Chapter 1
James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the 1965 Cambridge Debate
It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.… Autonomy is freedom and translates into the much championed and revered “individualism”; newness translates into “innocence”; distinctiveness becomes difference and the erection of strategies for maintaining it; authority and absolute power become a romantic, conquering “heroism,” virility, and the problematic of wielding absolute power over the lives of others. All the rest are made possible by this last, it would seem—absolute power called forth and played against and within a natural and mental landscape conceived of as a “raw, half-savage world.”
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (1992)
What one needs to consider is the individual who stands to suffer.
—William F. Buckley Jr., “Pro-Negro Discrimination Encouraged” (1968)
The nation’s dual origins in slavery and freedom imbued modern conservatives with a deep sense of cultural authenticity, and northerners and southerners alike held fast against the quest for inclusion. They saw no contradiction between claiming to stand for liberty and opposing the black freedom movement because they revered a tradition that silenced and subordinated blacks.
—Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough (2006)
Nineteen sixty-five materialized as another year promising the continued economic growth of the preceding two decades. By then, the postwar Keynesian mixed-economy consensus—the set of welfare state policies developed out of the 1930s New Deal—had become the dominant economic and political norm for the nation.1 Historian Kim Phillips-Fein asserts, “On the national level, the spring of 1965 was a high-water point for liberalism.”2 Indeed, as James T. Patterson described the year, “No people in the modern history of the world had had it so good.”3 Smoldering beneath these positive economic signs, however, was a range of discontent as African Americans and other people of color continued to navigate the restrictions and state-sanctioned violence defining Jim Crow America. Meanwhile, white America confronted the uneasy prospect of legislated social equality with the very targets of their Jim Crow America.
The title of Patterson’s book, The Eve of Destruction—named after the folk-rock tune “Eve of Destruction,” by Barry McGuire—aptly describes the cresting tidal wave about to flood through American society in 1965. Various flash points interrupted the celebrations of the good life anchoring the largely white suburban American dream: the assassination of Malcolm X in February, the violent setbacks for the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama, in March (coinciding with the official invasion of Vietnam in the same month), and the Watts uprising in August just days after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Caught in both an inherited and self-made tragedy, the U.S. public at the very height of postwar prosperity continued to walk through a fog of exceptional innocence, failing to take responsibility and account for the racial antagonism sustaining an American dream atop anti-Black sentiments and institutions inherited from the days of slavery.4 The material space in which to enact these dreams, of course, evolved through centuries of displacement of Indigenous peoples and Mexicans via settler colonial policies.5 The reenactments of these historical processes of displacement and enslavement—generally framed as heroic white masculine deeds—found warm reception from radio, film, and television consumers across the nation, creating an imagined history where the violence of invasion was converted into the innocence of settlement, free from the wanton greed and hatred demanded to secure white American freedom and liberty across North America. These accumulated debts of history, however, appeared to come due in 1965.
The relationships between white America, material well-being, and a normalized oppressive society protecting this dream had found regeneration across the centuries. The ideas woven through settler colonialism and slavery and its aftermath rhetorically supported a sense of white innocence obscuring the legacy of violent racial antagonism defining American identity. Patricia Nelson Limerick charts how innocence was imagined via westward expansion, writing, “The dominant motive for moving West was improvement and opportunity, not injury to others. Even when they were trespassers, westering Americans were hardly, in their own eyes, criminals; rather, they were pioneers. The ends abundantly justified the means; personal interest in the acquisition of territory, and those interests overlapped in turn with the mission to extend the domain of Christian civilization. Innocence of intention placed the course of events in a bright and positive light; only over time would the shadows compete for our attention.”6 This identity of free, autonomous whiteness juxtaposed itself against unfree, enslaved Blackness, naturalizing ideas of “difference and the erection of strategies for maintaining it,” as Morrison notes.7 These ever-evolving centuries-old practices define an important part of the identity of American whiteness.8 During the postwar years, welfare state policies reimagined this identity through federal intervention subsidizing white suburbanization and economic opportunities aimed toward white males (using the gendered language of the “family wage”).9 By the end of 1965, it was increasingly obvious that the deep currents of institutional, anti-Black racism interlaced into the framework of the welfare state and the postwar American dream clearly needed more than legislation to remediate the structural second-class citizenry of African Americans and other people of color in the United States.
One of the period’s leading critics connecting the American dream to the nation’s legacy of anti-Blackness was the African American author James Baldwin. Baldwin’s systemic critique of the relationship between racial oppression and economics appeared in full force through his nonfiction writings between the 1950s and 1980s. He summarized the entanglement of culture and economics in his 1971 dialogue with poet Nikki Giovanni:
It’s very hard to recognize that the standards which have almost killed you are really mercantile standards. They’re based on cotton; they’re based on oil; they’re based on peanuts; they’re based on profits.… Because, you see, the reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black. They think it’s important to be white because white means you are civilized, and being black means you are not civilized.… What I’m trying to get at is my apprehension of the crisis of this age. The crisis has something to do with identity, and that has something to do with buried history.… People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity.10
As an outgrowth of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness evolved through the twin dynamics of economics and culture, with the concepts and policies of slavery and freedom generating a sense of value in both human worth as well as profits (whether the value of the enslaved, or the value of the product produced by the enslaved).11 As Jared Sexton writes, “If, in the economy of race, whiteness is a form of money—the general equivalent or universal standard value—then blackness is its gold standard, the bottom-line guarantee represented by hard currency.”12 Marked socially dead from the initiation of the United States of America, Black people were envisioned as noncitizens from the start—from the 1790 Naturalization Act to the Dred Scott decision in 1857 to the foundation of the Jim Crow welfare state: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).13 Slavery provided the labor demanded for sustaining European transnational enterprises, while the slaves themselves were converted into exchangeable currency and measurements of wealth: Black enslaved bodies were worth $3.5 billion in 1860, “making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”14 In short, social death for Blacks equaled massive wealth for white America later to be translated into the terrorism of “racial domination” marked by lynching and the rise of crime statistics justifying the criminalization of Blackness.15 In the mid-1960s, a yawning gulf appeared through the celebrations of civil rights legislation, blatantly exposing the institutional racism hardwired into the very fabric of the infrastructure supporting the American dream. In response, the “buried history” long celebrated by white Americans in their popular media burst forth to defend the racial calculus still intertwined in the socioeconomic structures of U.S. society at the dawn of legislated social equality. The second Reconstruction had reached its bottleneck, as the crisis of identity—wrapped in the old spectral identities haunting American history—found renewed life amid the historic deviation from Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson. Baldwin confronted this shift head-on in 1965 when he debated William F. Buckley Jr., one of the major architects of the New Right and an important figure helping to shape the culture of neoliberalism.16
This chapter situates the 1965 debate as a crucial moment of dialogue reflecting the long-term contradictions of American society, as well as a preview of how the United States would address racial inequality as civil rights legislation reformed—or deregulated, to use the language of neoliberalism—the legal framework of Jim Crow. On one end, a man of Irish descent and the era’s conservative standard bearer who steadfastly stood “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so” during an era of civil rights activism.17 On the other end, a descendent of formerly enslaved peoples who pressed his pen into service on behalf of the era’s civil rights movement. Performing in the nation (England) that coordinated the destinies of both men’s ancestors, Baldwin and Buckley operated as vessels of the larger historical conjuncture spanning the 1960s and 1980s.
