What Booker T. Washington Didn't "Get"

  

What Booker T. Washington Didn’t “Get”

Peter Schultz

 

                  Booker T. Washington’s heart was in the right place, wanting to undertake a new beginning for race relations in the U.S. He thought it possible to do this by convincing blacks to concentrate on developing into Americans possessing those values and capabilities that characterized citizenship of the best kind in the U.S. Having so developed, then blacks would win the respect of white Americans and the equal civil and political rights they deserved.

 

                  But Washington failed to understand that citizenship, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is distinct from virtues such as justice. Citizenship does involve commitment but to particular regimes. Regimes are power arrangements that have become ways of life, accepted as good in themselves. Citizens are not primarily committed to justice and other virtues such as self-restraint, fairness, or humanity. In the South and even generally in the North, citizenship involved commitment to a white supremacist regime. Because of this commitment, white citizens would view blacks, their attempts to develop and especially their successes at developing, as threats to the established order, the white supremacist regime. Hence, white citizens would not be committed to or look favorably on black progress. In fact, they would do their best to make such development impossible.

 

                  For confirmation of this, recall the South’s response to Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. Southern states cashiered public education completely rather than integrate those schools. Insofar as white supremacy was threatened by integrated schools, then education itself had to go. No schools were preferable to integrated schools because in integrated schools white supremacy would be exposed as a myth. This fear was expressed as blacks seducing white girls; but the real fear was that white girls would choose blacks as partners, as lovers. Separation was absolutely essential to maintain the myth of the superiority of white supremacy. And no amount of black success would be allowed to overcome that way of life. Not even a black president could overcome the myth of white supremacy, as the reaction of many, including President Trump, to the Obama presidency illustrated.

 

                  Washington was trying to make “an end run,” so to speak, around white supremacy. But he was bound to fail, as Malcolm X and other black power advocates realized. The myth of white supremacy must be confronted head on to be dispelled. And this requires more than good citizenship. It requires, somehow, some way, as Du Bois put it, “dwelling above the color line.” Malcolm X chose Islam for dwelling above the color line, and Julius Lester chose Judaism; that is, they chose “places” beyond both black power and beyond good citizenship.