Black Lives Matter

I still haven’t been able to watch the video of George Floyd’s life slipping away all the way through. I don’t know if I ever can. As we lament Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and what happened to Christian Cooper, what I do know is how familiar this should sound to us. Before there was Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland and Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo, there was Lydia.

Her story is probably unfamiliar because as a slave, she wasn’t even given the dignity of a last name. When she started running from a punishment, the man renting her out from her master shot her in the leg. His behavior was so outrageous that a North Carolina jury in the 1820s convicted him of battery. But then Justice Ruffin, a slaveholder himself, reversed the conviction. With a candor that part of me appreciates, he declared that “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” He admitted that this necessarily followed from a slave system that sought to preserve a master’s power over his human property.

This past semester, I taught this case to a seminar on how race has shaped our legal system to flabbergasted law students. They all worked hard, and more importantly, they all cared about racial justice. I started to ask myself, what does it say about us that we have chosen not to pass down such knowledge? That question tore into me throughout the semester when student after student thanked me for offering the class and told me that they had never read an interview with a slave, read how states themselves explained why they were seceding from the Union during the Civil War (spoiler alert: it was slavery and they said so, not me), heard about debt peonage that echoes into our time, or read research about how segregated our schools still are today.

Many of them were surprised to learn that complaints about police brutality and the criminal justice system didn’t start with Black Lives Matter, the ’94 crime bill, the War on Drugs, or even the Civil Rights Movement. No, so many of us have had an instinctive fear of the police and distrust of the legal system for centuries, and those attitudes have passed from generation to generation. America’s very first prison, the Walnut Street Penitentiary, saw disparities between blacks and whites in the 1780s and 90s. Delegates to Texas’s 1868 constitutional convention found that instead of solving crimes against black citizens, police officers were participating in them. It noted that one county’s sheriff was, as the same time he was sworn to enforce the law, “the head of certain desperadoes who have committed numerous outrages, including murder, on the loyal whites and blacks of the county.” The sinking feeling that so many black Americans feel when they hear “the police are coming” has been a long time in coming. And when authorities did prosecute in Texas after the Civil War? In one case where a black man had been assaulted with intent to kill, the jury actually found the defendant guilty. They fined him a penny.

As a black man and a legal scholar, I can’t wave a wand to end the wealth gap between blacks and whites or change police practices. But what I can do, what maybe I’m uniquely positioned to do because of my life experience and my scholarly interests, is give you things to read. One of the most heartening things I’ve seen come out of this is people really taking education about our country’s legacy of racial injustice seriously. I want to encourage you to be a part of this if you have not been already.

Let me warn you: this list is long. It could take years to get through. But in a way, that represents the journey we will have to take if we want to end our racial inequalities. The black struggle for freedom and dignity has gone on for centuries. It will not end with one tweet or one Facebook post or one march or one election. It will take dedicated effort over time.

Some of what you read will sadden or enrage you. You’ll be angry that Cornelia Andrews was whipped so hard as a child for dropping dishes that she had scars more than 60 years later and that she grew up in a time and place where people who looked like her whispered in hushed tones about which slave had been beaten to death recently. You’ll be angry hearing W.L. Bost talk about having to look on as a child while a slave was whipped until his back was “cut to pieces,” had salt rubbed into the wounds, was made to lie in the scorching sun, and then was whipped again until he died. Your heart will break hearing about the women raped by their masters who “knew better than to not do what he say.” You’ll be chagrined to hear that slavery so reduced one mother’s view of humanity that she was thankful her master wasn’t as mean as the others because he didn’t sell her children away from her. There were no cameras to record their suffering, and there was no me-too movement to let them hold their perpetrators accountable. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t believe them. It was that they believed it appropriate to treat them this way. For the millions of slaves like them, no one will ever say their name.

You will probably be shocked to learn that Indiana once made it a crime for blacks even to set foot in the state, or that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld segregation in City of Boston v. Roberts nearly 50 years before the Supreme Court did so in Plessy v. Ferguson. Some of you will view assertions that we can’t judge slaveholders by modern standards in a new light when you read Quakers petitioning for an end to slavery in the 1600s or Thomas Jefferson lamenting that “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other” even as he couldn’t summon the will to act on that conviction and free his own slaves. It is scary to think that so many people could be exposed to truth, know that truth, and still turn away. And for those of you who’ve had the privilege to get lots of education, it should make you reflect. It’s easy to picture a racist as a poor southerner with a drawl who has little education. But the reality is that some of the worst offenders when it comes to participating in or sanctioning racial bigotry are the most educated. A college or graduate degree might confer prestige and increased earning power, but it does not confer racial enlightenment.

