Plus ça change

Guest Blogger

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).

Corey Robin

In 2010, Rogers Smith and Desmond King argue, America left behind the struggle between conservative color-blindness and liberal race-consciousness that had dominated race politics since the 1960s. Instead of color blindness and meritocracy, the right now seeks to openly protect white, Christian men from liberalism and to advance white Christian nationalism. Liberals no longer settle for race-conscious policies, as they had since the 1960s. They have adopted a more ambitious program of reparations. Both sides have mounted new alliances and networks and pushed new tropes and ideas. Smith and King call the right’s project Protect and the left’s project Repair. Both Protect and Repair have a foothold in some part of the state, each seeking to impose a new policy regime upon the rest of the state and society. 

My first question is whether this battle between Protect and Repair constitutes a new era in American racial politics. Like all historically minded scholars, Smith and King are aware that any historical moment entails elements of continuity and change (17, 20, 74). Even in an era of change, we should expect to find some continuity. Yet the evidence of continuity that Smith and King do and do not acknowledge makes me skeptical of their claim of a break.

The problem arises immediately with Smith and King’s distinction between a program of protecting white victims and the pursuit of color-blindness. This distinction lies at the heart of their claim for the rise of a new racial order (4, 12, 31, 70, 75, 116). Since the 1960s, however, white victimhood has been part of the grammar of color-blindness; it’s hard to conceive of a demand for color-blindness, on the right, without an attendant complaint of white grievance. Judge Robert Bork decried the “sacrifice” of white victims on the altar of affirmative action. Justice Antonin Scalia had an even more specific victim in mind: the “Polish factory worker’s kid.” Running for reelection against Harvey Gant, the Black mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, Republican senator Jesse Helms turned the claim of white victimhood into one of the most searing images (“the white hands”) of the age. Maybe the reason conservatives tell Smith and King that their complaints date back to the 1960s—when, those conservatives claim, the left gave up color-blindness for race-consciousness—is that they are simply repeating the complaints of conservatives since the 1960s (98, 103, 135).

Smith and King might respond that the difference today is that the right actively seeks to protect those putative white victims. Yet they also admit that color blindness “worked to protect the advantages possessed by, especially, more affluent whites” and that “protection was always the strongest motive for [conservative] support of color-blind policies” (75; also see 70). What’s changed then? Smith and King might say that color-blindness no longer works, as policy, to protect the accumulated advantages of white Americans (though resegregation and the increase in the racial wealth and income gaps, which Smith and King acknowledge, suggest otherwise). If that is the claim, it would be good to understand how and why color-blindness no longer works.

Or perhaps Smith and King would say that color-blindness no longer works politically for the right, which is why affirmations of white protection have gone from dog whistles to roaring cries (79). Yet the evidence they mention often points in the opposite direction. Throughout their book, Smith and King cite multiple incidents of conservatives’ repudiating affirmative statements of white nationalism (80, 118, 120) or simply avoiding them: “Unsurprisingly,” they write, “few [conservative] organizations announce their goals explicitly in terms of protecting white Americans” (84). Why, if the era of dog whistles is over, is that unsurprising? Given everything they say, what is surprising is that of the six possible scenarios they envision at the end of their book, the most likely one, they think, is the victory of a “multicultural protectionist conservatism” (284), whose “core message” would be “a valorization of America’s exceptional inclusiveness” (286). If that is the most likely scenario, how do we square its likelihood with Smith and King’s claims for the collapse of color-blindness and the rise of white protection?

As we move from words to deeds, the picture looks murkier. Smith and King cite multiple pieces of evidence for the rise of a new Protect racial order. While some of these pieces point to new developments, others signal continuity. Smith and King cite, for example, the support for Trump from the KKK’s successors, who claim that the “success of the Trump campaign proves that our views resonate with millions” (113). In 1984, the KKK endorsed Reagan, claiming that the GOP platform was “pure Klan” because it opposed busing and affirmative action. Smith and King cite Trump’s first Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ history of defending, as Alabama’s attorney general, de jure segregation in the state. George W. Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, had an equally vicious record as attorney general and governor of Missouri, leading one campaign after another against desegregation. UCLA scholar Gary Orfield described Ashcroft as the most intransigent of all the state officials he ever encountered in more than thirty cases of federal litigation, while civil rights leader Ralph Neas compared Ashcroft’s tactics to “the massive resistance employed by virulent segregationists during the early days of the civil rights movement.” Perhaps the main difference in their appointments is that eight Democrats voted for Ashcroft while only one (Joe Manchin) voted for Sessions.

