Southern
racial moderates during the 1930s vehemently opposed northern and judicial
intervention into the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. The South, the sane voices of the former
Confederacy insisted, should determine the legal processes for determining the
guilt and appropriate sentence for persons of color accused of crimes against
white persons. These processes did not
necessarily include legal representation and certainly did not include
African-Americans as either grand or petit jurors, but they were legal
processes. Southern community leaders were celebrated as racial moderates
because they insisted that persons of color be legally executed only after being
tried and sentenced to death by some “legal” process. They repeatedly denounced the Klan and such
extra-legal processes for dealing with alleged crime as lynching.
President Trump, the Klan, the
alt-right, and the Republican Party won a stunning rhetorical victory yesterday
when the American media and a great many Americans defined racism downwards to
1930 standards. Republicans who tolerate
or support police brutality in African-American communities, horribly
inadequate representation for criminal defendants of color (including lawyers who
fall asleep at trial), substantial underrepresentation of African-Americans on
grand and petit juries, and criminal laws and criminal law enforcement that has
resulted in the imprisonment of a stunning high percentage of African-American
men became racial moderates because they denounced the Klan and overt
expressions of white supremacy.
President Trump’s effort to establish the contemporary American center
as the place between those who celebrate white supremacy and those who protest
white supremacy, an effort reminiscent of those northern Democrats who in the
1850s condemned abolitionists and secessionists with equal scorn, failed. Media reports suggest contemporary racial
moderates are those Republicans who vigorously condemn white supremacy, with
equal vigor condemn any race conscious policy that attempts to improve the
status of persons of color in the United States and neglect, tolerate or support racist policies that do not overtly announce their
white supremacist foundations. A racial
moderate may gut the Voting Rights Act as long as they do not announce they are
doing so to promote the supremacy of the white race.
The events in Charlottesville
provide another demonstration of how Trump derangement syndrome on the left is
providing the foundations for permanent Republican rule from the far
right. By celebrating any member of the
far right who denounces President Trump and the alt-right, Trump derangement
syndrome further serves to normalize the far right in the name of not normalizing
the alt-right. White supremacists may
have lost a few Confederate monuments yesterday, but they continue to enjoy
great success in their efforts to move Americans back to a modified version
of 1930 racial politics when the Klan represented the right, everyone who insisted
on greater racial equal was a racial agitator on the left, and the comfortable
middle consisted of a racial status quo in which whites enjoyed a grossly
disproportionate share of the benefits of American life while persons of color experienced as
grossly a disproportionate share of the burdens.