When Michelle Obama spoke at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles on July 25, 2016, she delivered an emphatic endorsement of the party’s candidate for president, Hillary Clinton. But the words she said before mentioning Clinton attracted the most attention. She referred movingly to the challenges she confronted while raising her daughters in an often hostile political climate. “How we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith,” she said. “How we insist that the hateful language that they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”
After eight years as First Lady, she had rightly acquired a reputation as a persuasive speaker. Much like her husband, she combines charm and good looks with a penetrating intellect. Righteous and fervent, her convention speech echoed Martin Luther King Jr.’s prayer during a 1957 oration: “God grant that right here in America and all over this world, we will choose the high way; a way in which men will live together as brothers. A way in which the nations of the world will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”
As is the case with any black citizen who evokes the noble American spirit and suggests compassion in the face of hatred, she was praised for her eloquence and restraint. It was the kind of address, after all, that makes white moderates roar with delight and black believers fan themselves and shout “Amen!” Her advice to her daughters was indeed suitable for children navigating the school yard, if not as applicable for Democrats and independents battling a rising tide of Republican rancor and rebranded racism fueled by Trump’s successful run for president. I understand that right-wing lies, insults, and smears, desperate and clueless as they are, are often unworthy of a dignified response; deigning to reply may confer more significance than ad-hoc racialisms deserve. There is tempting convenience in offering a dismissive tsk-tsk instead of dirtying one’s hands via direct engagement. Clearly, Michelle Obama’s response to her haters reflects those considerations. What interests me more is the speech’s connection to the African American tradition of patient, refined dissent. As such, it both embodied and extended the stubborn shelf life of respectability politics, the approach that King advocated and that many (but not all) veterans of the civil rights struggle heartily endorsed. The philosophy wistfully suggests that turning a cheek and presenting clean teeth and fingernails will shame or otherwise persuade our oppressors to hold their fire.
The adherence to decorum as a defense against vitriol reminds me of attempts to cast every unarmed victim of police violence as an honor student, choirboy, Eagle Scout, and Red Cross volunteer. I’m aware that such efforts are partly in response to mainstream media’s mostly uncritical digestion of police officers’ deceptions. News organizations circulate law enforcement officials’ questionable incident reports and suggestive photographs that criminalize and otherwise destroy the reputations of those whose bodies they’ve already desecrated. And, because many white people historically have tended to judge all black people on the behavior of an individual black person, the more respectable the deceased is, the better. (It’s the reason why most African Americans, when learning of a criminal’s rampage, say to themselves, “Please don’t let him be black!”) A black killer is a thug and a menace, whereas a white one is merely “troubled” or needs treatment that he deserved but never received. I get all that. It’s a related sentiment I’m thinking of, the idea that an “honorable” black life, principled in word and deed, is somehow more valuable than a less virtuous one.
According to such fanciful thinking, our scrubbed, schooled, and obviously harmless presence will suggest to the millions of antiblack racists in our country, “If only you could see that I am good. Perhaps then you wouldn’t want me dead.” Or, when addressing the most passive of our self-described progressive allies, “If only you could truly believe that I am good. Perhaps then you wouldn’t stand by in mock #outrage while a police officer shoots me dead.” Miraculously, these epiphanies will take place in a Moral Cinematic Universe in which it has long been held that “the only good nigger is a dead one.” (The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that goodified is racist slang for a murdered black person.) White moderates sometimes become smitten with a similar notion: the possibility that their racist counterparts simply haven’t met the right black person, someone who could impress them as attractive, competent, and nonthreatening at the same time. Senator Harry Reid notably imagined that Barack Obama, “light-skinned with no Negro dialect,” could be that person.
Years later, many black people sustained the same fantasy. To counter offensive racist caricatures, they took to posting Facebook images of the Obama family: articulate, moisturized, and scandal free. But instead of persuading racists to discover the error of their ways, the Obamas’ luster merely inflamed their jealousy. Racist online comments protesting their White House occupancy led me to recall a scene from John Singleton’s woefully underappreciated 1997 film Rosewood. Speaking about a character played by Don Cheadle, one member of a lynch mob says to another: “You know, he’s got a piano. A nigger with a goddamn piano. I been working all my life. I ain’t got a piano. That nigger’s got one and I don’t. Now, how does that look?”
