Joseph Lowndes - "the New Deal coalition was destroyed and Reaganism was ushered in by those who sought to dismantle institutionalized racism. The blame is thus laid at the feet of antiracist progressives instead of the conservative movement-builders who exploited racial anxieties for Republican victories"

But Sleepers point is that the conservative strategty was successful. It doesn't matter whose to blame, what matters is how to change the direction. Your (and formerly my) strategy of confrontation and education failed in the long run. Perhaps it's time to try Obama's approach. Create a working majority of "exploited people" regardless of specific histories of why they are exploited and use political power to change it. That's how you confront a legacy of supremacism. Understand that it's the economic elite of all races who exploit the vulnerable of all races including their own and create public policy to "rebalance" the economy as Obama puts it.

When we get away from the situation where all exploited people are fighting over crumbs and understand that it's greed and callousness that we have to fight, we can unite and do it. See the film "Gangs of New York" for a better understanding.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

But what it is is not much of a guide to current policies -- which explains why these historians of American race relations have nothing practical to say when it comes to how we might change things or, for that matter, how a knowledge of that past implies the adoption of any particular program, now.

Ivory tower masturbation.

Confronting race doesn't help conservatives nearly as much as denying it hurts progressives.

That's the key, I think.

I'm a construction project manager and work with a lot of low-middle class, blue-collar guys. I'm not aware of virulent racism in any of them, but most of them harbor some racist ideas that they either can't or won't acknowledge as racist. The most persistent of these is that they are out breaking their asses to earn a living while a bunch of shiftless blacks are just being handed everything on a silver platter. My response to them is always that in the 40 years since the civil rights act, we are still not (in this state anyway) making quality education available to black kids. I point out that most schools in the state did not integrate until the early to mid-70s, and that in rural areas they never integrated at all; districts were merely gerrymandered to put all the black kids in one (inevitably shockingly underfunded) district and the white kids in another (supported by the only existing local tax base, mostly land, almost 100% white owned). And that in the schools that were integrated, as soon as it happened white voters started voting down school taxes and those who could pulled their kids out of the public schools. Those who couldn't still voted against school taxes; they were all too willing to destroy their own kids' schools if that's what it took to deny black kids the opportunity for quality education. And I close by saying that since whites as a group pretty much have, in fact, done everything they can to make sure black people don't get good educations, they should expect the result to be a sizeable group of people who can't completely (financially) take care of themselves. Really, what other outcome would you expect? If you're going to refuse to teach the man to fish, you need to anticipate that the man is still going to be there needing fish and someone else is going to be providing it one way or another. I've never gotten a response from any of them other than "yeah, you're right about that..." And I can tell that I've actually forced them to look at it in a way they're not accustomed to looking at it. That's the way these things really have to start, I think.

This stuff doesn't go away if it isn't confronted head on, which I was glad to see Obama bring it up. I'm with Glenn Loury in that ultimately the discussion needs to be much more explicit than Obama was in his speech, because otherwise it becomes all too easy for the conservative wedge-drivers to paint as just more whining. That has, after all, been their narrative for the past 40 years, which is exactly what has made it such an easy go-to position for all too many whites looking for someone to blame for their own economic plight. It will remain an easy go-to position if the people who buy into it are never given concrete examples and arguments as to why the pat answer offered by conservatives is not only simplistic but false in most of the particulars. People don't just change their minds out of the blue. You have to give them something to chew on and sort out for that to happen.

In regards to Obama's speech, though, I think it went as far as it was possible for him to go on a first foray. My hope is that it won't be his last and that in the future, he'll make some of these concrete connections for people. I'd be surprised to see it happen prior to the general election, though, unless the Republicans do what I expect they will do and ultimately lapse into blatant full-on racism as their campaign strategy. If that happens, they open the door for an examination of what's really been going on with race and racism in the US.

The first comment above (from someone with the interesting moniker of Sumbodhi!)gets it right:

Neither I nor Thomas and Mary Edsall ever even remotely took up, promoted, or leant creedence to the Republican and conservative race strategy, as Joseph Lowndes, George Shulman, and others we may hear from insist.

It would be a very serious failure of historiography to argue that way, since there is really no mystery about where people like me, the Edsalls, Michael Tomasky, and others whom they've atacked were coming from when we examined what was contributing to the Republicans' tactical success on that front, and there was no mystery about where we were going with that analysis.

What really offends some our critics -- especially some who have called us closet Republicans, neo-conservatives, racists, and so on -- is that we dared to suggest that some of the left's own positions and strategies had contributed to the Republican ascendancy of the 1970s and 1980s. I can understand why some dedicated leftist activists and their interpreters might take this hard, but it's been fatefully true, especially in places like New York, about which I wrote The Closest of Strangers, a book that really angered many people on the left.

For my part, I can confess to having become so exasperated at times by the folly and venom on the losing left that I myself laced into the left and backed centrist and even right-of center candidates as necessary antidotes and correctives to institutionalized folly. You can go to www.jimsleeper.com and read some of these pieces, if you like, and what you'll find there is a civic-republican standard that stands against both American conservatism in most (though not all) of its manifestations and against Marxist leftism that considers itself a constructive or viable politics.

The left has had some lessons to learn from the right, and, yes, I have said so, on many occasions. If I had to recommend one example of my doing this clearly but in a realm unrelated to race, I'd say it's a review-essay of Paul Hollander's book Political Pilgrims, for Salmagundi. Go to www.jimsleeper.com, click on the section "Folly on the Left," and then on the article bearing that same title.