You’ll be nervous reading about just how precarious racial progress is when you dig into reconstruction. Many younger Americans have lived with the assumption that racial progress is inevitable, that the black freedom struggle can be represented by one line going up all the time. It probably looked that way in the late 1860s and early 1870s, just a few years after the Civil War. Black men participated in writing state constitutions, went to Congress, became judges, and helped establish bona fide public school systems for the first time in some states. The  picture they painted of what true multi-racial democracy could look like became only a vanishing glimpse. Some Americans participated in a wave of terrorism, voter suppression, and coercion to put blacks back where they belonged. Others who knew better turned their backs. In a historical nanosecond, the fruits of abolition and reconstruction disappeared. In many places, blacks became just as bad off as they had been in slavery. The movement for racial equality is always one backlash away from ending.

But there is more. I hope the list leaves you with the insight that it’s not enough to be anti-police violence or even anti-racism. For people who want to be allies to the black community, it’s not enough to feel sorrow for us. You need to be pro-black. I have seen lots of people criticizing white supremacy and expressing disgust with whites that don’t “get it.” The key in this moment, though, is not to think worse of white people. It’s to think better of black people.

You need to take authentic pride in the contributions we have made. Our experience is not just one of being victimized, it’s one of succeeding even though we were set up to fail. I want you to be grateful for the priceless literary and intellectual inheritance black authors have left us with for centuries. To that end, I’ve included some novels and poetry that have been meaningful to me. I want you to be inspired by Jackie Robinson and Ella Baker and Arthur Ashe and Ida B. Wells, so I have included some biographies. Even as a child, I knew how important it was for blacks to know these stories and to take pride in our achievements. What has become apparent is how important it is for everyone else. Even though the circumstances of the black experience are often to be pitied, we’ve left contributions to be envied.

We live in an era where people talk about wokeness a lot. Sometimes as an epithet and sometimes as a badge of honor. But if to be woke means to be actually enlightened about the racial issues that still plague us, it is something to aspire to. There are a lot of ways you could measure that. You could look at your friend group. You could look at the entertainment you consume. If you’re in a position of authority, you could look at who you hire and promote. You could look at what your house of worship’s demographics are like. One really important question so many of us have overlooked: what’s on your bookshelf?

Take a look at these materials. Read them. Reflect on them. Discuss them with friends and family. You won’t be the same after you do. And then remember that what I have suggested here is but a drop in the ocean of the materials we could read.

General Historical Books

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

A Brave Black Regiment by Luis Emilio

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois

America’s Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles Payne

From Jim Crow to Civil Rights by Michael Klarman

Biographies

Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes by Andrew Young

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

Days of Grace by Arthur Ashe

Jackie Robinson: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northrop

A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula Giddings

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David Garrow

Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro by John David Smith

Articles

“Segregation Now” by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the Atlantic

The Birth of Race-Based Slavery” by Peter Wood in Slate Magazine

“The Free Black Experience in Antebellum Wilmington, North Carolina: Refining Generalizations About Race Relations” by Richard Rohrs in the Journal of Southern History

“The Negro in Indiana Before 1881” by Earl McDonald in Indiana Magazine of History

“From Slavery to Freedom in Mississippi’s Legal System” by James Currie in the Journal of Negro History

“The Continuing Evolution of Reconstruction History” by Eric Foner in the OAH Magazine of History

“Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison” by Leslie Patrick Stamp in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History

“Slavery Revised: Peonage in the South” by N. Gordon Carper in Phylon

“Red Shirt Violence, Election Fraud, and the Demise of the Populist Party” by James M. Beeby in the North Carolina Historical Review

“The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery” by Thomas A. Foster in the Journal of the History of Sexuality

“The Ku Klux Klan During Reconstruction: The South Carolina Episode” by Herbert Shapiro in the Journal of Negro History

Novels/Poetry

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Wench by Dolen Perkins Valdez

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Sula by Toni Morrison

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Primary Sources

Interview with Cornelia Andrews, Ex-Slave Stories (pages 28–31); Interview with W.L. Bost, Ex-Slave Stories (pages 139–146). The Works Progress Administration interviewed many slaves during the New Deal. For a full list of interviews, go here. For the specific interviews, go to volume 11, part 1. You would do well to go through as many of them as you can.