Sponsored by the Cambridge Union Society, Baldwin’s debate with Buckley on February 18, 1965, in England represented an important signpost reflecting the evolution of the ongoing American paradox of slavery and freedom 100 years after emancipation. The debate topic asked: “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?”18 With two Cambridge students debating the two sides and an audience of over 700 students filling the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, the event touched on the core cultural intricacies of racial inequality, the history of the African American experience, and the intersection of these processes with American capitalism.19 The program’s host, Norman St. John-Stevas, MP, described the momentous event, exclaiming, “Hundreds of undergraduates and myself, waiting for what could prove one of the most exciting debates in the whole 150 years of the Union history.… I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Union so well attended. There are undergraduates everywhere; they’re on the benches, they’re on the floor, they’re in the galleries. And there are a lot more outside, clamoring to get in.”
An excitement resounded through the Cambridge campus as one descendant of European ancestry and one descendent of African ancestry debated the legacies of slavery and its connection to economic opportunity within England’s former settler colony, the United States. Taped by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and later broadcasted by the National Educational Television Network (the precursor to Public Broadcasting System), the setting was visibly claustrophobic, with a sea of students filling the television screen.20 The debate’s relevancy, in hindsight, signaled an important cultural shift stirring through American society in the mid-1960s. Marking the beginning of the end for institutional American racial reform, 1965 witnessed the initiation of significant challenges against the further erosion of institutional racism that had become the focus of the Black freedom struggle.21
Throughout the debate, the long shadow of slavery and its ideas of anti-Blackness pressed heavily on Baldwin’s and Buckley’s arguments, as their performances in front of the Cambridge crowd represented the oppositional dialogue defining the post-1960s conservative culture wars. Baldwin’s critique of the American dream implicitly utilized the centuries-old Black radical tradition in his interrogation of the ideas, policies, and material outcomes of anti-Blackness rooted in the Atlantic slave system.22 In his defense of the American dream, Buckley evoked a deep reservoir of language and knowledge rooted in the maintenance—the conserving element of “conservatism”—of the racial hierarchical system of order in the nation’s institutions.23 Both in their early forties, Baldwin and Buckley represented two different intellectual poles in 1960s America, as well as two distinct understandings of history.
Buckley, born into the white conservative Catholic family of an oil baron and lawyer, schooled in France and England, and later married to the daughter of a Canadian industrialist, developed the intellectual framework for the resurgence of conservatism with the establishment of the National Review in 1955 and later his television talk show, Firing Line (first airing in 1966).24 Buckley was critical in bringing together the three major strands of the New Right: religious conservatism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism.25 Buckley’s patient persistence helped navigate the culture of capitalism away from the dominant set of ideas instilled by the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar Keynesian economics up through the 1960s. Rather than social welfare, Buckley’s libertarian conservatism reimagined President Herbert Hoover’s idea of a rugged individualism at odds with government intervention—ranging from low taxes to a renewal of state’s rights regarding social relations. Moreover, Buckley’s notion of individualism found root in what Nicholas Buccola calls inegalitarian libertarianism, a notion of freedom where “only some people were sufficiently ‘advanced’ to be free.”26 For Buckley, the attention toward an imagined individualism wrapped in an “inegalitarian libertarianism” helped deflect the collective power white men wielded for centuries, which disavowed the white male monopoly on political, economic, and social power that culturally and legally justified the exclusion of women and people of color. Historically, this sense of individualism sheltered the white nationalist collective nature of American society from charges of constitutional hypocrisy. Consequently, the idea of “human rights” arising out of the experience of World War II appeared antithetical to conservatives, as they understood the concept’s potential to dismantle the second-class citizenship of people of color—or even justify the welfare state. Conservatives, on the other hand, embraced the color-blind notion of “individual rights.”27 This sentiment, of course, harmonized with the massive resistance of segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s who claimed federal intervention interfered with one’s individual right to decide whom they wanted to associate with. Sensing an ideological partnership, Buckley not only hired one of the segregationist movement’s greatest defenders (James J. Kilpatrick), but the father of modern conservatism also vehemently defended Southern segregation in his National Review and in other media outlets.28
Buckley and the segregationists’ embrace of “individual” rights without mention of race—in short, color-blind language—represented one of the vital pillars of neoliberalism.29 The embrace of color-blind individualism at the precise moment when the white nationalist structures of the nation confronted legislative censure provided a key anchor for the conjuncture leading to neoliberalism. In a rhetorical shift, the long-collective nature of white superiority dissolved into a pure individualism, shaking loose the “buried history” haunting the longue durée legacies of freedom and slavery as the language conserving hierarchies adapted to the new political context. Morrison, again, offers insight into the contradictions surrounding a rugged individualist American identity anchored to “inegalitarian libertarianism,” writing “Autonomy is freedom and translates into the much championed and revered ‘individualism.’ ”30 White men (especially, white men with property) had always embodied autonomy within the American historical context—freedom of movement, speech, and access to institutions—out of which emerged an existential and material state of individual freedom perceived as a given norm—including the freedom to discriminate. Considering federal action on civil rights to be unconstitutional social engineering and an undermining of preexisting racial hierarchies, the conservative embrace of color blindness regenerated the reverence for individualism—with the racial and gendered discrimination squeezed out of the historical record as if it never happened. In the new world of color-blind individualism, there were no groups of people, only “individuals” abstractly isolated from the inherited legacies of racism and sexism. Through this imagining of the individual, innocence found regeneration—it was “born again,” alongside the myth of rugged individualism—despite a catalogue of oppression. Meanwhile, the embedded ideas and material outcomes of settler colonialism and slavery would continue to inform American society. As white supremacy fell to social justice legislation, Buckley and his segregationist allies in the South began stressing this individual freedom just as the door of the welfare state opened for people of color and women. A post–civil rights world took shape: the welfare state, no longer exclusive to white males, was reimagined as a handout to those who just recently gained access. Now repelled by the economic system responsible for the postwar prosperity, discontented whites looked favorably upon the ideas of neoliberalism, its racial ideology of color blindness, and its reforming of American anti-Blackness through the language of “culture” and “individual responsibility.”
