan geography. There is no recognition of how historic and contemporary discrimination sharply limited African Americans’ economic choices. The statement deliberately lacks context and history while at the same time suggesting that neighborhood configurations were shaped by “freedom,” “choice,” and cultural considerations, as opposed to redlining and racism. Nixon’s emphasis on “mobility” and “the ability to choose” ignores the heated, ongoing debates over the 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA). But this rhetorical and political shift would fit nicely with the demands of the business elite. Three years after the passage of the FHA, when Nixon made this speech, the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the nation’s largest association of real estate brokers, continued to oppose fair housing, referring to it as “forced integration.”28 This was not accidental language; it was part of a larger effort to reframe the political debates that went far beyond housing. By disconnecting the contemporary crisis from a history of racial discrimination encouraged by public policy and acted upon throughout the US private sector, Nixon was commenting more broadly about disparities between Blacks and the rest of American society. In Nixon’s world, a “free and open” society was more than enough; poor choices were the only real constraint on the “mobility to move upward.” “Bad choices” could produce a lifetime of poverty or crime.

Law and Order under Nixon

Since the Truman administration the theme of “law and order” had served a function in presidential governance,29 but the rise of the civil rights movement and then civil disorder gave new context and meaning for understanding crime, policing, and imprisonment. I explore these ideas more fully in chapter 4, but for the purposes of this chapter, it is important to understand Johnson and Nixon’s turn to law and order as a means of confronting the Black insurgency and recasting Black demands for justice as a pretext for ramping up the policing and prison state.

To do this, Nixon picked up an earlier thread in conservative politics that conflated civil rights protests and Black demands with criminal activity. In a 1966 interview, for example, he said that the deterioration of respect for law and order “can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them.”30 Nixon harnessed this logic, along with pointing to rising crime rates and the notion that the United States was spiraling out of control, as reasons to expand the powers and equipment of the criminal justice system dramatically.

Johnson’s Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was passed in the weeks after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., which prompted hundreds of riots across the United States. The legislation capped Johnson’s years of efforts to professionalize law enforcement around the country where it had been wracked by lack of training, coordination, and organization. This was certainly not simply about “fighting crime,” despite the attention to rising crime rates: Safe Streets greatly enhanced local officials’ intelligence-gathering capacities, including wiretapping, “to protect the United States against the overthrow of the Government by force or other unlawful means, or against any other clear and present danger to the structure or existence of the Government.”31 The bill also called for greater integration of the FBI into state and local law enforcement and a 10 percent budget increase to “develop new or improved approaches, techniques, systems, equipment and devices to improve and strengthen law enforcement.”32 More generally, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a subsection of the omnibus crime bill, was a conduit guiding federal resources toward states and cities to allow for more consistent approaches to police work. Indeed, within ten years, “the federal government was able to spend approximately $7.5 billion to beef up the nation’s law-and-order apparatus in little more than a decade.”33

Journalist Christian Parenti has pointed out the many specific ways the Nixon administration wielded the legal apparatus to harass and intimidate the left. For example, Nixon signed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act into law in 1970 as part of a larger bill against organized crime, ostensibly to fight the influence of the Mafia. The RICO legislation, however, could be just as quickly used against the left. For instance, the legislation

loosened the rules pertaining to the use of illegally obtained evidence by prosecutors; it created new categories of federal crime; it allowed the federal government to seize assets of any organization deemed to be a criminal conspiracy; it created new penalties and policing powers over the use of explosives and finally it created 25-year-long sentences for “dangerous adult offenders.”34

Using the new powers of RICO, the Nixon administration subpoenaed more than a thousand antiwar activists, including leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Thousands of journalists, Black Panthers, and Puerto Rican nationalists were also forced to testify in grand jury hearings that were nothing but fishing expeditions to get information about the left.35 Surveillance as a crucial aspect of social control was a major component of the widening Nixon policing state. Consider that in a matter of four years, the number of states with functioning “criminal justice information systems” mushroomed from ten to forty-seven. A $90 million investment allowed for greater integration of local systems with the FBI’s master intelligence system, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). When the NCIC was first formed, its database had 500,000 pieces of information, but by 1974, it had collected 4.9 million entries.36

