The way DuBois wielded this data to convey these realities was pioneering, but so, too, were the visual aesthetics of the infographics. Munro, who wrote the captions for each of the plates, came to see Du Bois as an innovator in design. In the book, he positions the data visualizations as “infographic activism” in their ability to get to the heart of inequities of the day. But he also points out that the compelling art, which was done in ink, gouache watercolor, graphite and photographic prints, deserves to be considered in its own right. The team’s Modernist use of shape, color and structure, created just before the rise of Europe’s avant-garde movements, he argues, makes the work nothing less than visionary.
“He clearly had these ideas about how and where he wanted these images to be installed, and how he wanted them to be presented,” she says. Du Bois was so determined to travel to Paris and install the works himself, she says, that he scrounged up the money to pay for passage in steerage. It was a degrading means of travel that he could not have taken without some irony, knowing he was on his way to extrapolate why African-Americans continued to be treated as second-class citizens in the U.S.
The data graphics were designed to appeal to both an international and stateside audience. They included French typography and writing to reach Europeans, says Rusert. However, she adds, the team also had an eye to U.S. audiences when they worked, as they knew the exhibit would eventually travel back home, going on view at Buffalo's Pan-Am Exposition, along with other stops around the country.
The underbelly of a lot of this misrepresentation and space-taking lies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the history that much of the story it relies upon, namely that of the Salem Witch Trials. It does so because it is easy for white storytellers to envision a descendant of European witches who fled to the new world to escape religious persecution as the champion of such a story.
In reality, it was not merely witchcraft that sent the town of Salem into a Christian religious panic and doomed many of its citizens to execution by hanging, but specifically the practice of non-European, non-Christian, Black spiritual traditions.
highlights. . .
“There is in both instances a preference for legal formalities over how we know the law is being implemented on the ground.”
The Roberts Court is poised to shape American society in Trump’s image for decades to come. All three branches of the federal government are now committed to the Trump agenda: the restoration of America’s traditional racial, religious, and gender hierarchies; the enrichment of party patrons; the unencumbered pursuit of corporate profit; the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the rival party’s constituencies; and the protection of the president and his allies from prosecution by any means available. Not since the end of Reconstruction has the U.S. government been so firmly committed to a single, coherent program uniting a politics of ethnonationalism with unfettered corporate power. As with Redemption, as the end of Reconstruction is known, the consequences could last for generations.
The supreme court’s moments of majesty, such as Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated schools; and Loving v. Virginia, which struck down antimiscegenation laws; and even Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, are few and far between. For most of its existence, the high court has been committed less to upholding the rule of law or the Constitution than to preserving its own legitimacy, unwilling to shield the powerless from the mob unless convinced that it has the political cover to do so. Like many things in America, the ideal rarely resembles the execution.
“We constantly romanticize the Supreme Court of the United States,” Kennedy says. “People think they have more rights than they actually have. They think something’s gonna happen and the Supreme Court’s gonna make things right. It’s just ridiculous.”
The Supreme Court’s growing hostility to federal efforts to protect black rights would come to its logical conclusion in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation in public transportation. Justice Henry Billings Brown, a Rutherford B. Hayes appointee, wrote that “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Separate was not inherently unequal, he insisted. “A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude.” As the historian Ibram X. Kendi has written, “Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions.”
The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, however, did not go to waste. As the Republican Party abandoned its black constituency in the South, it became more dependent on, and shaped by, its corporate benefactors, which profited handsomely from being granted rights and protections denied to black Americans.
The redistribution of civil rights from American citizens to American corporations helped create the greatest disparities in wealth in the nation’s history, until the present day.
The Conkling story illustrates the trajectory of the Republican Party, born in the fires of abolition. Black voters were the conscience of the party, the only constituency for whom the commitment to American pluralism was ironclad. Without them, it was inevitable that the party would sell its soul to the corporate powers that sustained it.
With Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, there is no discriminatory voting restriction the justices will be unable to sanction, no immigration law born in animus they will be unable to approve, no expansion of corporate power they will be unable to accept, no grant of presidential immunity they will be unable to uphold, no financial or environmental regulation they will be unable to strike down, no religious objection to an antidiscrimination law they will be unable to recognize, no worker protection they will be unable to repeal, no limitation on abortion they will be unable to allow, and no abuse of power by law enforcement they will feel compelled to restrict. While the Roberts Court will never explicitly endorse a white man’s government in the way the Redemption Court did, in pursuit of other cherished ideological goals it will be asked to pave the road for a white man’s government by another name.
But there are limits to the comparison. The Redemption Court was arguably constrained by the broad public consensus among white people of all political stripes that black people were inferior and undeserving of full citizenship, a consensus that hobbled enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 even before it was struck down.
Even those who might disagree with the president’s agenda are no longer willing to be significant obstacles to it.
“Reconstruction failed on the lower Mississippi mainly because Louisiana whites believed more devoutly in white supremacy than the Radicals believed in the rights of man.” It is hard to look at the leaders of today’s Democratic Party and avoid a similar conclusion: that the intensity of their commitment to fighting the president’s agenda is not equal to the passion of those who carry the banner of Trumpism.
While the leaders of the Democratic Party do not share the Trump-era Republican enthusiasm for a white man’s government, their unwillingness to fight fiercely for the constituencies threatened by Trumpism suggests a reluctance to take the necessary measures to win the political battle ahead of them, because unlike those constituencies, the stakes for them are not existential.
Democracy is a fight, and the Democratic Party’s leadership has yet to show that it can even wrap its hands.
Americans have an unfortunate tendency to see U.S. history as an epic, sweeping narrative with a Hollywood-style happy ending. That false promise of the final triumph of the forces of good is one reason why America’s struggles with racism remain so persistent, and why Americans seem so surprised when what they see as a distant, shameful history emerges in the present.
Millions of enslaved people lost their lives during the long night of American chattel slavery, without so much as a hint of dawn. Those who lived to see emancipation would see the darkness fall again within a generation.
The arc of history does not bend toward justice on its own. It can be bent only by those with the power to do so. As Frederick Douglass once said, power concedes nothing without demand.
The whitewashing of history is so insidious. White people are more concerned with absolving their ancestors of guilt than they are of dismantling the oppressive systems they built.