It remains a profound and perhaps interminable paradox that African Americans are constantly striving to prove themselves worthy of citizenship in a country that has not proved itself ready for democracy. I’m intrigued and mystified by the enduring popularity of moral appeals and dutiful citizenship in black communities, especially while the movement for black lives has worked so hard to consign the politics of respectability to the dustbin of outdated ideas. The sight of prayerful Negroes in church clothes kneeling before bloodthirsty troopers with snarling dogs has undoubtedly awakened sympathy in some previously hardened racists. However, little evidence suggests that spit-shined activism has ever swayed a crucial majority of white Americans. Our struggle requires a multifaceted approach combining skillful diplomacy, daring gambits, and methodical endurance. Consequently, it seems that going high is an unfit response, to say, rapacious private prisons, heartless Republican congressional policy, and the sixty-three million Americans who voted for a racist demagogue. Instead of going high, we should be going everywhere.
Justice don’t mean nothin’ to a
hateful heart!
.….….…
We needed a way around the hateful hearts of America.
—JUNE JORDAN, “JIM CROW: THE SEQUEL”
To overcome their oppressors, an embattled population needs superior numbers, superior weapons, or superior tactics. Our ancestors in America, having none of those, resorted to trying to make the battleground a moral one. Barack Obama paid homage to that tradition in a May 2017 speech given in defense of the Affordable Care Act. “I have said before that I believe what Dr. King said—that the arc of the moral universe bends, but it bends towards justice,” he told the crowd. “I have also said that it does not bend on its own, but it bends because we bend it, and we put our hand on the arc and we move it in the direction of justice and freedom and equality and kindness and generosity. It does not happen on its own.”
I seldom think in terms of good and evil. I rely on a simpler equation: There is our equality and those who would prevent us from realizing it. Still, I’m intrigued by the idea of cosmic reckoning, a moral universe in which the meek rise to power, the bad guys get punished, and righteousness rolls down like a mighty stream. The emphasis on a moral universe as opposed to a moral earth is troubling, however. It seems to suggest that justice is to be attained not on this bloodstained ball of confusion but on some other plane of existence, a milk-and-honey realm where lynching victims and rehabbed racists will frolic arm-in-arm. That sounds lovely, if you believe in Paradise.
Out here in these streets, though, moral revolution depends on an assumption of shared values underlying the American experience, what historian Richard Hofstadter called a “kind of mute organic consistency.” It depends on a narrative in which majority and minority both want the same things. It depends on a narrative in which oppressors and oppressed are equally culpable. It depends on a narrative in which oppressors earn forgiveness for their centuries-long litany of cruelties through repentance, generosity, and hard work. Repentance on the part of white Americans has been rare and generosity intermittent. In contrast, black forgiveness of their racist transgressions has often been automatic. In many instances of white Americans violently oppressing their black countrymen, the body is not yet cold before the dead person’s relatives are standing before cameras offering heartfelt platitudes about forgiveness. Do oppressed people have an irresistible impulse to forgive? Does forgiveness free us from some larger burden, enabling us to cope with the daily struggle? Or perhaps it keeps the hot coal of anger from burning our palms, as the Buddha would have it? Loving our oppressors is so much a part of the African American consciousness that to question it is to risk censure of the harshest kind. It’s a form of masochism, kissing the sword that has just sliced you open.
Perhaps forgiveness is politically expedient in settings where a numerical minority could otherwise get little done without further bloodshed. But if it makes sense to sometimes forgive as part of a larger political strategy, it does not function so well as a method of advancing moral consciousness in the United States. The Founding Framers had already staked a claim to the nation’s moral imagination long before the hunger for captive black bodies reached fever pitch. They polished their Enlightenment-flavored philosophies about morality and the dignity of man while building an economy on our ancestors’ backs and making a concerted effort to cripple their spirits and minds. This was, of course, a long, strategic process. In addition to murder, it involved rape, starvation, sleep deprivation, forced labor, mutilation, poisoning of food and water, and denial of access to spiritual materials—techniques most of us will recognize as elements of systematic torture. With hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty woven so tightly into the American fabric, a campaign to improve the country based on an ostensible moral consensus seems Sisyphean indeed. While honorable as a motive, moral suasion is ultimately insufficient as a tactic.
