Gagging Frederick Douglass
Paul GoodellIn April 1865, at the very end of the American Civil War, the renowned abolitionist (and ex-slave) Frederick Douglass spoke to the Boston Anti-Slavery Society in support of black suffrage. His words still resonate 144 years later, particularly those near the end of his speech.
Let me not be misunderstood here. I am not asking for sympathy at the hands of abolitionists, sympathy at the hands of any. I think the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just. … What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. … Everybody has asked the question … “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! [Y]our interference is doing him a positive injury. … Let him fall if he cannot stand alone!
To modern Americans, one of the first thoughts that likely comes to mind upon reading these words is that they could never be uttered in polite company today. Nearly anyone who said these words in any kind of context would risk being branded a racist.
We hear much of the “structural racism” present in America today, yet “structural racism” — codified or state-sponsored actions (such as slavery or Jim Crow) — is flagrantly illegal and severely punished, and has been for over a generation. Racial discrimination in virtually any sector of life (the government, the workplace, schools) is illegal, and the social pressure against discriminating on the basis of race in one’s private life — or even holding racist opinions — is immense.
One would think that in this kind of setting (one in which any kind of racial discrimination is severely punished by the government and makes the perpetrator a social pariah) making a speech like the one Frederick Douglass gave would not make someone a social leper. One would be wrong.
Frederick Douglass faced “structural racist” discrimination of a kind impossible for anyone in America today to experience, yet he felt completely at ease with the words quoted above. That he would either be gagged by social pressures or branded a racist if he spoke them today speaks volumes about the unfortunate state of our understanding of race and racial issues in modern America.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Paul, yes racism is illegal, but how do you police a prospective employer picking up the phone to call Mr. White for an interview while dumping Mr. Black’s resume right in the trash bin? The employer probably has a million different “reasons” that he can hang his hat on for doing what he did but there was only one reason that mattered. Its better, but we have a long way to go. We’re one generation removed from black and white drinking fountains that my parents remember, for god’s sakes.
I don’t think what Douglass realized, or could realize in 1865, was how the African American race, through no fault of their own, was put behind the eight ball. It wasn’t just a matter of opening up the job markets or the schools (which didn’t happen until decades later in some parts of the country). This was a society that accepted as a given that blacks were second class citizens. That mentality doesn’t go away in a generation, or two, or three, or four.
So, I hate to disagree with the preeminent Mr. Douglass, but I think I have to. When he said allow blacks to stand on their own too legs, he didn’t realize America had beaten those legs like the legs of an unsuspecting Nancy Kerrigan on her way to the locker room. You can’t cut somebody’s legs out from under them and say, come on, stand up, you have the same opportunities that I have, what with my two able legs and all. That’s absurd.
That being said, I don’t think anybody should censor you. You’re wrong, not evil.
October 9th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Well, Keith, I have to disagree.
I don’t blame you for holding the opinion that you do, though. It takes a great deal of independence to step outside the (in my opinion) flawed assumptions that undergird much of modern Western thought in this area, and most people aren’t ready to do that. (I know I wasn’t, until a few years ago.)
The idea that members of any race are congenitally unable to succeed on their own — the unstated assumption behind policies like Affirmative Action — is simply false. During the period of vicious racism of Jim Crow, all-black universities fielded debate teams that won competitions against teams from Ivy League schools. Black-owned businesses thrived. The bombed out ghettos of modern America simply didn’t exist. Blacks generally tended to look at themselves as fundamentally capable individuals who were being held back by the state, not (as the case is today) fundamentally incapable individuals who have been irreparably harmed by the state and therefore require perpetual assistance to succeed.
Frederick Douglass was closer to the plight of blacks than either you or I could ever be, close enough to recognize two very large truths:
1. African-Americans are human beings, as capable of fending for themselves as any other group — no matter the injustices done to them — provided they’re allowed to do so.
2. White Americans have generally tended to have trouble accepting point #1.
One of the key sentences in the quoted section is his conviction that Americans are more disposed to be generous rather than just. Justice demands that whites treat blacks as equals. Guilt-driven generosity dictates that whites treat blacks as perpetual charity cases.
Like a smothering parent who’s convinced that the world is out to get her child and that she’s responsible for making sure that her child succeeds, White Americans (originally on the Left, but today on both sides of the political spectrum) remain convinced that blacks have been so horribly altered by their generations of mistreatment that they simply can’t succeed on their own. (Most people who believe this would hasten to add “Yet” to that sentence, but have no idea when the “yet” would ever arrive.) It was this soft bigotry — along with the hard bigotry of slavery (and later Jim Crow) — against which Douglass rebelled.
You said:
“When [Douglass] said allow blacks to stand on their own too legs, he didn’t realize America had beaten those legs like the legs of an unsuspecting Nancy Kerrigan on her way to the locker room.”
