Dispatches from the Race War. Tim Wise

These will then be followed by formal citations. I hope this will satisfy the aesthetics best for most readers while also meeting the needs for scholarly legitimacy desired by those seeking truth in these dangerous (and often surreal) times.

      NASHVILLE, OCTOBER 2020

      INTRODUCTION

      AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR

      SITTING IN THE hotel restaurant on the second day of our family reunion in Memphis, my great-aunt wore a somber look on her face, not unlike that of a graveside mourner. She pulled her chair close to mine and leaned in. “So, Tim,” she began, in a syrupy drawl, made raspy by years of smoking, and so indelibly Southern that it always managed to turn my name into a two-syllable word. “Do you think we’re ever going to have a race war?”

      Hmm, I thought to myself, hadn’t seen that one coming. I had been working as an antiracism activist and educator for four years since graduating from college, so at least the question was in my professional wheelhouse. Still, it was odd and made me more than a bit uncomfortable. After all, this was a reunion of my mother’s side of the family—her father’s people—and they were not the relations with whom I would normally talk about politics or anything substantive. Far better for the 25-year-old me to keep my thoughts close to the vest at times like this. Smile, make small talk, and drink heavily—no need to venture into weightier territory than that.

      The question also threw me because of what I felt sure had motivated her to ask it. Something about her tone had given it away. Within a couple of years, two books would be written that predicted a likely racial conflagration in America and used that same term, race war, in their titles. The first would be penned by journalist Carl Rowan, and the second by Richard Delgado, a critical race theorist. But it seemed clear that when my great-aunt had asked me about these prospects, she had not meant it in the way they would. For those two, the possibilities of a race war were being driven skyward by white reactionaries, afraid of losing power, or of merely having to share it in an increasingly multiracial nation. My Aunt Jean, I’m confident, was not thinking of white supremacists as the instigators of the coming conflict. I doubt she was envisioning terrorists like Dylann Roof, who would walk into a Charleston church in 2015 and massacre nine black worshippers because he had become convinced they were “taking over” his white country.

      No, when my aunt asked the question, it was apparent that the race war she wondered about—the one she feared—would be initiated by black people, angry over some longstanding grievance, the legitimacy of which she couldn’t quite bring herself to acknowledge. Don’t get me wrong; my Aunt Jean was a lovely person and one of the people I most looked forward to seeing at these reunions. She was also, for what it’s worth, a lifelong Democrat in the mold of FDR. But as with many white Southerners who had embraced the New Deal and the benefits it brought our region, her views on race remained stuck in an earlier time. She was no bigot, yet she had increasingly come to view her neighbors—mostly black, in a part of Birmingham that had, as they say, changed—with deepening trepidation.

      I wasn’t sure what she expected me to say, and even less what she was hoping to hear. Furthermore, I wasn’t certain how deeply I wanted to get into all this. Earlier in the day, my mother and I had sojourned to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site where Dr. King had been assassinated twenty-six years earlier. It had been a powerful and gut-wrenching afternoon, and I was emotionally spent. The tour ends at the balcony where King had fallen, and no one warned us as we turned a final corner, only to find ourselves in a cut-out alcove between the two rooms his group had rented that night. We had not been prepared. To go from that sacred ground to a discussion of a possible race war—especially one that would be the fault of black people—seemed profane. But she had asked, and I was of a mind to answer, though I was under no illusion she would be satisfied with my reply.

      I proceeded to explain that if she meant what I thought she did—a race war in which marauding bands of black people decided to seek revenge on whitey for years of mistreatment—the answer was no. I did not expect that such a thing would happen. I could almost assure her it would not. If black folks were that given to payback, little of the United States would still be standing, and surely the place where we were speaking wouldn’t be: an Embassy Suites on the border of Germantown, the very white and affluent Memphis suburb. Trust me, I noted, only half in jest, this entire zip code would have been torched a long time ago.

      But, I explained, the bigger problem with the question was that it presupposed such a war was not already under way. It suggested that we were currently reveling in some melodious racial harmony and that only somewhere down the line might things get dicey. And there was also the assumption, however unspoken it might have been, that black people would be the ones to fire the first shot across the bow when that day came. But none of these propositions were true, I noted. The race war had already begun, and there had never been a cease-fire.

      It had begun in August 1619 when the first Africans were brought to the colonies as indentured servants: the precursor to enslavement. It had begun when colonial elites fixed upon the term white to describe all of European descent, no matter their station. This trick was one they had played to manufacture a kind of pan-European unity, which would then create distance between even the poorest of these and the Africans next to whom they toiled. It had begun when those colonists drove indigenous peoples from their land and praised God for the diseases they had carried from England, to which the latter had no immunity.

      The race war had been going on for a long time and had already claimed millions of lives. Most had been people of color, but hundreds of thousands of whites had also perished fighting it. Among them: some in our family. They died fighting to maintain white supremacy and enslavement in the South, or they died fighting to crush the Confederacy and its dreams of a permanent slavocracy. But in both cases, they had died because four score and seven years earlier, their forefathers had failed to end the race war that their forefathers had begun some 140 years before that.

      In other words, by the time she would ask me the question, the race war had been raging for fifteen generations. To ask if and when it might begin was like asking whether winter was on its way, even as the mercury dips to minus-ten and the snow piles up in six-foot drifts. There was no question as to the likelihood of a race war. It had been in full swing for over a century by the time the McLean family (whose reunion we were attending) came to colonial America in 1750. The only issue now was how the war would end. In short, I had some questions of my own.

      Would white folks come to recognize the injustice of the war, and lay down our weapons? Would we decommission our armies of perpetual injustice—from law enforcement officers to corporate executives to teachers to bankers—and insist on finally ensuring the blessings of liberty for all on equal terms? Or would we continue to turn the other way and pretend none of these were implicated in the persistent inequities that all but the immutably obtuse can see? Would we address the legacy of enslavement and segregation or continue denying that these had anything to do with us, even as we have accumulated vast advantages because of them? Most important, would we take personal responsibility for having initiated the conflict? Or would we continue to see the dark-skinned other as the instigator, and only now fret about a race war because we see those others refusing to concede?

      Finished with my reply, I watched as my aunt quickly rose to leave and play bridge. In so doing, she provided me with the answer to my questions—and it had been precisely the answer I expected. Confronted with the bill of particulars and our role in running up the tab, most of us will shrug. It has always been so. So far as I can tell, more than a quarter century later, it still is.

      Over that twenty-six years, much has happened to confirm these suspicions. Yes, the United States elected its first black president, but then followed that up by electing the man who, more than anyone, insisted the black president was not even a real American. The election of Barack Obama, as D.L. Hughley puts it, was like intermission at a Broadway show—a temporary break to let the audience get up, stretch their legs, and then get back to the scripted action. When I was growing up, the Sunday afternoon NFL game on CBS would always bleed over into the six-o’clock hour, which is when 60 Minutes was due to begin.