The Mason-Dixon Line is Now at the Canadian Border

Although in an earlier post (The Hologram of a Republican Party) I argued that media coverage of the Republican primaries were giving us a skewed (and depressing) image of currently prevailing American values, some recent news stories have served to remind us of how it is not just the deep South or the Bible Belt that has a problem with race, science, religion, economics and foreign policy. As NPR reported this morning, large percentages of the American public--from the Candian border to the Rio Grande, can now be counted on, for example, to disbelieve the theory of evolution and the president's affiliation with Christianity. For once smug Northerners, (those perhaps whom Newt Gingrich calls the Northern "elites"), the hard to accept reality is that our problems are at bottom national problems, too widespread to be relegated to a benighted Southland. Let us not forget that the good people of Pennsylvania sent Rick Santorum to the U.S. Senate.

The story that has triggered a good deal of soul-searching about who we are as a people grows out of the killing of a young Black boy, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. When the president went on the record by noting that, if he had a son, his son would likely look just like the boy who was killed, we were guaranteed a tempest. While, on the one hand, the Trayvon Martin incident is an ugly reminder of a period when lynchings were common in the South and Black Codes prevailed, an honest Notherner will also be reminded not just of the controversy surrounding the stop-and-frisk laws being employed in New York City, but also the Sean Bell case or even the incident involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

Unless young people today are fortunate enough to be the recipients of an exceptional education, there are no doubt millions of young Americans who are not just ignorant of what slavery and post-Reconstruction terror under the Black Codes looked like in the South, they will also have no way of knowing that discrimination and terror against Black Americans was not exclusive to the South. And, with regard to more recent history, they will not be aware of the sea change that took place in American politics after the Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s saw the almost overnight abandonment of the South's Democratic Party, (the so-called Dixicrats), with Southern conservatives becoming Republicans, ironically the party of the abolitionists during the Civil War period. Hundreds of American cities were in flames during the "burn, baby, burn" episode of the 1960s. Combined with literally millions of anti-Vietnam war protesters taking to the streets, the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, (the year the world ended), and, twelve years later, the disffiliation of much of the white Northern working class in the Reagan Democrat phenomenon essentially gave us the political landscape in which we now all live.

Prior to the Black liberation movement of the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. had come to be viewed internationally as cousin to the South African apartheid regime. Among the memorable events of 1968 was the issuance of the Kerner Commission report which concluded that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." Although much has changed in the ensuing forty-five years, and the report unsurprisingly generated a lot of conservative opposition, many would argue that even the presence of a Black man in the White House cannot alter the fundamental reality of the U.S. as a deeply divided society. The Mephistophelian bargain struck by the white working class was to forfeit many of the gains it had made in the twentieth century--its union strongholds, its standard of living, its urban life style, and more--for assurances that they would be protected from an expanding Black insurrection or the imposition of a truly integrated society. In this bargain lies the key to the oft-posed question, "Why does the working class so often vote against its own interests?"

Race may not explain everything about American life. It may seem unrelated to foreign policy matters, the military industrial complex or the greed of laissez-faire capitalism that has been given license to indulge itself, but the fact is that the "race card" is still being played, and played quite effectively. It has empowered some of the darkest elements in on the American political landscape, and, for that, it is not just Southerners who are to blame.