What’s more, religion, secular humanism, and atheism have all failed to instill anything like a moral culture in human beings. There is no shortage of cruel, duplicitous, and self-centered people of faith. There is no shortage of cruel, duplicitous, and self-centered secular humanists. There is no shortage of cruel, duplicitous, and self-centered atheists. Can we honestly claim morality exists here in the United States, where inequality has always thrived with the assistance of and on behalf of the state? The worst manifestations of unfair treatment include poverty, hunger, homelessness, substandard schools, untreated illness, and defenselessness against rape and other forms of violence. Half-hearted attempts at Great Societies and wars on poverty have failed to prove that eliminating any of these ailments has ever been a priority of the US government or its citizens for very long. Right-wing attempts to dismantle health care and punish the poor, abetted by the sixty-three million people who voted for a proud advocate of sexual assault, demolish the notion that, as Barack Obama proclaimed in 2008, “we hold common hopes.” What we have in common is the fantasy of a social contract. Sustaining the fantasy requires the delusional participation of all of us.
When one takes a slightly longer view of history, the futility of moral campaigns becomes even more evident. Consider, for example, the state of global civilization when Africans first arrived in Jamestown in 1619. At that time, church-led persecution, antireligious violence, human trafficking, child labor, and sexual assault were endemic. Four hundred years later, this still holds true. Human beings haven’t developed moral sophistication; we’ve merely gotten more practiced at developing rationales for our immorality.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1852)
During Obama’s first term as president, the audacious hope of his campaign collided with resurgent racism at nearly every level of society. Racism had never measurably decreased; it had merely receded. Bizarrely, Obama’s election made it safe to climb out from under the rocks. Before his victory, racism’s adoption of soft-power techniques (rebranding, the pseudo-language of conciliation) coincided with a reluctance on the part of progressives to call racism what it is. Many behaviors and policies that were in fact racist (e.g., “welfare reform” and the “war on drugs”) weren’t labeled as such, ostensibly out of concern for white people’s feelings.
Ironically, whenever white misbehavior is actually called out as racist, the denunciations seldom reach their targets. Instead, they arouse spasms of fragility among moderates who consider themselves allies of the black struggle. Any criticism delivered with a hint of passion stirs questions such as “Why are you so angry?” and “What about me? You don’t think I’m racist, do you?” A cloud of mutual suspicion forms, hindering insight and prompting fatigue. Black activists return to the streets and strategy sessions while their would-be white supporters retreat to the alluring comforts of silence. For fear of saying the wrong thing, they say nothing at all.
Their reticence clouds the landscape even further, increasing the wariness of citizens working for full equality. A 2006 FBI report notes the activity of “ghost skins,” Americans devoted to the delusion of white supremacy who perform their deeds in secret. It enables them to blend into society and infiltrate police departments, political parties, military forces, and other federal and municipal institutions. For African Americans in search of the “true spirit” of this country, knowledge of these covert operations leads to more questions. To what extent do white silence and active-but-illicit racism come between people of color and equality? To what extent do they impede our children’s opportunity to embrace the American promise? How can we distinguish between moderates and ghost skins if moderates never express themselves?
If we turn to an earlier period in the struggle for black lives, we find that the timidity of white moderates has always been a problem. Martin Luther King Jr. was a particularly frustrated critic. “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 Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner,” he said, “but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” In King’s view, “lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
While the Lukewarmers shelter in place, outspoken racists, for whom we used to employ the reassuring phrase “lunatic fringe,” have entered the telegenic mainstream. Sporting fashionable haircuts, salon tans, and Colgate-totally-whitened smiles, they are devising policy in the executive branch, preaching their racist gospel at universities, and defending police brutality on cable television. Perhaps emboldened by their trickle-down bigotry, their less polished counterparts compete to earn fifteen minutes of YouTube infamy by brazenly terrorizing any African American, Latino, Muslim, Jew, or disabled person they stumble across on a subway train or Walmart parking lot.
This frenzy of grievance affecting numerous affluent, poor, urban, and rural white Americans is symptomatic of the inevitable decline of empire. The browning of our country and falling fertility rates among white citizens stimulate an anxiety of impotence and an outbreak of irrational jealousies. Like Don Cheadle’s piano, these neuroses provoke a suspicion that minorities are getting more than they deserve. Acting on those impulses, billionaire policymakers and their elected lackeys conspire to deny basic access to health care, clean water, and ballot boxes. The disruptions unfold in accord with the emergence of well-financed white racist groups on college campuses, and the persistence of Trump rallies packed with his admirers, pounding their chests and hooting.
White moderates undoubtedly know that we are living in an era when, as the Washington Post put it, “anti-black sentiments drive white residential preferences.” They likely know that 74 percent of white evangelicals, hell-bent for nostalgia, believe American culture has changed for the worse since the 1950s, and that 56 percent, or more than half of all whites, agree with them. They’ve probably seen the NPR poll showing that 55 percent of whites believe they face racial discrimination, as well as the American National Election Study indicating that “black influence animosity” and racial animus were the main deciding factors for Trump voters. They also may have seen the proliferation of Facebook groups for “pissed-off white Americans” and racists whose concept of morality is rooted in a worldview in which black people are little more than pack animals and concubines. When white moderates don’t speak out against these troubling developments, is it unreasonable to wonder if they agree with them?