Transcript of 1868 Texas Constitutional Convention, Report from the Committee on Lawlessness and Violence.

1688 Quaker Petition Against Slavery

Query XIV and Query XVIII of Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

Transcript of Arkansas’ 1868 constitutional convention, pages 490–512

Southern Declarations of Secession

Court Decisions

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)

Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198 (1850)

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)

Clark v. Board of School Directors, 24 Iowa 266 (1868)

State v. Mann, 2 Dev. 263 (N.C. 1829)

Reconstructing Cancel Culture

I hope you all are taking care of yourselves while we shelter in place. Hopefully, this post gives you a way to pass the time.

In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about cancel culture. Celebrities, politicians, and regular people have been “cancelled,” though it’s often unclear what that means. The best definition might actually come from Urban Dictionary. It defines “cancelled” as meaning “if you or anyone does something that’s considered ‘bad’… no one would look at you in a good way anymore, no respect, etc.” The consequences could include losing business, twitter followers, or votes.

For many, cancel culture is something woke young people have invented recently. Merriam-Webster claims “The idea of canceling—and as some have labeled it, cancel culture—has taken hold in recent years due to conversations prompted by #MeToo and other movements that demand greater accountability from public figures.” It then credits black Twitter users for the term.

This semester, I’ve taught a seminar on how race has shaped the legal system. It’s been an eye-opening experience. As we studied the aftermath of the Civil War, I was struck by a phenomenon that looks a lot like cancel culture, except on steroids.

Former rebels didn’t take their defeat on the battlefield lying down. They unleashed violence and terrorism on their supposedly victorious enemies that spurred the creation of a committee on lawlessness and violence at Texas’ 1868 constitutional convention, three years after the Civil War. The committee observed that, “multitudes who participated in the rebellion, disappointed and maddened by their defeat, are now intensely embittered against the freedmen on account of their enfranchisement, and on account of their devotion to the Republican party, and against the loyal whites for their persistent adhesion to the Union…that it is their purpose even by desperate measures to create such a state of alarm and terror among Union men and freedmen as to compel them to abandon the advocacy of impartial suffrage or fly from the State…”

People often worry about cancel culture suppressing free speech. A 2018 study found that 54% of college students felt “intimidated in sharing your ideas, opinions, or beliefs in class because they were different than those of your classmates or peers.” And to be sure, there have been worrying incidents. When a Bryn Mawr student posted on the school’s ride-share Facebook page looking to see if anyone would be interested in going to a Donald Trump rally, several posters called her racist while others threatened her physically. The harassment led her to drop out of college.

But this threat to free speech is not new, as Texas’ experience shows. In 1868, the committee on lawlessness and violence noted that “There is absolute freedom of speech in very few localities in Texas.” Rather, “Union men dare not generally avow their political convictions” because “the dominant rebel element will not tolerate free discussion.” In fact, things were so bad that “hundreds of loyal men, to our knowledge, are at this time forsaking their homes in Texas, fleeing from the assassin, [and] forced away by rebel intolerance.”

Former rebels admitted to things like firing guns into a black church, murdering black officials in cold blood, and whipping black women “to compel the negroes to give up Loyal Leagues, and to get satisfaction out of them for supporting Yankees.”

Cancel culture was real in in Texas after the Civil War in a way that puts today’s debate over it in perspective. Texans with unpopular opinions (you might even say politically incorrect ones) were not at risk of being called out or being shamed. They were at risk of having their very lives cancelled. What were those politically incorrect opinions? Believing in black equality and supporting the Union. Many celebrities who get “cancelled” these days wind up just fine.

Still, Texas gives us two cautionary lessons about cancel culture, but not in the way many critics suppose. First, we should really worry about cancelling when majorities do it to vulnerable minorities. The consequence of being cancelled for those at the margins of society are likely to be real in a way they aren’t for wealthy celebrities.

Second, before cancelling people, we should ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: is the person whose opinion we find repugnant actually right? Could they be getting at a truth we’ve overlooked? The former rebels who cancelled loyal Unionists surely thought their cause was righteous. They were wrong. Today, many of us look back and ask, how could anyone have thought about cancelling people for advocating loyalty to the government and black equality? Before we cancel people today, we would do well to ask ourselves if future generations will react similarly. Are we really trying to eliminate injustice, or will future generations see that we instead enabled it?