As a best-selling novelist and essayist, Baldwin grew up poor in Harlem, eventually leaving the country to live and write in Europe.31 As he gained international recognition from a series of novels and collections of essays, the civil rights movement pulled Baldwin back to the United States in 1957, where he quickly became a sought-after spokesman for the civil rights movement. A central Black intellectual of the time, Baldwin’s rhetoric combined his working-class, Christian background from Harlem with his ability to “speak the language of the white intelligentsia.”32 In a series of nonfiction works, Baldwin’s critiques during these years provided a counter to both the mainstream views of the civil rights movement as well as what would become Black Power. As an exemplar of the Black radical tradition, Baldwin’s critique contributed to the centuries-old tradition of resistance against racial antagonism by people of African descent in the New World. Exploding to life with the first group of enslaved Africans brought to the New World, Cedric Robinson describes the Black radical tradition as “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation.”33 A genealogy of resistance rooted in slavery and maroon communities, and later post-emancipation forms of de jure and de facto segregation, informed this evolving tradition as it adapted to the changing process of racist oppression rooted in settler colonialism and slavery.34 We see this tradition’s presence in the thoughts of Benjamin Franklin, who voiced the blueprint of the soon-to-be republic when he asserted, “Every slave might be reckoned a domestic enemy.”35 Within a global sense, the enslaved as insurgent to European expansion formed the core of Paul Gilroy’s counterculture of modernity.36 Baldwin’s rhetoric and oratory built off these centuries-old traditions, blending “the hope of Martin Luther King, Jr.” with “the threat of Malcolm X.”37 In the 1960s, Baldwin increasingly brought arguments rooted in economics into his arguments.38
The Baldwin-Buckley debate represents an early glimpse of the dynamics shaping the historical conjuncture in which neoliberalism took root in the American political economy: the culture war between the demands of civil rights social justice movements and the so-called white backlash or states’ rights advocates who bristled against anti-racist federal intervention.39 The phrase white backlash too narrowly frames the historical ramifications of the era, as the concept obscures the deep contours of an American identity rooted in racism. In short, it implies a Black provocation against a white presence innocent of past and present crimes of racial antagonism and institutional discrimination, obscuring the fact that for many white Americans, especially white men, civil rights legislation represented a loss of centuries-old rights and entitlements over historically marginalized peoples as the new laws dismantled the restrictions on opportunity for women, African Americans, and other people of color. An epochal existential crisis of identity unfolded as this deregulation of hierarchies included a loss of normalized employment discrimination, whites-only housing (in the North and South), access to credit, voting, sitting on juries, and the cultural loss of deference to white male authority.
Unsurprisingly, this upsetting of deep hierarchies alarmed conservatives. In 1954, conservative intellectual Russell Kirk asserted, “What really matters is that we should accept the station to which ‘a divine tactic’ has appointed us with humility and a sense of consecration.”40 This cultural viewpoint mobilized various levels of “higher authority,” from God (“a divine tactic”), to notions of Western civilization in its imagining of order. The defense of Western civilization became a core element of the conservative movement and especially the circle of intellectuals Buckley recruited for the National Review.41 James Kilpatrick, a contributing editor to the National Review, echoed these sentiments in a 1963 essay arguing that social equality between white and Black was anti-American: “This precious right to discriminate underlies our entire political and economic system.”42 The proudly white supremacist essay—titled, “The Hell He Is Equal”—was held back by the Saturday Evening Post after the white nationalist terrorist bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four African American girls: Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14).43 Through today, however, cultural war debates against the claims of social justice activists continue to evoke—indeed demand—an innocence toward the history of racial and sexual antagonisms, both disavowing the past and placing an emphasis on individuals rather than groups. Buckley made this clear in his attack on affirmative action in the late 1960s: “What one needs to consider is the individual who stands to suffer.”44 His assertion, of course, dismisses the collective nature of white supremacy’s privileging of white males at the exclusion of African Americans. Moreover, in the wake of civil rights legislation, Buckley insists that it would be unfair to have legislation helping historically marginalized groups if this meant interfering with individual rights. This denial of historical context would incessantly haunt the culture war arguments of conservatives for years to come.
The Cambridge debate between Baldwin and Buckley underscores the two very different sets of language and knowledge anchoring the culture war. Mobilized in reaction to the demands of the civil rights movement, an ethos of anti-Black antagonisms outlines the historical experience of people of European descent in the United States, a state of being defining the overall post-1400s European encounters with the New World where the identity of whiteness, the West, or Western civilization found its binary in the Other, the enslaved, the Alien, the savage, the heathen, the Black.45 The dominant American attitude constructed through the processes of modernity—including the Atlantic slave system, settler colonialism, and patriarchy—shaped a vision of the world translating the violence required to ethnically cleanse Native Americans from their land, enslave people of African descent, and objectify women as property of men into a system experienced as a naturally ordered and righteous (Western) civilization led by white men. The notion of civilization, as many have noted, melded together the idea of “progress” into a culture emanating from these experiences and structures that helped Americans navigate and define their history and identity.46
The Baldwin-Buckley debate provides a snapshot of the contestation of the culture war ideals, with the historical moment weaving a systemic tapestry outlining the relationship of power to language and the “possession of history.”47 While Buckley’s ethos possessed the “progress”-laden language and history of Western civilization to defend his argument, Baldwin’s approach, on the contrary, foregrounded the Black radical tradition’s subaltern position of the enslaved, the oppressed peoples written out of history. This confrontation between systems of knowledge born out of the longue durée processes of settler colonialism and slavery represent the stakes of the 1965 debate at Cambridge, let alone the anchoring precepts of the post-1960s culture war and its struggle over “buried history” and its crisis of identity.48 Critical to this culture war struggle was the possession of the meanings of history.