The growing policing state was not just an attack on the organized left; it was also directed at policing the “unruly” Black population. Most experts chart the beginning of the phenomenon called “mass incarceration” in the 1970s. Anti-Black policing and law-and-order rhetoric had a much earlier start, but the exponential growth of imprisonment and the turn toward hyper-punitive prison terms began after the Black Power uprisings of the 1960s had ended. Between the 1980s and 1990s, the chances of receiving a prison sentence following arrest increased by 50 percent, and the average length of sentence increased by 40 percent.37 As historian Heather Ann Thompson has pointed out, there were many markers highlighting the shifts in law enforcement over the 1960s and 1970s, but the vicious crackdown against a mostly Black uprising in the Attica prison in upstate New York, was, perhaps, most indicative. Inmates in Attica took forty-two prison staff members hostage to draw attention to their political demands to improve the quality of life in the prison, including improved sanitation, an end to guard brutality, better medical care, and better food, among many others. For five days inmates negotiated in good faith with state officials, but on the morning of September 13, 1971, the governor of New York

gave the green light for helicopters to rise suddenly over Attica and blanket it with tear gas. As inmates and hostages fell to the ground blinded, choking and incapacitated, more than 500 state troopers burst in, riddling catwalks and exercise yards with thousands of bullets. Within 15 minutes the air was filled with screams, and the prison was littered with the bodies of 39 people—29 inmates and 10 hostages—who lay dead or dying. “I could see all this blood just running out of the mud and water,” one inmate recalled. “That’s all I could see.”38

The brutal suppression of the Attica uprising was a way for law enforcement to act out violent revenge against the same kinds of people who had rebelled on the outside. It was a way for the state to impose its authority in ways that it had been unable to in the hundreds of rebellions that had rocked the country throughout the 1960s. Rockefeller used the state-led assault on Attica as an opportunity “to take a hard line and rethink how he had been handling New York City’s ‘fringe elements’—whether inmates, activists, or addicts. Determined to show conservatives in his party that he was tough on crime,” Governor Rockefeller “not only chose to put down the Attica rebellion with deadly force but he publicly committed himself to certain “enduring principles” such as society’s need for law and order.”39

New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws also indicated the punitive turn in sentencing in the 1970s.40 After a 31 percent increase in drug-related arrests in the early 1970s, supposedly liberal-leaning Republican Nelson Rockefeller called for harsh sentences even for drug possession, including a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years to life for four ounces of narcotics—the same sentence as for involuntary manslaughter.41 The effects were incontrovertible. Over the next twenty years, the proportion of drug offenders in New York’s prison population grew from 11 percent in 1973 to a peak of 35 percent in 1994. In 1978, the state of Michigan tried to outdo New York by concocting the “650-lifer” law, which required judges to impose life sentences on anyone convicted of delivering 650 grams (less than one and a half pounds) or more of narcotics.42 The effects of the growing policing and prison state were clear by the end of the decade: In 1970 the American prison population, including those in state and federal facilities, was 196,429—as small as it had been since 1958—but by 1980 it had grown to 315,974, the largest number of Americans ever imprisoned.43 In addition, while white people—then as now—were always the predominant group of drug users, the ever-expanding powers of the police were directed at the “unruly” Black and Latino neighborhoods where authority had broken down and whose activism and discontent were a constant source of tension.