I’ve noted earlier that “going high” often seems designed to tiptoe around the sensitivities of sympathetic observers and their fence-straddling cousins. In addition, it creates the unintended consequence of lowering the bar where the support of white “progressives” is concerned. Shouldn’t we demand more than lukewarm acceptance from people who consider themselves our allies? In the face of overwhelming racism, is politeness stupid?
They can help raise expectations by going beyond preaching to the converted and actively engaging all those white people who cling to their unearned advantage, stuck in the delusion that sharing opportunity is equal to diminishing whiteness. They need to tell them that people of color don’t want what white people have; we want what is rightfully ours. I see and appreciate the allies who march with us, rejoice with us, commiserate with us, and join their voices with ours in a roar of outrage when injustices afflict us. So when I say it’s time for allies to do more, I’m not dismissing the significance of their efforts thus far. But they are far from enough.
When they say, “I’m doing all I can,” what does that mean? Unless they’re challenging the tradition of unearned advantage every day at every opportunity, they are not doing all they can. If they ever indulge in the luxury of remaining silent while people of color feel the effects of racial inequality every day, they are not doing all they can. Some white people are unable to hear people of color when we’re not singing onstage or dancing in the end zone; they might see our lips moving, but instead of our voices, they hear a torrent of howling and screeching. We need the voices of our allies to penetrate the din, using their whiteness as a lever and a megaphone. If they are not challenging their racist brothers, sisters, friends, and lovers on a daily basis, they are not doing all they can. Annual discussions over Thanksgiving turkey won’t do it; they need to take place on the regular until racism is acknowledged and equal opportunity is real. Frederick Douglass famously offered this advice to young black Americans: “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!” Certainly he would not object if we extended his wise counsel to white Americans who claim to be committed to equality and justice.
What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.
—AUDRE LORDE, “TRIP TO RUSSIA”
Along with Douglass and David Walker, Maria W. Stewart was one of the earliest black American philosophers to disseminate her ideas about race, justice, and civic virtue. In 1831, she published Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, a pamphlet that, among other subjects, disputed prevailing theories of black inferiority. “It is not the color of the skin that makes the man,” she wrote, “but it is the principles formed within the soul.” She also referred specifically to Walker, whose Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) endorsed a radical morality in which any man who abetted slaveholders was destined for divine punishment. “Are they not the Lord’s enemies? Ought they not to be destroyed? Any person who will save such wretches from destruction, is fighting against the Lord,” he wrote, “and will receive his just recompense.” According to Walker, black men hoping to get heaven had better commit to fighting “under our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom and of God.” Those who refrained from the struggle “ought to be kept with all of his children or family, in slavery, or in chains, to be butchered by his cruel enemies.”
In insisting on their own interpretation of the Bible and in their determination to frame their antislavery arguments within a discussion of good and evil, Walker and Stewart (soon followed by Douglass) helped lay the groundwork for a black liberation theology. Elements of their philosophy helped shape and propel every campaign for black equality that came after, especially the modern civil rights movement in which some (but hardly all) black churches played a pivotal role.
Walker and Stewart were up against the kind of capitalist theology found in an 1837 catechism concocted by Rev. Charles Colcok Jones. He was pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Georgia—and owner of three rice plantations where more than one hundred enslaved black people labored. In a passage addressing “Duties of Masters and Servants,” he wrote:
Q: What are the Servants to count their Masters worthy of?
A: All honour.
Q: How are they to try to please their Masters?
A: Please them well in all things, not answering again.
Q: Is it right for a Servant when commanded to do anything to be sullen and slow, and answering his Master again?
A: No.
Q: But suppose the Master is hard to please, and threatens and punishes more than he ought, what is the Servant to do?
A: Do his best to please him.
Both philosophers argued that pleasing God had nothing to do with pleasing white people, and that the best way to serve Him was to work for freedom for all. For her part, Stewart expressed little tolerance for patience and moral pleading. In an 1832 speech to the Boston-based Afric-American Female Intelligence Society, she advised, “It is useless for us any longer to sit with our hands folded, reproaching the whites; for that will never elevate us.” Walker’s Appeal mentions love twelve times, but never as an unconditional affection to be freely shared with one’s oppressors. “We ask them for nothing but the rights of man,” he wrote, “for them to set us free, and treat us like men, and there will be no danger, for we will love and respect them, and protect our country—but cannot conscientiously do these things until they treat us like men.”