Framing of Debate through the Possession of History
Commenting in the last decade of his life on the nature of history, Baldwin discussed the inability of people trying to escape “history and the effects of history”:49
I have been living with those questions for a long time. You see, the trouble I am having right now is with the word itself. History means one thing in a European head. It actually means something else in an American head, and yet again something else in a black man’s head. To leave it at that is enough for openness. I am not sure any longer what the word means. Especially as the white world now is calling on what it calls history to justify its dilemma without having the remotest sense of how they got to where they are.… Because if history means something, it means that you have learned something from it. If you haven’t then the word has got to be changed. History in England, or France, or Germany, or indeed in Europe is now meant as an enormous cloak to cover past crimes and errors and present danger and despair. In short, it has become a useless concept. Except that it can be used as a stick to beat the people without history, like myself, over the head. That worked as long as I believed that you had history and I did not. And now that it is clear that that is not so, another kind of dilemma, another kind of confrontation, begins. Perhaps history has got to be born for the first time. It is certainly true that all the identities coming out of history with a capital H are proven to be false, to be bankrupt.… And in terms of America, the Americans are even more abject than the Europeans who are stifling among their artefacts, their icons, which they call history. The Americans have never even heard of history, they still believe that legend created about the Far West, and cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, and black and white, and good and evil.… If the Europeans are afflicted by history, Americans are afflicted by innocence.50
When Baldwin reflected on the inability to escape history and its effects, he identified an important component of the post–civil rights–era culture war: analyzing the present and past from within the language and knowledge inherited from years of oppression. Baldwin points to this bottleneck as an impediment toward articulating and reconciling the crimes of the past and their bearing on the present: one needed power over controlling the circulation of knowledge, which, in turn, determined the boundaries of debate. Like the walls of a frontier outpost, these boundaries of debate protected the sense of innocence veiling the coercive nature of American westward expansion and the atrocities of slavery and the maintenance of Jim Crow.51 For Baldwin, this possession of history allowed a sort of cognitive dissonance to call on an established history justifying one’s contemporary sets of systems, structures, and institutions, while simultaneously disavowing the material outcomes produced through these very systems, structures, and institutions. The result, of course, was a version of nationalist myth: “the white world now is calling on what it calls history to justify its dilemma without having the remotest sense of how they got to where they are.” This knowledge and language of an exceptional American past is a significant element in national identity. As Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny note, “This reservoir of cultural meanings” is “at the heart of the process of building the nation. A common memory of belonging, borne by habits, customs, dialects, song, dance, pastimes, shared geography, superstition, and so on, but also fears, anxieties, antipathies, hurts, resentments, is the indistinct but indispensable condition of possibility. For nationalism to do its work, ordinary people need to see themselves as the bearers of an identity centered elsewhere, imagine themselves as an abstract community.”52 For Americans, this possession of history found expression through the legacy of slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath, the success of settler colonialism and westward expansion, and the patriarchal normalcy guiding relationships between men and women. Tom Engelhardt suggests that this desperate need to foster a “victory culture” stemmed from the settler colonial experience: “It was important that the arrival of the Europeans be a matter of ‘settlement’ not ‘invasion,’ and the move across the continent ‘expansion’ not ‘conquest.’ ”53 It was critical for the land to be imagined as unoccupied, empty of people, where the mythical idea of Manifest Destiny and rugged individualist settlers merely struggled against the elements—with Native Americans and the environment becoming one and the same. The real struggle over the possession of history, of course, rested in debates among the white settlers: “this was history as a success story, an ennobling tale of the growth of a powerhouse of goods and ideas, a land of natural abundance open to the emigration of ‘free men’ everywhere.”54 Americans consumed and celebrated this imagined past through cultural avenues such as historical textbooks, captivity narratives, popular media, and national holidays, all of which draped (as Baldwin suggested) an “enormous cloak … cover[ing] past crimes and errors and present danger and despair.”55
An example of confronting this possession of history includes W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction of America (1935), a work that condemned the history profession for its “propaganda” in retelling the history of Reconstruction. Du Bois takes aim at the rhetorical strategy designed to protect American innocence: “Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center.”56 Underlining the embeddedness of this historical innocence, up through the twenty-first century conservatives continued to “set out to ‘strike a fair balance’ on slavery by recognizing the ‘benefits’ blacks gained from it and the ‘substantial advantages’ they enjoyed as a result.”57 This possession of history long circulated through public education history books, most recently on egregious display in debates surrounding 2015 Texas high school textbooks.58 Innocence demands constant maintenance to shore up its naturalness as it struggles for an identity beyond the shadow cast by crimes against humanity.
Consequently, the power to frame the debate, to possess history, is the ability to silence history that reflects an inconvenience to a traditional narrative shaping contemporary politics. In times of crisis, there is the necessity for the maintenance of this constructed past in which to shed light on contemporary policies aimed toward discrediting oppressed people’s claims in the present (one of the primary functions of the Black radical tradition has been to reclaim this silenced past). This struggle between forgetting and remembering becomes especially relevant, as Baldwin notes above, when one is constantly beaten over the head by the very forces of institutionally remembered history. Forgetting or remembering help buttress contemporary rhetoric and policies, ultimately providing justification for material or economic processes while cultivating and renewing methods of oppression and privilege. Historically, violent oppression allows for the disciplining of this knowledge, leading to the ability to frame both contemporary reality and the historical record. This violence performs a “function,” whereby acts coated with rhetoric subsume violence into prerequisite norms determining the manner different groups interact historically.59 A few questions arise from this situation: when a relationship founded on violent antagonism is reformed by legislation, how does the oppressor reconcile their ostensible of loss of engaging in unencumbered violence toward those who helped shape—through violence—the very identity of the oppressor? What happens when historically marginalized people begin speaking out of turn, and refuse to defer; or what happens when the acts and language of African Americans fail to acquiesce to the controlling images of, for example, the Sambo, an image white Americans have trafficked in and revered since the antebellum era? As Baldwin asserted in his classic The Devil Finds Work, “That victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat. The victim’s testimony must, therefore, be altered.”60 As the victim becomes a threat, and attempts to present a counternarrative, a struggle over the possession of history ensues.
The power to dominate generally favors those with a recognized history, literally establishing a rhetorical legitimacy structuring the violent antagonisms toward those, as Baldwin asserts, “without history.”61 In his exploration of the history of capitalism, Fernand Braudel notes this power dynamic in explaining the perceived “superiority” of European markets versus other “populated regions of the world”: “There is for one thing a “historiographical” inequality between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe invented historians and then made good use of them. Her own history is well-lit, and can be called as evidence or used as a claim. The history of non-Europe is still being written. And until the balance of knowledge and interpretation has been restored, the historian will be reluctant to cut the Gordian knot of world history—that is the origin of the superiority of Europe.”62 Although written through a Eurocentric lens—the rest of the world did have history—Braudel’s observations may also be read as an earnest assessment of the unequal dynamic between those “with history” and those “without history.” His admission of the power of a Eurocentric-historical methodology is correct in how it marginalizes non-European history as existing outside the acceptable boundaries of European-approved knowledge—and thus enjoys limited power for mobilization in the present to confront ongoing social justice issues. Hardly a controversial observation, the very contours of historical methodology and its truth-making ability developed during the era of imperialism and, for American historians, the final years of the centuries-old war against North American Indigenous peoples and the evolution of Jim Crow segregation in the late 1800s (Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America also highlights this).63 Institutionalized by the twentieth century, the silences haunting history become weapons for the powerful against the politically weak and historically marginalized.64
Remembering particular stories about the past, then, rhetorically extends the past into the present, shifting memories and impulses into conceptual, historically vindicated relationships within the current moment. As Morrison asserts, an American self is “not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”65 Consequently, traditional U.S. history operates through the recurring trope of innocence in its narrative defining the American identity as one of defending itself after an unprovoked, sudden ambush (e.g., the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor), with this identity wrapped in a thin shroud isolating innocence from the bloodied layers of crimes against humanity related to settler colonialism and slavery.66 This well-worn innocence proved crucial for navigating the policies of neoliberalism into place as the conservative culture war struggled against the victims of the American dream in the 1950s and 1960s.