You may recall that Nancy Kerrigan won the silver at the Olympics only a few months after she was brutally attacked. People didn’t encourage her to compete in a wheel chair; they expected her to recover and to succeed on her own two feet, and she obliged.
This has been the pattern countless other ethnic groups who’ve come to America have exhibited — because they’ve been expected to do so. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years. European anti-Semitism threatened to wipe the race from the face of the earth in the ’30s and ’40s. Jews faced outright discrimination in the US and Europe (and still do in Europe, as the resurgence of anti-semitic opinion shows). Given the logic of your analogies, one would expect Jews to be about the most downtrodden people on earth. Instead, they’re one of the most successful ethnic groups in the world. Did they succeed because someone offered them a handout? Not really.
Pick virtually any ethnic group who’s immigrated to the US, and you’ll find a similar story. Cambodian refugees who fled the Khmer Rouge in the ’70s arrived with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of them lost all of their families and friends in Pol Pot’s genocide. Unlike African-Americans, they didn’t have the benefit of being familiar with English or American culture, nor did they have any networks of friends or family to help them. Yet they’ve persistently succeeded in creating a positive ethnic subculture, whereas African-Americans largely haven’t. Is this because they were insufficiently oppressed? Hardly. It was because no one told them they weren’t good enough or able enough to succeed.
Why are we today telling blacks this today? I have no idea.
More to the point, neither did Frederick Douglass, who had MUCH more reason to agree with sentiments that blacks were neither good nor able enough to succeed. After generations of slavery, how could they be expected to succeed on their own? Yet Douglass, who had a much better understanding of blacks’ condition than you or I, Keith, was convinced that the propaganda that blacks can’t succeed on their own was false.
I’m tempted to ask why you seem not to agree with him, Keith.
You said,
“You can’t cut somebody’s legs out from under them and say, come on, stand up, you have the same opportunities that I have, what with my two able legs and all. That’s absurd.”
Your image of a paraplegic is telling, Keith, since it implies a belief that blacks are perpetually unable to succeed on their own. Paraplegics can’t grow their legs back, after all. Had we given all blacks lobotomies, I’d see the truth of your analogy. We did no such thing, however. We unjustly discriminated against them in horrible ways for years, but that discrimination did nothing to change the inherent capabilities that they still possess. Your analogy seems to suggest that you disagree with that assessment.
But let’s assume that your analogy isn’t so flawed. Let’s assume that whites did actually “cut the legs off” from under blacks. For at least a generation, we’ve been openly committed to giving them the best pair of prosthetic legs imaginable, as well as intensive rehab therapy.
Consider the following examples:
A black person who was passed over for a position can claim that his being passed over is prima facie evidence of racism — and will often be supported by the EEOC and the courts, regardless of the merits of his case.
The federal government requires anyone working with them to hire at least a certain number of minority workers.
Colleges and universities have been required for years to bend over backwards to make sure that non-whites aren’t discriminated against in admissions. All the advantages of the legacy system that the children of rich alumni enjoy are enjoyed by virtually all non-white applicants.
How do these arrangements constitute anything other than a massive commitment to surgically reattaching their legs (or attaching the world’s greatest pair of prosthetic legs), Keith? I don’t understand. That the academic and professional achievement rates of African-Americans persistently lag behind those of whites cannot be attributed to a LACK of attention on the part of white Americans. As Frederick Douglass said, and as the success of virtually all other non-white ethnic groups in America indicate, it may very well be BECAUSE of this excessive attention that this gap is present. Perhaps our doing with them has played the mischief with them.
Maybe we should do less. In other words, maybe we should treat them like the capable adults they are.
The only reason I can conceive of that people would not want to do so is that they don’t believe that blacks are, in fact, capable adults. I would strongly disagree with that belief.
Since your words seem to indicate that you don’t disagree with that belief, Keith, I’m curious: why do you agree with it?
October 9th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Ha, the old racism turnaround argument. Let me see if I remember the tune to this old song. Because I think that after 150 years of slavery and another century of intentional, unmitigated institutional racism, blacks might be entitled to a little assistance, I must not think they’re capable and I must be the racist. You, who think they’re doing fine and need no assistance whatsoever, are actually the second coming of Abe Lincoln. And the univerisities, the employers, and anyone else with affirmative action programs, are all huge bigots. Is that it? I’m not buying what you’re selling.
And if you watched the 1994 Olympics, it was debatable whether Kerrigan would have gotten a silver medal, sans beating. But then again, maybe if that had happened she would have gotten the gold, who knows. But the Judges, either consciously or subconsciously, certainly didn’t hold that against her and in all reality she probbaly got a little boost from it. That’s all I’m talking about, a little compassion, a little understanding. As the great philosopher Waylon Jennings said, in the context of the Native Americans (although it applies to African Americans as well), “And the red man is right, to expect a little from you, promise and then follow through, America….”:
October 10th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Ah, the old ad hominem. I do remember how that tune goes. I prefer to wait to engage until you include more arguments and less assertions. You’ve gestured in the direction of my arguments. You’ve done nothing to answer them.