Smith and King do yeoman’s work in Table 5.1, which compiles all of “Trump’s Protect Policies.” Yet not all the 61 items in the table are policies (some are proposals). Nor can all of them be characterized as Protect (e.g., signing Democratic legislation to reduce mass incarceration or increasing funding for HBCUs). Some items on the table, moreover, were rebuffed by elements of the Protect alliance. As Smith and King acknowledge (129; also see 116, 135-136), Trump vetoed bipartisan legislation to rename military bases named for Confederate leaders, but Congress overrode the veto. More remarkable is that 40 Senate and 109 House Republicans voted to override; only 7 GOP senators and 66 representatives supported Trump. Items on Table 5.1 are also consistent with the pre-Protect policies of Bush (e.g., before Trump filed suit against Harvard’s affirmative action policies, Bush filed suit against the University of Michigan’s; before Trump opposed trans equality in the workplace, Bush opposed gay equality in the workplace; Bush also privileged religious freedom over civil rights, claiming that religious groups were most in need of civil rights protections).

The point is not that Smith and King fail to provide evidence for the rise of a Protect order but that some of the evidence they cite (it’s difficult to assess how much without a complete examination) points the other way. And while any claim for historical change will come up against evidence of continuity, Smith and King could be more assiduous in sifting through the evidence they do cite, as well as that which they don’t, to help us assess their claim. Some part of that sifting will raise the question of significance. It could be that the countervailing evidence I’ve cited pales in comparison to Trump’s impact on immigration, making a radically constricted immigration regime the “cornerstone” of a new racial order, along the lines of 1924. But making such an argument requires bracketing the many elements of the Protect alliance that are continuous with the older conservative order. Bracketing may make for a smaller body of evidence, but it’s critical to Smith and King’s case. 

My second question concerns the “orderness” of this new Protect order. Smith and King distinguish between policy alliances, policy regimes, and institutional orders. While they insist that Protect is not simply a policy alliance or regime but an institutional order, they acknowledge historical moments when alliances are “too disempowered to be called ‘institutional orders,’ even though some have succeeded in gaining control of governing institutions” (35). Are we at such a moment? Two pieces of evidence suggest we may be.

First, as Smith and King argue, Trump has pursued the Protect agenda through his appointment of officials and judges and executive orders (125). While judicial appointments are for life, executive appointments and orders are temporary. Many of Trump’s executive orders overturned Obama’s, while many of Trump’s have been overturned by Biden. Executive orders and appointments are part of the presidential repertoire of power, but it’s striking how much Trump had to rely upon them, to the exclusion of legislation. Smith and King compare the politics of racial contestation to a spiraling pendulum, where every few swings of reform and reaction take place not “on the same horizontal plane” but on a new, higher or lower, plane (8). That describes the transition from enslavement to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights era. But so much of the contestation since 2016, at least at the federal level, has involved a back-and-forth on the same plane that it suggests less the move to a new order than stasis.

Second, despite the contestation, Smith and King rightly insist that in any racial order we see “predominant patterns that have prevailed across many policy regimes and in many sectors of social life” (277). A racial order does not merely control a government institution; it “authoritatively order[s] citizens’ conduct” (8). If we take voting as one domain of the new Protect order, which Smith and King do, we see a striking failure to prevail and order citizens’ conduct. Despite decades of Republican effort to restrict voting, voting rates in 2020 were the highest they’ve been in a century. Latino turnout rates were higher than ever. Black turnout rates were higher than in any election other than when Obama was on the ticket. This does not diminish the Right’s aim to restrict voting. It suggests instead that critical elements of a new order—predominance, prevailing, and controlling citizen conduct—are not yet present. 

If this new Protect order is not quite an order, we’re faced with the question of why. That leads to my last observation. The racial battles and orders of American history that Smith and King cite—enslavement versus emancipation, de jure segregation versus integration, de facto segregation and discrimination versus race-consciousness—involved central questions of the economy. Every battle broached critical issues of property and ownership, workplace control, housing and schooling—not just in a few elite sectors or regions but across the entire American economy. No question of race failed to touch the economy; every cultural question was a material question.

One of Smith and King’s most fascinating findings is how small a role the economy plays on both sides of the Protect/Repair divide. Corporations and rich people heavily invest in both sides (30, 57, 257, 259). The most radical Repair proposals do not address basic issues of distribution and ownership (60, 257). Whatever the right may say about the left, Smith and King are careful to point out that conservatives “who advance this story of how America has gone wrong do not see the Left as currently prioritizing any deeply threatening economic agenda” (100). Seeing no economic threat from the Left, seeing the racial wealth and income gaps and segregation rates growing, the right can remain comfortably, if maniacally, focused on “recapturing control of America’s cultural institutions” (100).

While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, and alliances suffice. Without an economic or material challenge—along the lines of the battle against slavery, de jure, and de facto segregation—the battle over racial politics will continue to be fought, more or less, as it has been fought for the last several decades. 

Corey Robin (corey.robin@gmail.com) is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and a proud former student of Rogers Smith.