This backlash narrative to which Sleeper subscribes was initially not an historical account, but rather an active political strategy by conservative Republicans to win over white voters both in the south and in the north and west as well.

Can we ever fully distinguish between History and Narrative? We can approach history with something like scientific method, but only at a certain risk of being confronted less with critical argument and dismissed with simplistic, but effective, characterizations as liberal academic elite. White supremacy (I might argue like any ethno-national narrative) appeals to essential populist tendencies, backlash or otherwise.

This, by the way, is as far as I know, original with me, so if anyone uses it, please reference a publication here by Richard Brewer.

You are being facetious, aren't you?

Thanks everyone for the responses. To Sumbhodi, I support the kinds of universalistic programs you’re talking about. They’re desperately needed, and they should be fought for. However, I do not think we should not abandon the idea of targeted programs, nor should we give up trying to find new solutions to grapple with the specificity of racial oppression.

But it is not just that. Left unacknowledged and not dealt with, racism continues to provide a convenient set of explanations for poverty, unemployment, imprisonment, etc. And it continues to find new expressions, whether it is genomics, as I mentioned in my first post, or the ludicrous ranting of Lou Dobbs to an enormous national audience every night. Jenn of Ark is right, I think, that when people are presented with a reasonable perspective, they can let go of unexamined racist beliefs. This is why, again, that there was nothing inevitable about white backlash.

The answer to it should never have been to succumb to the logic laid out by the right in the 1960s and thereafter, but to continue to challenge the assumptions, and outright lies they laid out. At the risk of self-promotion here, my forthcoming book ‘From the New Deal to the New Right’ closely analyzes the development of backlash framing and strategy from the late 1940s until the 1970s among Republican party organizers, conservative intellectuals, Southern Democratic politicians and others. Conservatives across this time period were creative, flexible, and highly adaptive. They continually tried out new rhetorical strategies to make their politics stick. And most important, they were willing to sustain defeat after defeat. But each defeat brought them closer to victory.

My point here is that white folks aren’t inherently racist. But there needed to be sustained opposition to backlash, not acquiescence among liberals, which began quite early on. Indeed, the term itself was coined by liberal journalists and social scientists in the 1950s, who, misunderstanding the political nature of racism, wrongly chalked it up irrationality and ignorance among poor whites. By this understanding, education and economic security would solve everything in the long run without having to address race directly. Such a view left liberals ill-equipped to deal with the way that racism could be politically mobilized across classes and regions – in union halls and wealthy suburbs, in San Diego as well as Detroit or Birmingham. Many Democrats and liberals eventually responded to the conservative onslaught by embracing its racial premises. And thus do we get Bill Clinton flying back to Little Rock to oversee the execution of the mentally retarded Ricky Ray Rector on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary.

I appreciate Jim Sleeper sympathizing with the sting that radicals in the 1970s must feel from his tough critiques. No offense taken here – I was still a kid in the conservative Sunbelt South where I was born and raised. I also appreciate Sleeper’s claim that he is not really a conservative. I have to say though that if he vented as much indignation on the Right as he has on left, black, feminist and gay activists, (or those who engage in what he has elsewhere called “the self-indulgent politics of racial and sexual ‘liberation’”), that claim would be a little easier to swallow.

Kevinbruyneel is asking an important question, but it comes at the end of this exchange here in TPM and is a question that has been asked and answered many times over the past twenty years.

I have written two books answering it, and anyone who is truly interested in the matter, and not just in the entertainment value that might come from watching a debate, can find some versions of my "side" of the argument at www.jimsleeper.com.

I put the word "side" in quotes because too many of my critics tend to caricature positions that differ from their own in order to shore up their own points of view. They do this, I think, because their moral and or ideological passions get the best of their judgment.

So we hear terms like "backlash" thesis that have never been fair to the positions that the Edsalls, Tomasky, I, and others of us hold. In some cases, we do disagree with and condemn position snd policies which liberals and leftists have taken, because in our experience, a lot of what passes for "anti-racism" really only recapitulates racism itself.

This isn't the place to make that argument for the benefit of people who haven't heard it before, but this notion of a "backlash thesis" won't help anyone who seeks greater understanding and political wisdom.

The big, big, big mistake the self-proclaimed white "anti-racist" faction makes is in believing that their bloviation on the subject of race will make any improvement. It does not. It only makes those who are already self-righteous without real cause feel more self-righteous. Everyone else either loses interest or gets pissed off the more self-righteous they get.

Race should not be ignored, but there also need not be an obsessive beating of a dead horse. Slavery and it's effects are well established facts. Segregation and it's effects are well established facts. Racism's continued existence is well known by all. The questions regarding why we are here are for all practical purposes settled. The questions that matter and the conversation that matters is where do we go from here?

I have read and listened all my life to the self-righteous white liberals yammering away for a conversation about race in this country. It seems as though that is all they want: conversation. I want action. And while I fully appreciate the importance of having a solid grasp of our history and how we got to this point (I have spent my lifetime in that pursuit), it is a waste of time to keep going over the same ground again and again and again just for the sake of it. We need to move forward. We need to talk about strategies for addressing the inequalities that exist today regardless of how they arose and who is guilty or responsible or who isn't. While it is important to understand who is responsible for the ongoing oppression racism represents and it's important to know and understand how our institutions support it and so on, endless hashing and rehashing of the same subjects for decades hasn't moved a single soul forward, gotten them an education, the healthcare they need, homes, jobs or anything else.

If we're not discussing the actions we're going to take, we're just wasting time and blowing hot air around.