You still don’t seem to have grasped what Douglass meant when he said that “the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just.” A little compassion? That’s precisely what’s NOT needed. Justice is what’s needed. All that’s needed — all that anyone is entitled to — is to be treated like free adults. That is justice.
As John McWhorter has observed, no people group in all of human history has ever succeeded by being lifted up by another group. Every group has either succeeded by lifting themselves up or they have failed. A state that respects its citizens and treats them like adults will allow them to experience either the success of their efforts (unhindered by laws explicitly discriminating against them) or the failure of their efforts (unmitigated by laws explicitly shielding them).
On this last point, we apparently disagree.
I welcome any response from you that actually explains your reasons for disagreeing. I’d prefer not to see any more hand waving or ad hominem gestures from a man as intelligent as you, though.
October 10th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Moreover, it certainly seems that you think that the massive changes to its law and culture that America has already made are either a) clearly insufficient to rectify past discrimination and must be beefed up, or b) must be maintained indefinitely, or c) both.
If my reading of your words is correct and these are your positions, please explain how they adequately address both Mr. Douglass’s insight concerning Americans’ general inclination towards generosity rather than justice, and with Mr. McWhorter’s observation concerning the absence in the historical record of any people group succeeding by explicitly being lifted up by others.
October 11th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
*Doubling over with laughter* Paul, your entire post was assertion and not argument. To make the naked assertion that structural racism is illegal and severely punished, is to just not get it. In the last half a generation, we’ve had to classify a new kind of offense - hate crimes - because crimes are being committed that are not motivated by money, power, sex, love, or any of the other centuries old motivators, they are crimes motivated solely by hatred of someone else’s differences. Yet, everything’s a-o-k, nothing to see here, keep moving folks.
I respect your position and it does have a certain logical appeal. It sounds like, though, you’re trying harder to convince yourself than to convince me. I’m not saying you fall into this category, but I think many people hold these views so they can get to sleep at night.
In response to your last post, I choose (b), that the programs that are in place remain so at least for my lifetime (I’m 36). As far as John McWhorter, I have no idea who he is. He could have been the butler on My Three Sons, for all I know. However, I don’t see my view as “lifting up” anybody. I see it as simply leveling the playing field. If history forced them to start 10 yards behind, let’s do our best to make up that 10 yards. If I knocked you down (indulge me) and then offered you a hand up, you wouldn’t marvel at my kind generosity. I knocked you down in the first place! You might marvel at my change of heart or my attempt to make things right, but you wouldn’t say that I lifted you up. Don’t you concede that the Civil Rights Act was necessary, that Brown v. Board was necessary (we’ll save whether it was compelled by the constitution for another day), that we needed those things to move forward? We differe because I think we still need them and other programs, you don’t think we need them anymore (or we never did need them).
October 11th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Cumtwa, doesn’t your argument presume that affirmative action actually (rather than just theoretically) a hand up, rather than a well-intentioned harm? That seems to be the point of contention here. Paul has provided some arguments that you’ve presumed incorrectly. You haven’t addressed the point.
So, getting to the heart of the matter, how do you support the contention that affirmative action is “making up” 10 yards to a sprinter? To me, it seems more like giving ultra-cushion shoes to a marathoner. It may seem like an advantage, and make for a more comfortable race, but it virtually ensures a loss at the higher levels of competition.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
I’ll indulge you, Keith.
Let’s say you did knock me down. If you then gave me a hand up, I wouldn’t marvel at your generosity. That’s not what we’re talking about here, though, which is the rhetorical sleight-of-hand used by proponents of programs like affirmative action.
A more accurate analogy to the situation at hand would be something like the following:
You knocked me down, breaking my lower back. I lose my job because I’m paralyzed from the waist down, leading to my family falling into poverty for lack of any income. (Assume for the purposes of the analogy that my wife doesn’t work.) My children have a hard life and have to scrimp and claw for everything they get, rather than enjoying the advantages of a more prosperous life that they might have had (and that your children had) if I’d been able to work like I had. They blame you for their predicament. My grandchildren then demand that your grandchildren compensate them for the losses that their parents undoubtedly suffered — and which they claim they’re still suffering — because of your actions.
That is much more akin to affirmative action. It lays the burden of guilt on an entire group of people, none of whom were directly responsible for past mistreatment, many of whom bear absolutely no responsibility — whether familial or tangential — for past mistreatment.