A certain level of performance is needed to profess innocence in the face of a well-documented history of brutal racial antagonism. Paraphrasing William Faulkner, Baldwin once asserted, “History is not the past, it’s the present. One may even make an argument, in a couple of more weeks, that history is never the past, that everyone is always acting out history.”67 Baldwin suggests here that real history is performed every day by people who act out their historically inherited patterns of relations. We might call these performances “historical projections,” the rhetorical deployment of possessed history. Here, conglomerated layers of inherited rhetoric, discourse, ideology, gestures, ontology, and the results of material power are summoned and regulated through one’s positionality in society. More precisely, these interactions reflect Baldwin’s concept of the balance of power between those possessing history and those supposedly lacking history. Historical projections in practice help facilitate the dominant common sense and historical calculation directing society’s traffic through well-rehearsed paths justified with the aid of familiar stories of a prejudice either normalized or disavowed. Performance and adherence to these constructed traditions in everyday life culturally link the past to the present, with conflicts arising when an act of remembering challenges the dominant narrative of the past and present—a disruption creating noise. This memory trespass represents Baldwin’s idea about the victim articulating their situation as the victim, including the outcome resulting in the containment of that noise from those seeking to conserve existing power relations. These conflict sites are the spaces of culture wars, where trespasses of unequal relationships are policed.
These culture war struggles over the possession of history take us back to the relevance of the longue durée. A narrowly remembered history—decades, for example—too often eludes the longue durée processes haunting sets of centuries-old norms, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. Absent the larger context of history, the narrow conception leads to an ostensibly “clean slate” for future arguments to operate free from their tainted social, economic, and cultural connection to the “whole longue durée of racial dictatorship since the conquest.”68 The unpleasant past is quarantined like a virus, allowing the nationalist trope of “innocence” to be redeemed. For example, the twenty-first-century use of religious liberty imagines Christians (the dominant religion of the United States) as innocent victims of federal intervention overriding states’ rights, which retroactively pardons the crimes of Southern segregationists whose use of the concept of religious liberty long justified Southern segregation, slavery, and the violence maintaining these institutions.69 American exceptionalism amid innocence disavows the violent past’s contribution to the present, placing a “silence” around ongoing, centuries-old practices enacted through a reformed language where explicit racism is removed, while the confrontation with difference finds justification through the color-blind moniker of “culture.”70 The performance of disavowal or silencing blankets the present with reinforced ideas of “progress” and the superiority of Western civilization. It is here, in “progress,” where the very sense of “innocence” Baldwin and Morrison suggest afflicts the American idea of history obscures the violence of settler colonialism and slavery shaping the American dream.
At Cambridge, Baldwin represented the descendants of American ex-slaves, a status in 1965 bearing the racial antagonism represented by American history and its obsession with anti-Blackness. Baldwin’s work—both fiction but especially nonfiction—examined these structures and ideas throughout the mid-twentieth century, addressing the ongoing anti-Black antagonisms Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery.”71 The material and cultural aftermath of the colonial era and the nation’s founding utilized the ideas of Enlightenment progress to form a contradictory existence between, on the one hand, recognition of the “rights of man,” and on the other, a specificity of these rights that did not apply to those non-whites who were colonized or enslaved. Buckley, a descendent from Ireland—and a beneficiary of the Enlightenment’s “rights of man”—represented the quintessential white ethnic. This identity, revived in the 1970s after a brief pause during the post–World War II years of white ethnic assimilation into suburban America, largely emerged as a response to the ethnic pride movements initiated with the civil rights–Black Power movements.72 Beginning publicly in the 1950s within his journal, the National Review, Buckley’s attacks against the civil rights movement stressed the supposed cultural deficiencies of African Americans when compared to other ethnic Americans, such as the Irish, Italians, or Jews.73 This shift in language from previous discussions based on racial science to ideas of culture formed a core component of the 1960s culture war.
The “Ethos” and Victims of the American Dream
Broadcast announcer, St. John-Stevas, described Baldwin as the “star of the evening” as the author rose and ventured his way through the crowded union to the podium amid an enormous applause.74 Framed in a sea of white British faces, with a few Black Britons, Baldwin initially responded to the question of the American dream and its relationship to the Negro by calmly positing that the overarching, “deeper” question depended on “one’s point of view,” “on where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions we hold so deeply as to be scarcely aware of them.”75 Baldwin outlined this notion of ontology by describing the dynamics of white interpretations of Black resistance to racial oppression. For whites, this resistance appeared as an irrational attack on “the system to which [the white man] owes his entire identity.”76 Culturally and economically, the status quo of the social structure fostered a white identity dependent upon the existence of Black and white social dispositions where the subjugation of Blacks by whites occurred “naturally.” For example, Black enslavement was imagined as the inverse to white freedom, with the suppression of “African resistance,” becoming, notes Gerald Horne, “a crucial component of forging settler unity—and the solidifying identity that was ‘whiteness.’ ”77 A few years after the debate, Baldwin described the intricacies of the relationship between whiteness and Blackness: whiteness was a set of attitudes permeating the system of oppression, whereas Blackness was the condition created by these antagonistic beliefs toward Black bodies.78 Thus, this situation left resistance by Black people against American racism to be seen as an insurrection against the system whiteness utilized as a normative baseline, whether in the form of a lack of deference to breaching color lines to all-out rebellion. In short, a society premised on whiteness viewed Black agency as turning Western civilization on its head—an affront to nature, law and order, and the axioms of the conservatism espoused by Buckley and his National Review.79
During the debate, Baldwin also contextualized the economic contributions of African Americans to the economy—the “expense” of this system—noting the free labor Black people provided to build the ports, railroads, harbors, and other economic features that aided industrialization and the accumulation of capital. This weaving together of race and economics highlighted the way American racism operated, where the status of Black people circulated through both their connection to capitalism as living property and, after emancipation, cheap labor. Moreover, this relationship performed another role for those not benefiting from the accumulation of capital. Describing the minds of poor whites to his Cambridge audience, Baldwin outlined their frame of reference: “They have been raised to believe, and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter how terrible some of their lives may be and no matter what disaster overtakes them, there is one consolation like a heavenly revelation—at least they are not black.”80 An investment in anti-Blackness, then, is the reward for white acquiescence to an American dream you might or might not become a part of. In this sense, monetary value binds itself to a racially coded binary, where whiteness assumes the role of property—it can be possessed.81 In the postwar years, the greatest asset driving the American dream for the majority of white Americans was the federally subsidized, racially exclusive housing in the white spaces of suburbia; for people of African descent, this aspect of the welfare state did not exist as a possibility.82
Moving his argument to the present, Baldwin announced to the Cambridge audience, “What we are not facing is the results of what we’ve done.… What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to establish some kind of dialogue between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream, and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble.” Here, we see Baldwin’s notion of the operation of history at work, insisting on those living in the present to recognize the outcome of this centuries-old paradox anchoring the American dream. This recognition demands, however, an admission that the American dream embodied a white imagined space and existence and that it was created through an ethos built on the brutality of slavery and the exclusion of African Americans from the protections and opportunities of civil society.83 Adding an ominous epilogue, Baldwin summed up:
Until the moment comes, when we, the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, for which we need each other. That I’m not a ward of America; I’m not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied the participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens, it’s a very grave moment for the West. Thank you.