If nothing else, Texas’ experience should make us think twice before we exaggerate cancel culture, or engage in it.

Man in the High Castle Tackles Race

Man in the High Castle is over. The journey through a world where Nazi Germany and imperial Japan won world war two and conquered America has concluded. The most interesting part of this season was not the confusing ending, but the show’s willingness to explore race in a way it hasn’t previously.

I’m thinking specifically of the Black Communist Rebellion (“BCR”). It’s a group of black revolutionaries fighting against the Japanese occupation of America’s west coast. They want to expel the Japanese invaders and then set up a separate state for black people.

While many other Americans quietly acquiesced to Nazi or Japanese rule in the show’s alternate timeline, the blacks had no choice but to resist. There is a moving scene where BCR members go around the room sharing the names of concentration camps they had lived in and family members lost. Resisting was risky; they could die if caught, and there was a high chance of getting caught. But not resisting would have brought certain death. Under Nazi ideology, blacks were sub-human and subject to extermination.

The show raises interesting questions about what they’re fighting for. At first, it’s a separate state for blacks of the sort that Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey envisioned. They don’t even want to work with white resistance groups. At first glance, this behavior might be hard for viewers to sympathize with. Aren’t they engaging in the same racially exclusive thinking the Nazis are? The answer is complicated. Whites resisting the Nazis and Japanese are fighting for America as it was before the war. They had liberty and the ability to manage their own affairs. The blacks, on the other hand, did not in the same way. Their experience was of segregated water fountains, unequally funded schools, sharecropping, and in not-too-distant-memory, debt peonage and slavery. Fighting simply to go back to the way things were was unappealing.

Man in the High Castle subtly acknowledges this in the alternate universe. John Smith, reichmarshall of Nazi-occupied America, uses recently-developed technology to travel to an alternate world where his son Thomas is still alive. One morning, John takes his son out for breakfast at a diner in Virginia. We get a glimpse of what their life would have been like if Thomas had not been euthanized as defective because of his genetic condition. A group of blacks come in and sit at the lunch counter demanding to be served. The diner refuses and then the blacks experience violence before getting arrested. Thomas berates his father for not saying anything. Tellingly, neither did any of the other whites.

This accounts for the debate about using the American flag as a symbol as the season is ending. Lemuel Washington recovers an American flag and suggests using it as a symbol to unify all Americans under Nazi rule. But the BCR’s leadership refuses. For them, the American flag can never be a symbol of freedom and liberty. To them, it only symbolizes America’s failure to live up to its promise before the Nazis set foot in the country.

Indeed, there was a need to reach out to other racial groups. After the Japanese end their occupation of the Japanese Pacific States, the Nazis plan to invade. As a small minority group (many of whose members have been exterminated), there just aren’t enough blacks to fight off the world’s most powerful empire. If that weren’t enough, the Nazis on the show pandered to racial prejudice to win public support for their invasion. They sent bombers over the west coast that said “[r]esist Your Negro Overlords, The Reich is Coming!”

In real life, the Nazis used blacks in their propaganda. They did it to bolster the morale of the home front and instill fear of what a foreign occupation would mean.

Failing to resist could lead to scary-looking black men violating “pure” German women. Of course, pandering to racist prejudice against blacks is a familiar tactic in politics. Within living memory for some of the black characters on the show was reconstruction, the brief period after slavery where blacks in many southern states exercised real political power.

Opponents used race in an attempt to scare and scandalize whites into voting against republican rule. Delegates at Arkansas’ constitutional convention warned about the dangers of black men going after white women. One delegate claimed that a constitutional amendment banning amalgamation was necessary because a black man from his neighborhood had recently kidnapped a white woman. He said the measure was necessary to protect “poor white trash, if you please, as they have been styled by some…from further social degradation.” He warned that black men would acquire land, money, and position in society and then “insidiously make their advances to these unfortunate and helpless persons [poor whites]” and then “mislead and misguide them [] into error and folly…”

And, just as the Nazis on the show—and in real life—tried to sow fear of black leadership, so did reactionaries during and after reconstruction. Trying to undermine black judges—hard as it is to believe, there were black judges on the bench in southern states just years after slavery ended—writers opposed to reconstruction spun wild tales. In one case, when a black judge was told that he had not charged the jury (lawyer speak for providing instructions before deliberations), the judge allegedly said “Gemmen of de Jury, I charge you half a dollar apiece and you must pay it before the case goes on.”