Nixon’s turn to focusing on crime fit snugly with his broader use of colorblindness to champion his domestic policies. There was no need to invoke race in this campaign for law and order, but the consequences of the policies could not have been clearer. Crime was committed by bad people who made bad choices—it was not the product of an unequal social order that left Blacks and Puerto Ricans, in particular, isolated in urban enclaves with little access to good jobs, housing, or schools in a worsening economy. Instead, inequality left poor and working-class people of color to their own devices to advance in a society that had made next to no provisions for them to do so through legal or normative means. These kinds of constrained “choices” were made in white enclaves as well, but those were less surveilled and less likely to be criminalized by the police and the criminal justice system as a whole.

Elected officials’ ability to manipulate and politicize crime was not wholly based on fiction. There was a surge in the numbers of crimes committed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Some of this had to do with a greater focus on counting crimes, including absorbing “criminal acts” committed in the midst of political rebellion into the overall numbers. The number of reported violent crimes grew from 161,000 in 1960 to 487,000 by 1978. There were also major fluctuations and variations in the numbers and locations of criminal activity over time and place. For example, homicides dropped by 4 percent from 1975 to 1978, as did property crimes.44 But what did not change was the propensity for African Americans to lead in virtually all categories as victims of crime. Over the course of the 1970s, a Black man’s chance of being murdered was six to eight times greater than that of a white man. Black families were more likely to be victims of burglary and car theft. Even Black middle-class families, because of their physical proximity to poverty, were much more likely to be victims of crime than their white peers. Politicians were quick to manipulate crime numbers that showed the disproportionate burden of Black communities as an excuse to expand the powers and reach of the policing state; they did so using public funds that were needed to develop the kinds of public institutions and civil infrastructure that could mitigate poverty and criminal activity. To be sure, this often meant that Black people were the ones to call on the state for greater protection from law enforcement—but this happened in a context where almost all the alternatives had been taken off the table.

The Crisis Problem People

In 1973, Richard Nixon declared an end to the “urban crisis.” The significance of this was that the “crisis in the cities,” as Johnson had described it, had been the catalyst for federal aid to American cities for much of the 1960s. But in the spring of 1973, several weeks before he was to offer a draconian budget that included suspending all federal housing subsidies, the president declared the urban crisis to be over. In a radio address, Nixon declared, “A few years ago we constantly heard that urban America was on the brink of collapse. It was one minute to midnight, we were told, and the bells of doom were beginning to toll. One history of America in the 1960s was even given the title Coming Apart. Today, America is no longer coming apart.”45

Crisis magazine was much more skeptical than the president. An editorial replied, “The rosy portrait of the state of the Union with its implications of a cool summer followed the unveiling of the President’s alarming budget . . . [and] came three months before the summer vacation period during which hundreds of thousands of poor and unemployed ghetto youth will be released from school to roam the teeming streets of their quarters practically 24 hours a day.”46 Nixon never mentioned any repair to or improvement in the conditions of urban dwellers, including African Americans. He also made no effort to quantify how the end of the urban crisis could be measured: An end to police brutality? An end to housing discrimination? What were the markers? Instead, he focused on the decline in the number of people living in substandard housing. That was an important marker, but it hardly spelled an end to the litany of problems outlined in the Kerner Commission report. Nixon was mostly interested in turning the page. He was not naïvely thinking that urban problems were now a thing of the past; he was extracting the federal government from its responsibility to resolve them. It had now been five long years since the last massive upheaval in a Black community, and Nixon seized the opportunity.

The new attack on social spending was buttressed with descriptions of urban populations as either not truly in need or beyond the help of federal antipoverty programs. The Nixon administration began to describe urban problems as being intractable because of the people who lived in the cities. In other words, where impoverished conditions still existed, it was time to look at what was wrong with those people. Nixon’s new emphasis on the “free society” and “choice” was intended to reduce social inequality to individual behaviors. People, of course, could make right or wrong choices, but it was the individual, free of social constraints, doing the choosing. It was much easier to promote the idea of making do with less in the aftermath of the nation’s longest economic expansion if the people being asked to make do with less were blamed for their own hardship.

