Intellectualized Racism is Still Racism
As Mark Joseph Stern points out in the recent On The Media as well as in his article for Slate, our current law about citizenship is based on the 14th amendment. Stern argues that almost all of these types of arguments come out of a think tank called Claremont Institute.
And if you are wondering about John Eastman and Claremont, here is what conservative magazine, the National Review writes July 2019:
Many conservative institutions and individuals have adjusted their standards and long-proclaimed principles to accommodate Trump and Trumpism. Some have become almost unrecognizable. But Claremont stands out for beclowning itself with this embrace of the smarmy underside of American politics.
John Eastman is intellectualizing racism instead saying directly what he and his institute wants to say--that a person of color does not belong in the Vice President role. One more point that Stern makes is the Claremont Institute didn't activate concern or write opinion pieces when McCain (born in Panama Canal Zone) or Cruz (born in Canada) was running for president. They're situations are not exactly the same, but interesting that Eastman twists law and precedent to "question" Harris, but doesn't have that same impulse with McCain or Cruz.
Eastman, Miller, Trump and all the nativists remind me of older figures in the nativist camp: Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Madison Grant was a leading eugenicist from New York whose social circle included Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. He graduated early from Yale and went on to get a law degree from Columbia Law School. In 1916 he wrote The Passing of the Great Race which eventually gained him a personal letter from Adolph Hitler saying "The book is my Bible."
Stoddard had his PhD from Harvard and his famous work was The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, introduction by Madison Grant. He was somewhat of a protege of Grant. The book was reviewed positively by the New York Times:
Lothrop Stoddard evokes a new peril, that of an eventual submersion beneath vast waves of yellow men, brown men, black men and red men, whom the Nordics have hitherto dominated . . . with Bolshevism menacing us on the one hand and race extinction through warfare on the other, many people are not unlikely to give [Stoddard’s book] respectful consideration. 1920
President Warren Harding mentioned the book as an important read in a speech in Alabama. Another sad moment that people in power jumped for a book about the color line by a white supremacist. Yet, somehow, they missed that Stoddard was likely riffing on a much more important book by WEB Du Bois. In his introduction to the Souls of Black Folk he writes the "problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line."
Stoddard's follow up in 1922 was called the "Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man." This is the book that gave the Nazi's their racial slur Untermensch meaning "subhuman." Often racism is depicted as coming from poor whites in the backwoods, but as Ibram X. Kendi argues in his writings, it is people like Grant and Stoddard (and Eastman) who built intellectual arguments to continue with racist policies. In Eastman's case, he is part of a group who is trying to undo the anti-racist legislation of the 14th amendment, albeit in a clandestine way.
Isabel Wilkerson in her new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, discusses a famous meeting of German bureaucrats in Berlin, June 1934. Hitler has been elected Chancellor, but has not yet declared himself Furer. They are meeting to discuss new laws to lift up the Aryan race and marginalize non-Aryans. From their survey of the various national laws, they have decided that the United States offers the best model for achieving these. One had recently traveled to the University of Arkansas to study our citizenship, immigration and marriage laws. Quoting from Wilkerson, "The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste ... Hitler especially marveled at the American 'knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.'" (81)
They were also interested in the US "one-drop rule" and other ways of discriminating before the law and at the voting booth. According to James Whitman (again quoting from Wilkerson): "In their search for prototypes, the Nazis had looked into white-dominated countries such as Australia and South Africa, but 'there were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world ... Their overwhelming interest was the 'classic example,' the United States of America." (82)
People say that history rhymes or repeats. It certainly does those things. It is also true that certain problems, never properly faced, will not go away. I think it is vital to be reading these histories so that when someone like John Eastman spins out his op-ed which sounds very intelligent and almost polite to non-legal people (like myself) you can look at his fine-combing of the law as a way to rationalize his attack. He casually admits that the precedent for the last fifty years is against him. He uses buzz words like allegiance. All this from someone who defends a president who refuses to reveal his current allegiances by disclosing his taxes as all other recent presidents have done.
And finally, the main reason I wanted to post was to share this amazing historic moment from 1929 that I discovered the other day by accident. It was a public debate between two Harvard PhD holders - WEB Du Bois and Lothrop Stoddard. The question "Shall the Negro be encouraged to seek cultural equality? [Has the Negro the same intellectual possibilities as other races?]." Du Bois made a laughing stock of Stoddard. Please go read the write up in the New Yorker. Again this is important history and I believe Du Bois is one of our most important American writers. Below are a couple of posters, as you can see I used one for my own version above.
Since white-supremacist are so fixated on "civilization" and so blind to see how violent and barbaric they are in rhetoric, deed, law, and policing, I was especially struck by Du Bois point to Stoddard at the end. Du Bois asks if perhaps civilization is not a a gift bestowed by the élite, but derived from “the masses of ordinary people.”
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