Another newspaper described a black Arkansas judge as “a true type of the old plantation negro” who was “one of the many ignorant persons to whose hands Radical prejudice of the State has given the administration of the law.” The judge’s courthouse was allegedly “his own log cabin, humble as a shanty.” When interrupted by a plaintiff, Brown allegedly replied “hold on dar Mr. Clerk, go on wid de court; I knows de law.”

A delegate at Texas’ constitutional convention argued for making only a handful of judicial districts for the election of judges to ensure a white majority in every district. Having any district with a black majority would “destroy the hopes of fifteen counties and put them under negro rule…by forcing upon them [whites] a set of district judges elected by the negroes of those districts.” Black officials were treated as ignorant and an affront to basic dignity. Whites were supposed to be embarrassed to have such blacks ruling over them. This is the same embarrassment the Nazis wanted to exploit on the show.

The show wasn’t perfect on race. Although it was very moving to hear BCR members go around a circle and share portions of their life story, it would have had more impact to show flashbacks. The show could have shown life in America before the Nazi invasion. It would have packed a real emotional punch to show one of them, say, going through side entrances of a store or learning from hand-me down textbooks in segregated schools with inadequate resources, and then being herded into a Nazi concentration camp.

Still, I’m glad the show chose to seriously engage with race this season.

Some Nazis Had Redeeming Qualities

Can a good person be a Nazi? The Nazis murdered millions of people, broke treaties, plunged the world into a terrible war, all for horrible ideas. So it seems absurd even to consider such a question. Wading into the uncomfortable space where we ask it is Man in the High Castle.

Based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Man in the High Castle describes a world where the Germans and Japanese won World War Two. They have both carved up the United States into zones of influence: the Japanese control the West and the Germans the East. After defeating the allies, they are now in a cold war reminiscent of the one that actually happened between the United States and the Soviet Union. The show follows Juliana Crane and her boyfriend Frank (along with others) as they are caught up in the resistance to Germany and Japan. One the men they are resisting is John Smith.

When American Heroes Become Nazis

Our first introduction to Smith is as a high-level Nazi bureaucrat ferreting out American resistance. Smith orders a man to be tortured, and then beaten to death. He’s set up nicely to be a villain for us to hate for the entire series. This is fair for a man who does many villainous things. He double-crosses a band of black smugglers by promising them money in exchange for one of the films [on the show, Hitler tasks him with finding films depicting an alternate universe where the Nazis lost world war two], but then sends a bomb. He demonstrates no remorse about participating in war crimes and genocide as a younger man.

But there’s more. He’s a loving father and husband. You can see it in the way he interacts with his son and daughters when they’re eating breakfast or in the intimate moments he shares with his wife. And it is precisely those attachments that make his journey as a Nazi so compelling. The Nazis on the show–and in real life–engaged in euthanasia for anyone they deemed subhuman. This includes those with debilitating ailments. At first he and his wife seemed to agree with this; his wife observed after seeing Smith’s brother in a wheelchair that such people weren’t permitted to suffer under Nazi rule, i.e., were euthanized. Her tune changed when she learned their son Thomas had a rare, incurable disorder. The doctor gave Smith an ultimatum: kill his son himself, or have the condition reported to the government (in which case Thomas would have been killed anyway). To save his son’s life, Smith murdered the doctor and covered it up. At the same time he was rising up the Reich’s hierarchy, he was a victim  of its ideology. And although he was an ambitious man, he was willing to put his ambitions at risk for those he loved. With an excellent portrayal by Rufus Sewell, viewers are eventually left cheering for what remains of Smith’s humanity to prevail over his darkness.

As the series went on, we learned that Smith had fought bravely in the U.S. Army before the Nazis took over. This is a tantalizing hint of what might have been for his character: a patriotic American devoted to serving his country and its ideals. More than anything, I’m left with questions for him. Did he ever think about joining the resistance? What were his views towards the blacks and Jews targeted by the Nazis? What about Nazism appealed to a decorated American soldier?

What can we learn from John Smith?