Douglass never assumed that he and his opponents shared the same moral values, even if they claimed as much. He spoke openly of his contempt for their false pieties. “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial, and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” he wrote in his famous memoir. “Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”
Perhaps, this is a moment for impassioned African American critics to take up the mantle of their predecessors and examine the fraudulent underpinnings of American morality once again. To cast aside “abiding faith” and interrogate the “bombast and fraud” that Douglass identified in 1852. To question America’s fundamental pretenses, as Fannie Lou Hamer did in 1964. Without a flourishing and constructive black contrarianism that rigorously engages Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, “free” enterprise, and other precious national tenets, we remain, as DuBois said, “the sole oasis of faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.”
In addition, there is no time like our disorderly present for African Americans to have an unprecedented conversation among ourselves about what we think morality is. We need a discussion that isn’t predicated on the majority culture’s conception, with its historical roots in invasion, abduction, and forced conversion. What’s more, the conversation would be incomplete without the contributions of black people whose spiritual practices differ from those of Christians, or who choose to forgo such practices altogether. These discussions would almost certainly be uncomfortable and occasionally contentious, but they are absolutely necessary.
For example, there is nothing close to a consensus about LGBTQ lifestyles. While many of us regard the right to be one’s true self as fundamental and unalienable, others among us continue to condemn same-sex-loving and nonbinary peoples as sinners and abominations. Still, others defend outrageous behavior in the name of racial “solidarity” (see R. Kelly, for example). Meanwhile, in some “prosperity” churches, there’s no greater sin than insolvency, justice is seldom mentioned, and Jesus is not so much a messiah but a glorified investment broker/Amway salesman who died on the Cross so that his followers could make mad dollars. Do prosperity preachers mean to imply that the poor are impoverished because they’re immoral? And while the concept of a hereafter populated by lions and lambs grooving side by side is popular among many religious African Americans, it isn’t the only notion of heavenly reward. Historically, even as black people began to accept the possibility of an Americanized hereafter, they resisted the suggestion that they would be sharing it with their captors.
Charles Ball noted in his 1837 memoir of his life in bondage, “It is impossible to reconcile the mind of the native slave to the idea of living in a state of perfect equality, and boundless affection, with the white people. Heaven will be no heaven to him, if he is not to be avenged of his enemies. I know, from experience, that these are the fundamental rules of his religious creed, because I learned them in the religious meetings of the slaves themselves.”
Is it immoral to adhere to a theology that emphasizes liberation over love, as some of our ancestors did? Is refusing to love unwise Supreme Court justices, duplicitous police, and rabid Trump supporters morally indefensible? I’m not against love by any measure, although I want to suggest that it is best reserved for those who love us in return, not for those who oppose us and, in so doing, deny our humanity. How does urging black people to love their oppressors differ from telling a battered wife that her husband wouldn’t abuse her if he didn’t care for her so much? Until we examine such questions thoroughly and with input from a wide cross section of African Americans, we are ill-equipped to launch moral crusades, let alone take them seriously.
We may discover that we have been chasing a unicorn all along. We might realize that as long as there is hunger and other people have knowledge of it, as long as there is wanton killing not only by cops but also by “terrified” private citizens and self-styled vigilantes, as long as there is predatory lending and for-profit policing, as long as citizens remain silent while watching their nominal leaders build fortunes on the backs of the poor and defenseless, as long as there is hoarding of material goods by human beings fully aware that other human beings are dying of lack, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all morality. That conclusion is not as pessimistic as it sounds. It would, after all, free us to cast our quest for genuine equality in more earthbound terms. Would it be any less effective, for instance, if we opposed injustice simply because it is unacceptable, not for moral reasons but because we won’t stand for it?
If we’re looking for reasons for optimism, we can find it in knowing that our opponents, despite centuries of concentrated, systematic effort, have failed to completely destroy our minds, our capacity to reason for ourselves. We can find it in our ability to have strong, smart, healthy children despite equally intense efforts to poison, incarcerate, murder, and otherwise inflict them with fatal discouragement. I need no reasons beyond those to motivate my striving. “In the struggle for justice,” Douglass observed, “the only reward is to be in the struggle.”
I don’t believe that love can conquer injustice. Strategy, however, has a fighting chance.