The Cambridge Union hall awarded Baldwin’s conclusion with a standing ovation.
A more subdued applause greeted Buckley’s arrival, unlike Baldwin’s raucous reception. Buckley began with a solemn appraisal of Baldwin’s “indictments,” with his rebuttal immediately embodying many of the attributes outlined by Baldwin’s theorization of the American dream. In an attempt to disqualify Baldwin’s testimony, Buckley began by normalizing the field of objectivity as a strict domain of “white rationalism,” one of the signal attributes of Western civilization. Buckley asserted, “It is quite impossible in my judgment to deal with the indictment of Mr. Baldwin unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man, unless one is prepared to say to him that the fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments that you raise. The fact that you sit here as is [sic] your rhetorical device, and lay the entire weight of the Negro ordeal on your own shoulders, is irrelevant to the argument that we are here to discuss.” Underlining the dichotomy between “those with history” and “those without history,” Buckley demanded an erasure of Baldwin’s Blackness—his history—from the debate while remaining silent about the inherent power of Buckley’s own male whiteness (which, of course, was normalized into invisibility). The question at hand, according to Buckley, could not be judged objectively by someone who was Black. With the loss of an unapologetic white supremacy, the demand for color blindness wrapped in white normativity stressed Baldwin’s bias as a Black man and underlined Buckley’s innocence as a mere rational white man attempting to make a sober analysis of the era’s upheavals. We may associate this reform, later embraced by neoliberalism, as a continuation of modernity’s “scientific” objectivity so vital for the engineering of the dreams and truth statements of Europeans and white Americans.84 The ability to be objective, especially for white Americans, established itself through a measurement of humanity that set people of African descent as the savage “race” furthest away from the “superiority” of rational European “stock.”85 Buckley’s objectivity, or arguments grounded in the normality of whiteness to judge things exterior to it, offered a reassuring balm—a pledge of innocence—for those associated with parts of the system connected to the brutality toward non-whites in the name of maintaining Western civilization. Buckley’s pronouncements mustered the historical projections still circulating in the mid-1960s mimicking this logic: the socially dead—enslaved or descendants of enslaved Africans—cannot speak their case as they are without history, and thus not reliable sources of knowledge. This rhetorical shift for Buckley, moreover, provides insight into the evolution of color blindness from its overtly racist origins. Indeed, eight years before the 1965 debate, Buckley rigorously defended the resistance of Southern segregationists against desegregation with a similar logic: “the White community is so entitled [to discriminate] because it is, for the time being, the advanced race.”86 Color blindness removed the explicit racial markers from language criticizing the civil rights movement, while retaining the implied white authority of the ideas justifying the policies.
The attempt to undermine Baldwin’s credibility spoke to the mid-1960s anxieties surrounding the historically reflexive white fears of the formerly subjugated speaking back. These anxieties were tied to the dissolution of older ideas constructed to imply an innocence of white participation in anti-Black crimes against humanity. One of the oldest white-imagined caricatures of African Americans was the plantation Sambo.87 The Sambo was the image of the passive Negro, whose childlike behavior needed direction and guidance, while clearly unable to exercise self-rule let alone be socially equal with white society.88 In short, it both reinforced Black inferiority and emphasized white paternalism, or the benevolent slaveowner. In addition, notions of self-rule secured the truth statements insisting that African Americans were socially dead, outside civil societies’ boundaries of decency and security. At the debate in 1965, the logic of self-rule emerged through an ad hominem attack aimed at Baldwin. Buckley suggested that “he [Baldwin] didn’t, in writing that book [The Fire Next Time], speak with British accents that he used exclusively tonight”—painting Baldwin with another controlling image of African Americans from the mid-1800s, the caricature of Zip Coon: the awkwardly free Black who, despite trying, can never speak, act, or think like a white man.89 Zip Coons made a mockery of the idea of social equality between whites and Blacks. In the same sentence, Buckley also charged Baldwin with threatening “America with the necessity for us to jettison our entire civilization.” Again, for Buckley, the removal of the oppressive conditions connected to policing Blackness would turn the ethos of white America, specifically its putative “progress” narrative of innocence, on its head.90
In a full performance of the post–civil rights era’s white defense of privilege, Buckley inverted the power dynamics between whites and Blacks. Suggesting Baldwin somehow had an advantage, Buckley presented himself as being unfairly matched—not against the intellect of Baldwin but against a presumed social power Baldwin possessed over Buckley, who was a mere white man. Buckley was the victim: “Tonight,” Buckley announced, he was “going to speak to [Baldwin] without any reference whatever to those surrounding protections which [he was] used to in virtue of the fact that [he is] a Negro.” This performance of powerlessness focused on a narrow moment of the present that stipulated an enhanced rhetorical power connected to Blackness despite centuries of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Rhetorically excluding the longue durée history between people of European descent and African descent, Buckley sought allies in the Cambridge hall who might feel uncomfortable with an increased public criticism toward deep traditions that have now been condemned as racist. George Lipsitz labels this type of situation a “manifestation of privilege masquerading as powerlessness.”91 According to Buckley, Baldwin’s Blackness simultaneously disqualified him from the engagement in civil society to make his own arguments, while at the same time Baldwin’s Blackness was pronounced as an unfair power advantage over an innocent, white ethnic Buckley. In minutes, centuries of white supremacy and systemic anti-Blackness dissolved; race as an identity suddenly appeared as a discriminating rhetorical device against white people. Indeed, Buckley’s performance is an early moment of color blindness when, as Nikhil Pal Singh notes, “race now means racism, especially when it is used to define or defend the interests of a minority community.”92 Color blindness solved the issue, leaving whiteness in its hierarchical position, unnamed and normalized, leaving an unspoken contempt toward Blackness to survive through acerbic charges of “using the race card” or in color-blind coded words such as culture.
Buckley’s parries illustrated more than the modern fear of the enslaved striking back at the master. More importantly for the next decade’s economic restructuring, these discursive strategies were employed for reconceptualizing the operation of power by historically erasing centuries of white privilege after a decade of embarrassing scenes transmitted globally of naked white brutality against Blacks whose crime was seeking the same protections of the Constitution enjoyed by white people. In his assessment of the unfairness of Baldwin’s Blackness, Buckley helped to anchor a conceptualization of centuries of white antagonism toward Blacks as a process conceived of as reciprocal, insinuating that each “side” had equal ability to deliver “damage” to the other. In short, a system of “race relations” that imagines racial prejudice arising “out of a natural antipathy between groups on the basis of difference,” rather than a system of “racial oppression,” which “locates the source of the problem within the structure of society,” where a “system of domination … entails major political and economic institutions, including the state itself.”93 As a relationship decontextualized from history, one could innocently frame any support for African American equality as an unfair advantage against whites, a familiar binary in reverse imagining whiteness as an ethos, and Blackness as a condition. The so-called white backlash, then, reaffirmed a white innocence in order to counter the growing chorus of 1960s social movements questioning the violent norms of modernity and its language of Western civilization.