Smith’s nuanced portrayal differs from the way Nazis usually appear in popular media. On Man in the High Castle, Hitler was a crazed maniac obsessed with crushing the resistance to his rule and tracking down the films. In Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, Hitler is cartoonishly evil, vetting auditions for actors trying to play his nemesis Billy (a man fighting in the resitance to Nazi rule in the game) and shooting those who displease him. And Hitler wasn’t even the craziest on the show; that honor belongs to Reinhard Heydrich and others plotting to embroil the world in a war with Japan. It says something about the bloodlust of the Nazis on the show that Hitler is too meek for some of them.

An exception is the German movie Downfall, set during the last days of world war two. Hitler is shown at the beginning being kind to his secretary and dog and appreciative of the efforts his Hitler Youth soldiers make. Of course, there are limits to how much Downfall can humanize Hitler given the historical record. The movie recognizes this. Out of touch with reality, he orders around nonexistent German units to attack his enemies and fulminates against generals who accurately describe the military situation. His SS hunts down and hangs old men who refuse to fight against overwhelming odds.

The best Downfall can do is give Hitler’s monstrosity a human gloss. But there can be no doubt that a man who plunged the world into a war that continues to affect us today and ordered the genocide of people he deemed inferior is a monster.

The only way Hitler could have succeeded, though, was with the assitance of others. There were the millions of Germans who shared every aspect of his wretched ideology and cheered him on as he trampled on human rights and brought war. But even that was insufficient. To be as effective as he was, he needed the assistance of people like John Smith, people who had consciences and redeeming qualities. That is scary.

One enduring lesson from world war two is to vigilantly guard against leaders like Hitler. And yet to stop there lets us off too easy. To truly avoid repeating the atrocities, we have to be vigilant against men like John Smith.

Would Nazis Have Been Any Worse For Blacks Than Jim Crow?

The question of what life in America would have looked like under Nazi rule continues to fascinate us. In 2019, shows like Man in the High Castle are still popular. The show’s three seasons, set in 1960s America, are plenty-thought provoking, but given that it makes only oblique references to race at a time the civil rights movement would have been blooming historically, it left me wondering what a Nazi-ruled America would have looked like for blacks.

Nazi Racial Ideology

Racism was core to Nazism. In Mein Kampf, everything good was associated with Aryans, the alleged master race. Hitler declared that “[a]ll the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” Blacks were inferior. For Hitler, in fact, they were part of a Jewish plot to degrade Germany: “[i]t was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.”

These attitudes influenced Nazi policy. The few blacks in Germany found it impossible to become German citizens; their passports eventually read “stateless negroes.” In 1941, they were kicked out of German public schools. They were the focus of forced sterilization efforts.

Historian Eve Rosenhaft suggests that a 1942 survey of blacks in Europe was done with the intent of rounding them up. That never happened. But during the war, the Nazis used blacks as propaganda to stiffen the German people’s’ spines. Take a look at these pictures:

Ironically, the Nazis later targeted black soldiers in their propaganda efforts during the war too. Leaflets targeting black soldiers bragged “there have never been lynchings of colored men in Germany. They have always been treated decently.” Others claimed that “colored people living in Germany can go to any church they like. They have never been a problem to the Germans.”

But black soldiers would have seen this for the lie it was. Black newspapers drew parallels between Jim Crow and Nazism before the U.S. even entered the war. In 1938, the New York Amsterdam News reported that “[t]aking a leaf from United States Jim Crow practices against the Negro, German Nazis plan to Jim Crow Jews on German railways…” More ominously, it noted that “[t]he Nazis, in declaring their intentions of Jim-Crowing Jews within the Reich, specifically cited American Jim Crow customs against its Negro citizens…” Walter White of the NAACP even went so far as to ask Jesse Owens and other black athletes to boycott the 1936 Olympics because it was being held in Nazi Germany.  He warned that “if the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the world are successful it is inevitable that dictatorships based upon prejudice will spread throughout the world, as indeed they are now spreading.”

Nazi obsession with racial purity ultimately led to the holocaust where more than six million Jews were murdered. Other groups such as gypsies, gays, and slavs suffered grievously too.

Life for Blacks under Nazi Occupation

Given their propensity for genocide, what would the Nazis have done if they had taken over America and its millions of blacks? Surely nothing good. Man in the High Castle hints at this. At one point, Joe Blake, one of the main characters, reads the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a child. After reading a passage about Jim, the child asks “how can he be good–he’s black!” At which point his mom notes that the Nazis banned the book. We can infer that when they took over America, the Nazis’ propaganda targeted blacks. In the show, one of the most important resistance fighters, Lemuel Washington, is black, and so are several others. So we can infer that whatever remained of the black community perceived the Nazis as a sufficiently serious threat that it was preferable to risk death in the resistance.