George Romney, Nixon’s first secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), led the way in this shift by focusing on what he described as the “crisis problem people.” In 1973, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club to explain the scandalous collapse of a federal housing program, Romney explained why government malfeasance and private institutional fraud were not the culprits. He said, “with deep regret, the things that have gone wrong with the housing subsidy and insurance programs . . . are my responsibility.” He continued: “Even if we had been able to avoid all of the mistakes and errors that have occurred in the housing programs, we would still be up against the larger tragedy—the crisis of people with problems in our central cities.” He would later elaborate on who these “people with problems” were: “Housing by itself cannot solve the problems of people . . . who may be suffering from bad habits, lawlessness, laziness, unemployment, inadequate education, low working skills, ill health, poor motivation and a negative self-image.”47

These phrases were codes for the Black poor living in the cities. This also showed how colorblindness worked against the interests of African Americans not just in obvious ways but as a pivot for attacking living standards and programs for all working-class people. Nixon’s declaration of the end of the urban crisis was not only a way to isolate poor, urban Blacks; it also began ideologically undoing the postwar welfare state. Carl Albert, Democratic Speaker of the House, recognized Nixon’s draconian 1973 budget as, “nothing less than the systematic dismantling and destruction of great social programs and the great precedents of humanitarian government inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and advanced and enlarged by every Democratic president since then.”48 Albert may have been engaging in some partisan hyperbole. It would take the swinging axe of Ronald Reagan to completely destroy the Johnson welfare state, but Nixon helped to establish the ideological groundwork for Reagan’s project by systematically discrediting the people who relied upon the programs.

Historian Alice O’Connor has described the emergence of the neoconservative right in the 1970s as most interested in “redefining the problem [of urban crisis] altogether along the lines earlier sketched out in Moynihan’s sensationalized 1965 report on the Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”49 Conservative intellectuals gathered in think tanks and journals to articulate this process of redefining. They went farther than resuscitating the “culture of poverty” narrative, reaching back to earlier theories of biological racism. For example, one conservative described urban slums as “human cesspools . . . into which our worst human problems have flowed and in which, through some kind of bacterial action, a self-sustaining reaction has been created that is making matters worse despite the general improvement going on everywhere else.”50 Another conservative author described urban rebellions as little more than “outbreaks of animal spirits and of stealing by slum dwellers.”51

Conclusion

It is important to understand “colorblindness” as much more than the denial of racism. Colorblindness has become the default setting for how Americans understand how race and racism work. It is repeatedly argued that the absence of racial insult means that racial discrimination is not at play. Indeed, the mere mention of race as a possible explanation, or as a means of providing greater context, risks accusations of “playing the race card”—a way of invoking race to silence disagreement. This is deployed to hide or obscure inequality and disparities between African Americans and whites. It has helped to elevate and amplify politics that blame Blacks for their own oppression.

Colorblindness is a critical weapon in the arsenal of the politically powerful and economic elite to divide those who have an interest in uniting to make demands on the state and capital to provide the means for a decent quality of life. Colorblindness and “postracial” politics are vested in false ideas that the United States is a meritocratic society where hard work makes the difference between those who are successful and those who are not. The history described in this chapter concerning the rise in class struggle, the anxiety of the business elite, the onset of economic crisis within global capitalism, and how the convergence of those different factors created an opportunity to undo the welfare state of the previous period is the context within which we should understand the emergence of the concept of colorblindness. The looming threat of explosive cities, still palpable in the spring of 1974 with Nixon’s draconian budget cuts, stopped a frontal attack on the social welfare programs of the 1960s. Instead, barely coded language focused on the poorest of Blacks to explain the retreat from the cities, as did Nixon’s abrupt announcement declaring the end of the “urban crisis.” Most importantly, removing race and, ultimately, culpability for the conditions of the cities, meant there was no explanation for those conditions beyond the people living there. If culture was the issue, what was needed was personal transformation, not a robust public sector. All this prepared the ideological ground for the massive assault on social welfare that would come in the 1980s amid the so-called Reagan Revolution.