Racist power started civil-rights legislation out of self-interest. Racist power stopped out of self-interested when enough African and Asian and Latin nations were inside the American sphere of influence, when a rebranded Jim Crow no longer adversely affected American foreign policy, when Black people started demanding and gaining what power rarely gives up: power. In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted, “We’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power.” But our generation ignores King’s words about the “problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo.” The same way King’s generation ignored Du Bois’s matured warning.* The same way Du Bois’s generation ignored Garrison’s matured warnings. The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem or immorality or ignorance.
Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.
To fight for mental and moral changes after policy is changed means fighting alongside growing benefits and the dissipation of fears, making it possible for antiracist power to succeed. To fight for mental and moral change as a prerequisite for policy change is to fight against growing fears and apathy, making it almost impossible for antiracist power to succeed.
The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.
*the referenced “matured warning” from WEB Du Bois:
On June 26, 1934, W.E.B. Du Bois critically assessed the success of educational suasion, as Garrison had critically assessed moral suasion before him": “For many years it was the theory of most Negro leaders… that white America did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro.” Du Bois spoke for himself, believing “the ultimate evil was stupidity” early in his career. “Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.”