The book makes these implicit racial dynamics explicit. The Nazis reinstituted slavery in the United States. This outcome is so horrifying because it is so believable. Slavery legally ended with the 13th amendment. But it continued in all but name with things like peonage, sharecropping, and chain gangs. Well into the 20th century, an outside observer could look at the lives of many blacks and conclude they had not improved since slavery. Nazi occupiers could have used blacks (and other disfavored minorities) as slave labor to power their war effort the way they used slave labor in Europe. And Nazi slavery might have been even worse than American slavery. During the antebellum period, slaves had the hope–however distant and difficult–of running the underground railroad to freedom in the North. But with Nazis occupying all of America, where would they have gone?

An even more horrifying possibility could have greeted blacks when Nazis arrived: extermination. We know the Nazis viewed blacks as inferior, and we know from the holocaust that they were willing to commit genocide against groups they despised. The logical conclusion of these attitudes would be death camps. And just as Poles and Ukrainians aided Nazis in their persecution of Jews, we can imagine some racist Americans doing similarly. This would have made blacks especially likely to resist Nazi occupation. So in the video game Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, when a black woman was a key resistance leader, I was unsurprised. All Americans would have lost freedom and dignity under Nazi rule, just as those living in conquered European nations had. Blacks could have faced wholesale genocide. The resulting calculus would have been something like “I could die if I do resist, but I will die if I don’t.” As an aside, Wolfenstein surprisingly offers a more thoughtful look at race relations in Nazi-occupied America. A scene in the game features KKK members and others welcoming Nazi rule with open arms, grateful to be rid of blacks and Jews. It acknowledges the backwards racial attitudes too many had when, in a flashback, the protagonist’s father punishes him for befriending a black girl.

Perhaps the most horrifying possibility is that things would have stayed the same under Nazi rule. Blacks would have attended separate and unequal schools, drank from separate water fountains, been denied the ability to live in particular neighborhoods, and faced widespread lynchings…just like they did under Jim Crow. The reason I say this is perhaps worst of all is because it means the Nazis–some of the most evil people in history–would have said “black people were already oppressed enough before we got here.”

This possibility was reflected in Jesse Owen’s experience. At the 1936 Olympics, Owens put the lie to Nazi racial ideology by winning four gold medals. There was a persistent story that Hitler refused to shake Owen’s hand. But Owens wryly noted, “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.” He later reflected that “after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country and I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus…I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference [between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow]?” At a reception in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria, he was relegated to the service lift instead of the regular one reserved for whites. The sad truth is that for Owens, there was no difference between Nazi ideology about blacks and Jim Crow ideology about blacks.

All of these possibilities are frightening. But there is a more uplifting one. It’s hard to imagine a people who rebelled against a king submitting to Nazi rule. I’m confident that there would have been widespread resistance. The only way for any resistance movement to succeed would have been to unify across racial and ethnic divides. And there is hope that even racists resisting the Nazis would have had reason to reconsider their prejudices. The more self-aware ones would have been able to draw parallels between Jim Crow and Nazi racial policies.

The trailer for season four of the Man in the High Castle looks promising when it comes to race. Lots of black resistance fighters are portrayed. And I hope the show will explore in more depth what racial dynamics look like in Nazi-occupied America.

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About the Confederate Flag Representing Southern Heritage

Memorials to confederate soldiers have become a point of contention in the past several years. This is something I welcome. The Civil War shook our country up in ways nothing else has. And even after all this time, we haven’t arrived at a consensus about how to remember it. Nothing puts a finer point on this than the confederate memorials. Should they stand to commemorate valiant southern soldiers or brilliant strategy from confederate generals? Or is their existence an affront of the worst order: a celebration of treasonous men who tore the country apart and fought for a cause that would have denied freedom to millions of blacks?

Free State of Jones provided an intriguing perspective on these questions. It is often said that the confederate flag and confederate memorials merely represent southern heritage that we should honor. But, the movie suggests the answer is more complicated. It follows Newton Knight, a southern farmer opposed to slavery who deserts after losing his nephew in the war.