Alongside the rewriting of history, Buckley also deflected the criticisms of African Americans away from notions of structural racism. In attacking Baldwin’s argument, Buckley dismissed the connection between capital accumulation and enslaved or Jim Crow–disciplined Black labor. A primary tool for Buckley’s defense of the status quo lay in the arguments underpinning a book he suggested the students read to fully understand the situation in America: Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963).94 Published the same year as Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Beyond the Melting Pot embodies what historian Matthew Frye Jacobson calls “an inaugurating text” of the culture wars.95 While acknowledging discrimination, Beyond the Melting Pot downplayed its impact upon African Americans by regenerating ideas of inferiority: “the ‘weak’ Black family” was to blame for the unequal status of African Americans in the United States.96 In short, writes Ibram Kendi, “Blacks were not taking enough responsibility for their own problems.”97 Of course, this academic assessment was music to Buckley’s ears. “My great grandparents worked too, presumably yours worked also,” Buckley innocently proclaimed to the Cambridge audience, reciting what would become a familiar white retort to affirmative action after the 1960s.98 In highlighting the “complicated” nature of the racial problem in the United States, Buckley suggested that the issue existing in America was individual discrimination against Blacks, not institutional—a problem for reform, not radical solutions.
Buckley’s use of Moynihan, coauthor of Beyond the Melting Pot, is noteworthy as the latter was instrumental in developing white liberal, and later conservative, responses to Black critiques of institutional racism. Three significant interventions by Moynihan include The Moynihan Report (1965), his contribution to President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University in 1965, and his memo to President Richard Nixon in 1970 suggesting that the “issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect. The subject has been too much talked about.”99 Constructed through the racist sociological debates of the 1920s and 1930s—including the controlling image of Black women’s so-called sexual depravity and the Black family’s matriarchal structure—Moynihan’s ideas expressed the longue durée thoughts white Americans cataloged to justify the very real sexual depravity connected to slavery’s brutality.100 The other coauthor, Glazer, later wrote Affirmative Discrimination in 1975 where he asserted that affirmative action policies were unfair for whites, who were innocent of the crimes of their descendants while Glazer denied the ongoing connection between racism and economic opportunity.101 Building on his long-held civilizational beliefs, Buckley’s second suggestion during the debate dismissed the idea that racism was the sole reason for the conditions of African Americans in the United States: a primary “failure of the Negro community itself [was in its inability] to make certain exertions which were made by other minority groups during the American experience.” Noting the absence of the “particular energy … so noticeable in the Jewish community and to a certain, and lesser, extent, into the Italian and Irish community,” Buckley asserted, “we should focus on the necessity to animate this particular energy” in African Americans. In short, encourage them to develop an “ethos”—a particularly favorite word for Buckley when describing this situation throughout his television program, Firing Line.102
Buckley’s use of the concept of ethos updated the racial science language of white superiority: rather than a biologically imagined Black inferiority, the new language suggested Black Americans lacked the proper cultural ability to adapt to mainstream white society. This new language amid the changing political landscape of the civil rights era was necessary to keep alive the sentiments of anti-Blackness through color-blind assertions coated in deeply rooted ideas of culture and ethos.103 This is where the concept of Western civilization bears importance as an overarching transnational idea tying together the longue durée fraternity of European expansion throughout modernity. Buckley—wealthy, white, and brought up in a transnational world—naturally saw people of color, especially Blacks, as inferior, just as many elites and educated white men did in the early twentieth century.104 Moreover, his anti-Blackness is better understood in light of his recurrent need to justify brutality and ongoing social inequality toward African Americans through the studies of Glazer and Moynihan, who debated the so-called Negro problem through the historical experiences of white ethnic assimilation. As Matthew Jacobson notes, “The historical weight of incorporation by conquest or by slavery, for instance, was of little account in this model, as all groups could expect to proceed along roughly the same lines of acceptance, mobility, and success as had the great waves of immigrants from Europe beginning in the 1840s.”105 Two outcomes occurred through this racial calculus: white ethnics became more white, especially after World War II, while Jim Crow helped shape their whiteness through the exclusion of Black people from postwar assimilation and economic opportunity. The result is that the forces of anti-Blackness obtained new allies at the precise moment when the flexible contours of cultural pathology replaced racial science as a justification for exclusion or a reason explaining the status of African Americans.
By contrasting differences between African Americans and white ethnic Americans, Buckley helped to outline the rhetorical contours of Martin Barker’s notion of the “new racism,” where theories of race are concealed in order to “provide form and structure to people’s experiences and reactions, without displaying itself as a whole theory with big and dangerous implications.”106 Here, ideas of culture manifested historical ideas of civilization (and who is included in its protections), setting parameters where contemporary use of culture discursively links up to older embedded notions of science and biology. Meanwhile, culture-as-race pronouncements obscured the discredited assumptions of racial superiority through innocent language describing “a ‘way of life’ ”—with the latter judged from the dominant cultural perspective.107 As the authors of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain assert, “Once the argument has been couched in terms of ‘alien cultures,’ common-sense racism can be relied upon to provide the missing inflexions.”108 Rather than having racial matters weighted in biology and science, the dominant issue is “the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions.”109 By the early twenty-first century, this rhetorical shift became the dominant frame of debate regarding what otherwise would be a discussion about race and the fears of integration.