The whole point of this essay was that a man who was much closer than any of us could ever be to the actual effects of state-sponsored discrimination (which, hyperbolic claims to the contrary, we haven’t had for at least a generation) never asked for the “hand up” that you seem to claim is necessary for beneficiaries of affirmative action to succeed. Your assertion to the contrary — that “Douglass [didn’t realize], or could realize in 1865 … how the African American race, through no fault of their own, was put behind the eight ball” — is patronizing in the extreme.
You think that a former slave, a man who became intimately acquainted with the deficiencies in black education (and therefore their ability to successfully interact with society) through his own self-education and through teaching fellow slaves to read, a man who then traveled in the most educated circles (and therefore had an excellent frame of reference within which to place black slaves’ terrible situation), didn’t know how far down blacks had been put in America? Really? That assertion strains credulity, to put it mildly, Keith.
Much more likely is that Douglass knew quite well how difficult the task would be for blacks; that he had a good idea how long it would take them to succeed on their own (if whites didn’t use the laws to overtly discriminate against them — which, unfortunately, they continued to do through Jim Crow); and that he thought blacks were up to the challenge.
As a people they’d been held back at least 10 yards in the race of life. But so have many other non-white peoples who came to America, and nearly all of them (especially Central, East, and Southeast Asians) have clearly outpaced African-Americans with their successes. You never attempted to answer why this is, if the real problem is the legacy of white discrimination against non-whites.
To answer your final questions, I do think that the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board were morally correct. I can’t find a moral argument against them. I also think they were colossal mistakes, and have written about this before (http://www.theonlyorthodoxy.com/2007/11/01/the-principled-tyranny-of-non-discrimination/). I’d put them in the same category as laws against bad-faith lies (as opposed to “white lies”, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny): morally justified in theory, but terrible and ultimately tyrannical in practice.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
To answer your other question, Keith, John McWhorter is a linguist and a noted commentator on racial issues: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mcwhorter.htm
October 21st, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Paul, I confess that I didn’t read your whole post. I simply don’t have an infinite well of time from which to draw. However, with that disclaimer, let me say as follows. Those other cultures that you mention haven’t been slaves. No one makes a sick joke like I heard in the last year, Obama dies and goes to St. Peter, he says who are you, he says I’m the first black President of the United States, St. Peter says oh really, when you were elected, Obama says about 45 minutes ago. Can you believe that those so-called jokes are going around in 2008 or 2009? When’s the last time you heard a similar joke about a Korean? But I guess everything’s fine though.
Paul, if your position helps you look in the mirror when you shave, or sleep a little more soundly at night, more power to you, I’d love to be right there with you as I toss and turn at night for a variety of reasons and cringe when I look in the mirror. Your position may be right and I may be wrong. In my line of work, as you know, I get told every day that I’m wrong. But I believe, to quote our beloved Chief Justice Roberts, that your position is just so much whistling past the graveyard.
October 21st, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Cumtwa, you fail to address any of Paul’s substantive points. You may not have an infinite well of time from which to draw, but surely you have enough to at least skim the arguments to which you purport to respond.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:43 pm
I echo Jeremy’s point, Keith.
I assume that when you say “The other cultures you mention haven’t been slaves” you mean “The people from those other cultures you mention haven’t been slaves in America.” And you’re correct. (If you meant something else, you might be in error.)
Of course, no African-American today has been a slave, either. The parents and grandparents of African-Americans today have never been slaves. Their long-dead ancestors were slaves. Frederick Douglass was a slave. Neither he, nor any former slave, enjoyed the legal, cultural, or economic advantages any African-American enjoys today. Yet he felt completely at east with the words quoted in this article.
You talk about the presence of systematic racism, and as an example you cite a tasteless joke. I feel completely justified in saying that blacks 150 years ago would have LOVED it if the worst they had to fear was tasteless jokes. Instead, they had to fear systematic, state-sponsored racist discrimination and the denial of their freedom as human beings.
Some people certainly still have racist attitudes. This is — and, in all likelihood, will always remain — true. People are flawed creatures. You’ll always have hatemongers like Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton. You’ll always have bigots like whoever thought up that joke. To use THEM as anything remotely resembling an example of discrimination that keeps blacks down is, frankly, to give the game away Keith. Life isn’t perfect, for anyone.
I repeat: non-black minorities often had to deal with a hell of a lot worse than almost all African-Americans had to deal with over the past 30 years (escaping genocide, having no family, learning a new culture and language, etc.) and they generally succeeded. This, while they were privately discriminated against and called all kinds of bigoted names. To say that blacks cannot emulate their success because their grandparents were sharecroppers and their great-great-grandparents were slaves is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Sleep tight, Paul. I’m glad you convinced yourself. I would toss and turn at night at that logic.
December 10th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Apart from your first response, Keith, you’ve avoided actually interacting with my, Jeremy’s, or Mr. Douglass’s arguments with remarkable consistency. Well done.