Free to Be A Supremist

The New York Times' Elisabeth Anker wrote last week on the centrality of the concept of “freedom” to white racial identity.

Indeed, there is a long history of ugly freedoms in this country. From the start of the American experiment the language of freedom applied only to a privileged few. At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, only 2 percent of the city’s population were qualified to vote. Slave codes allowed white property owners to possess Black humans — creating what the historian Tyler Stovall called “white freedom,” the “belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.” This freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.

In early American history, claims for men’s freedom permitted domestic violence against women, and a husband’s prerogative and privacy allowed him to beat his wife. In 1827 the jurist and legal scholar James Kent argued on behalf of husbands: “The law has given him a reasonable superiority and control over” the person of his wife, he wrote. “He may even put gentle restraints upon her liberty, if her conduct be such as to require it.” In other words: a woman’s freedom was at the discretion of her husband.

In the 20th century, racial segregation was justified as the freedom of white people to control public space and make their own business choices. In his infamous 1963 inaugural speech on segregation, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama couched his stance against integration as “our fight for freedom,” and justified it as “the ideology of our free fathers.” We can call that ideology white supremacy.

These are but a few examples of how claims for “freedom” have long suppressed the rights of nonwhites, women and workers. It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination.

And now-- after years of being branded a racist for his inflammatory comments and actions-- Trump and some of his allies are brandishing their their own definition of racism, one that disregards the country’s history of racial exclusion that gives white people a monopoly on power and wealth. To make America more equitable, they argue, everyone must be treated equally — and, therefore, white men must not in any way be disadvantaged.   But this is really just a cheap political tactic whose goal is to anger and animate voters.  This strategy is unfortunately finding some success, because it taps into the belief among some voters that attempts at equity have gone too far and are punishing people who happen to have been born white.