For Buckley and many of his successors, culture replaced the explicit racial arguments justifying the conditions of African Americans, relieving white society of moral complicity in fostering, defending, and policing racial antagonism. The transition from overt racism to a cultural sense of inferiority gained momentum through the innovation of “crime statistics” at the dawn of the twentieth century, leading to a scientific measurement of difference fueling “gendered notions of black male pathology, and when linked to illegitimacy rates, doubly burdened black women by defining them as sexually deviant and undeserving of the protections of womanhood.”110 From this renewed position of innocence, Buckley’s cultural approach ventured into sociological territory inhabited by Glazer and Moynihan, where a technocratic and “unbiased” study denotes the range of deficiencies allotted to African Americans. In Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Baldwin observed, “One of the reasons we are so fond of sociological reports and research and investigational committees is because they hide something. As long as we can deal with the Negro as a kind of statistic, as something to be manipulated, something to be fled from, or something to be given something to, there is something we can avoid, and what we can avoid is what he really, really means to us. The question that still ends these discussions is an extraordinary question: Would you let your sister marry one?”111 This combination of statistical investigation and the sexualization of the so-called Negro problem—embedded into American crime statistics in the early years of Jim Crow—found mobilization alongside another set of self-rule tropes near the end of Buckley’s speech.112 Adding statistics from Beyond the Melting Pot to underline the inferior ethos of African Americans, Buckley confidently asserted the sexual distance between Blacks and whites, a trope deeply ingrained in American slavery and the American albatross of miscegenation fears.113 Speaking this language, Buckley declared, “Fourteen times as many people in New York City born of Negros are illegitimate as of the whites.” Building on this conception of Black deviancy, Buckley then connected the biological deviance of Blacks with that of the ignorance of poor whites in a response to an audience member’s heckle demanding that Blacks be able to vote in Mississippi: “The problem in Mississippi isn’t that too few Negroes can vote; it’s that too many whites can.” This remark conveniently laid the blame for racism on the poor and ignorant, erasing the origins of institutional racism while simultaneously creating a rhetorical bridge between Black inferiority and poor white ignorance. This longue durée gesture of conservatism brought traditional suspicion toward the poor and working class together with an inscription of poor whiteness—“white trash”—as a separate degraded race akin to people of African descent.114 Buckley followed up the question paraphrasing the conservative Black thinker Booker T. Washington, who, strategically, sought education and training for African Americans over the need for political rights. Using the Black conservative’s words as a shield against charges of buttressing white supremacy, Buckley suggested that mere voting rights or holding public office were not enough: “but that they be prepared to hold public office. Not that they vote, but they be prepared to vote.… It is much more complicated, sir, than simply just the question of giving them the vote.” Through this logic, a so-called deviant or deficient culture—a culture lacking an “ethos”—justified the skepticism of civilized and rational people toward extending self-rule to African Americans.
A critical ontological anchor of modernity, Buckley’s defense of white nationalism and Black inequality consistently embraced the civilization versus savagery mindset.115 The primary difference between the 1960s and 1950s, however, lay in Buckley’s more overtly racist language. An August 1957 issue of the National Review highlights a more honest, less subtle assertion of rational innocence guided by a sense of “progress” and the defense of Western civilization draped in the language of white supremacy. In the piece, Buckley contextualizes ongoing Jim Crow practices within the longue durée of the American experience:
Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendations of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro—and a great many Whites—to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.… The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful.… So long as it [the South] is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.116
The truth-making discourses of Western civilization, reason, and progress, so essential to justifying the processes of American history—from slavery to settler colonialism to the restriction of women’s rights—provides Buckley with the rational and moral language and knowledge to save the South from criticism of its own “civilization.” The assertion of “Negro backwardness” easily fit into its antithesis of white “superior mores,” justifying Buckley’s logic of inequality of power, delaying “genuine cultural equality,” and helping shape the future dynamic of individualizing structurally racist institutions: African Americans merely needed to develop an ethos, like the Italians, Irish, and Jews, to gain access to the American dream—nothing else, apparently, stood in their way. For Buckley, American history leading up to the 1965 debate contained “reasonable” precedents in the anti-Black policies of the colonists and founders, and later, the segregationists who appeared to be unfairly tarnished as “tyrants” as they resisted desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. For Buckley, order and respect for laws came before social equality and the guarantees of the Constitution.
The nonovertly racist defense against the criticisms of the American dream during the 1965 Baldwin-Buckley debate characterized the cultural shift responding to the overall deregulation of civil rights in the United States. If Jim Crow laws created a strict segregation of employment opportunities on the weight of anti-Black cultural logic, once these laws were removed, the now-embedded cultural logic would remain—though now wrapped in color-blind language. Economically, the post–civil rights era saw the Jim Crow welfare state replaced with the more laissez-faire system of neoliberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s. Contextualized within the longue durée of white nationalist privilege, the welfare state found itself dismantled—and condemned—at precisely the same moment African Americans and women gained access to it via 1960s civil rights legislation. All wealth and economic opportunities accumulated through the racially exclusive Jim Crow welfare state dissolved from view, obscured behind the veil of neoliberal color blindness. Along with the absence of reparations for slavery and the Jim Crow segregation years, nothing addressed the ongoing ontological features inhabiting institutional racism after the 1960s—leaving the reason for slavery and Jim Crow untouched, carefully buried in the language and knowledge of “culture.” Working through the longue durée normalcy of Black inferiority and exclusion from the rights of civil society, these reforms deregulated the legislature and language of an unabashed white supremacy. Rather than explicit language, such as the “Negro problem,” the path was cleared for new language, such as the “urban problem.” The ability of language to disavow the knowledge of the crimes and injustices of the past helped make the American dream of the post–World War II era appear in line with the historical projection of American exceptionalism. The possession of history mattered, with Baldwin’s debate with Buckley representing what was at stake in the 1960s culture war.
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As an ideological-economic project of capitalism, neoliberalism thrived on, and gained momentum from, the tension produced through the culture war and its possession of history. Color-blind language displaced overt discrimination while at the same time retaining the same sets of impulses and historical projections Americans could still manifest to identify antagonists: people of color. With the new language came a new veneer; renewed innocence draped around the virtuous narrative of “progress” celebrating 1960s civil rights legislation. As conservative ideas ascended in the 1960s and 1970s, neoliberalism (and its application as Reaganomics) utilized the historical projections performed by Buckley (among others) to gain political leverage from the white working and middle classes in dismantling the Jim Crow welfare state, which, ironically, proved so crucial for their economic prosperity and the achievement of the American dream in the postwar years. As their economic opportunities dwindled, their source of warmth came primarily through conservative rhetoric scapegoating people of color and historically marginalized groups.
Baldwin, nonetheless, continued to work through these issues in the 1970s, publishing No Name in the Street (1972), the delayed follow-up to his book The Fire Next Time. No Name in the Street reflected a contemporary assessment adorned in pessimism and prophecy regarding the inability of U.S. society to come to terms with its legacies of modernity, particularly its inability to fully rid itself of anti-Black antagonisms born of slavery.117 Reminiscing about the previous decade’s civil rights activism and dialogue on race, Baldwin noted the ongoing haunting of America’s past and the impossibility for closure without an adequate accounting of the layers of damage:
[William Faulkner] is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed—without, that is, any further menacing itself—and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends.118
Noting the difficulty of dismantling the new color-blind racism in the post–civil rights United States, in 1980 Baldwin remarked, “Another kind of dilemma, another kind of confrontation, begins.”119 That dilemma essentially involved wrestling with the ghosts of history guiding white privilege, which, in the wake of civil rights legislation, reset the playing field of the American dream, with its innocence renewed for future generations. At the very moment modernity’s ideological construct of Western civilization fell under siege from anti-colonial liberation movements abroad, and various social justice movements within the United States, conservatives did more than occupy the barricades in defense of the status quo in the 1960s. They entered a period of organizing aimed toward “recovery and restoration” of the power of business after years of the left-liberal welfare state.120 One important tool was the well-entrenched ideological construct of “civilized” versus “savage,” with these embedded cultural symbols summoned as weapons to push back against the new diversity spreading through the United States at the dawn of the first decade of legislated social equality in U.S. history.121