For the Balkinization Symposium on Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Rebecca E. Zietlow
 
America’s New Racial Battle Lines illustrates the centrality of race to our nation’s politics and identity, so relevant to our present political moment and throughout our nation’s history.  After reading this book, it seems abundantly clear that whenever our country experiences progress and growth in the field of racial justice, that progress is followed by backlash and retrenchment.  
 
Smith and King argue that there are two predominant schools of thought about the role of race in our country today, representing polarized opposite views.  Members of the “Repair” group cite our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other racial injustice.  They seek to repair the damage wrought by that injustice using legal and economic measures.  Repair advocates view themselves as continuing the tradition of the civil rights activists of the 1960s, but taking the fight for racial justice to a deeper level by confronting past injustice.  Opposing this vision, the “Protect” group see the Repair activists as a threat to the fundamental way of life in the United States.  Smith and King argue that the conservative movement in this country, once focused on free market economics has become obsessed with a racial narrative that describes our country as under attack, needing protection from immigrants of color and “woke” activists who criticize our history and tradition. 
 
As a historian of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, I am very familiar with backlash.  Reconstruction marked a highpoint in this nation’s constitutional history.  It was a time when the political will of the nation supported the expansion of individual rights, including racial justice and economic rights.  During Reconstruction, our country amended its constitution to end slavery and constitutionalize individual rights against state infringement for formerly enslaved people and other people in this country.  Union troops occupied the formerly confederate slaves states and protect the right to vote of formerly enslaved people, including the right to vote.  They elected officials, including Black representatives, some who were formerly enslaved, to state and federal government.  Those representatives enacted progressive legislation, including laws establishing minimum wage and maximum hours for workers – laws that helped all workers regardless of race.   In the early years of Reconstruction Congress also considered some land reform measures, which would have authorized the federal government to seize land from former slaveholders and grant that land to the formerly enslaved people who had worked on the land.  Those measures failed, but Congress enacted other laws to protect formerly enslaved people, including civil rights legislation, prohibiting race discrimination in contracts and establishing both criminal and civil remedies when state officials violate federal rights.   
 
During Reconstruction, southern states resisted these efforts.  They formed the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups to terrorizing formerly enslaved people who tried to vote or exercise any rights, championing the “lost cause” narrative which romanticized slavery and the antebellum south and lionized Confederal General Robert E. Lee and his confederate army.  By the mid-1870s, the federal government tired of enforcing the rights of formerly enslaved people – and the Republican party turned its attention to westward expansion and economic development of the country.  In the former slave states, during a time known as the “redemption” era, a system of slavery in all but name developed - convict leasing, sharecropping famers who were essentially indentured servants, and brutal racial segregation in the Jim Crow south.  For almost 100 years, formerly enslaved people and their descendants suffered from the backlash of the Reconstruction Era, without the right to vote, and living in fear of violent retribution if they tried to assert any other rights. 
 
In the mid twentieth century, after World War II, a civil rights movement emerged out of the labor movement.  Civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated for the end of racial segregation and for voting rights of Black people in the south.  This is where the Repair story that Smith and King recount begins.  Responding to the civil rights activists, in what historians refer to as the “Second Reconstruction,” Congress enacted new landmark civil rights laws, banning racial discrimination in employment and public spaces, and establishing meaningful measures protecting the voting rights of Black people throughout the country.  These laws prohibited discrimination and required equal treatment of white people and people of color. 
 
1960s Congressional civil rights measures inspired “massive resistance” in the south, but over time, a consensus developed in this country that treating people equally was okay. –  and indeed, Protect advocates have embraced the narrative of “racial blindness” as their marker of equality.  However Repair activists believe that the history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and brutal racial violence left such a mark on people of color in this country that many people began to believe that the injustice of the past could not be redressed without proactive measures such as affirmative action and even reparations for past harms.  In 2016, the Reverend William Barber II, called for a Third Reconstruction, which would embrace economic empowerment as well as racial justice.  
 
In recent years, advocates of the Repair movement achieved significant visibility, participating in the Black Lives Matter Movement, focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion, and championing reparations for the ancestors of formerly enslaved people and others who have been harmed by systemic racism.  Repair activists highlighted our nation’s history, convinced Congress to adopt Juneteenth – the day in which enslaved people in the state of Texas learned that they had been emancipated, as a national holiday, destroying some confederate statutes and demanding recognition of the history of racial injustice in our country.  “Protect” advocates called these efforts radical and anti-American, and a majority of people in our country seem to agree.  Last month, the “Protect” narrative helped to propel Donald Trump to his presidential victory, and he has promised to dismantle many of the initiatives championed by the Repair movement.
 
Martin Luther King said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” – but in reality, the arc is circular - with every advance, the universe regresses, especially when the advance is progress towards racial justice.  Reading  America’s New Racial Battle Lines helps one to understand where we are today and how we got there.  It is essential reading for understanding not only the backlash, but also how we can move forward into the future.