When he gets back to Mississippi and sees the confederate home guard pillaging supplies from civilians, he decides to lead a rebellion of his own–against the rebels. Working with escaped slaves and other deserters, he fights guerilla style for years. At one point, he even tries to work with Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Ironically, a confederate memorial stands in in Ellisville, Mississippi, which was “ground zero” for the rebellion in Jones County. The real-life version of Knight supported the Union just as strongly as the fictional version did. He so undermined the tax system in Jones county that the confederacy sent two regiments to take him out. They failed. After the war, he was an ally to blacks, ensuring that masters freed their slaves and fighting the Klan.

Knight was hardly the only white Southerner opposed to the confederacy. By some estimates, in fact, over 100,000 white Southerners fought for the Union. These men were just as “southern” as the men who fought for the rebels. But if you could transport them to today, would we seriously think that men who carried the American flag into battle would consider the confederate flag as representing their heritage?

Holding up the confederate flag as the symbol of southern heritage has always been in tension with the historical record. As you might suspect, it leaves out the 90,000 former slaves who fought in the Union army. Would a Mississippi slave who fled his master to join the Union army really regard the confederate flag as representing his heritage? Would he feel honored that monuments and public places fly it?

The Civil War echoes into our time. The things we were fighting about–racial equality, the proper role of the federal government, etc–are things we still are. As we grapple with how to remember the conflict, I hope we will do so with nuance. On that score, there is no better place to start than recogizing that the oft-overlooked southern unionists are an important part of southern heritage.

Read Book of Negroes

I recently finished Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. It was phenomenal.

The story follows Aminata Diallo, a Muslim growing up in Western Africa when her parents are killed and she is captured and sent to the New World. The story documents the harrowing trip on a filthy slave ship where the captives launch a failed slave revolt. She then lives on Robinson Appleby’s harsh South Carolina plantation for years where an overseer secretly teaches her to read. She marries Chekura, who came with her on the ship, but their child is sold away from them.

Eventually, she is sold to Solomon Lindo in Charleston, who provides further tutoring in reading and math so she can be his secretary. Lindo is kinder than Appleby, and Aminata comes to have genuine affection for him and his wife. Still, she struggles being separated from her husband and baby and chafes at being a slave.

So when she visits New York with Lindo, she escapes. After doing work for the British during the American Revolution, she becomes responsible for writing down the names of black loyalists in the “Book of Negroes” so they can leave with the British to Canada. Of course, Canada turns out to be no better. The blacks face the same discrimination and hardship they were fleeing from in America. She loses her husband at sea, and the daughter they had while living together in New York is taken from her.

Finally, Aminata helps found a colony for freedmen in Sierra Leone funded by English abolitionists. The slaves are just as dependent on the abolitionists as they were on their masters, and the colony struggles for life. To make matters worse, on a visit back to the village she was taken from, the men guiding her scheme to sell her back into slavery.

The story is on pace to be a tragedy until Aminata goes to London to advocate for ending the slave trade and is reunited with the daughter taken from her so many years ago. She ends up supporting a school and writing her life’s story.

It’s honestly one of the best novels I’ve read in years for a few reasons. First, Hill presented us with a rigorously researched, believable world. Lots of small details demonstrate this. He took the time to dig into the languages someone like Aminata would have spoken and the process for making indigo in the 1700s. These details made the book something I could learn from. For example, a sizeable proportion of African captives practiced Islam, which plantation owners consciously suppressed. It’s a good reminder that Islamophobia predates 9/11.

Second, it has such a nuanced portrayal of betrayal and hypocrisy. We see the Africans selling each other into slavery and placing profit over the rights of their fellow human beings–the same evil the white plantation owners and ship captains are committing. We see the abolitionists committed to blacks’ wellbeing demonstrating the same paternalism when they insist on telling Aminata’s story for her or running the colony for freedmen that underlies slavery itself.

Finally, the story was ultimately an uplifting one. Aminata’s story will help abolitionists end Britain’s slave trade. And at the end of her life, Aminata is reunited with the daughter taken from her earlier. Her life was difficult in a way few of us could imagine. But in the end, she can take comfort in her daughter’s love and in the fact that she’s played a major role in fighting a grave injustice.
Book of Negroes is well worth your time.

Ivan Drago Was Creed II’s Biggest Winner

Adonis Creed may have walked away from Creed II’s final fight as world heavyweight champion, but Ivan Drago was the biggest winner.

We first met Ivan more than 30 years ago in Rocky IV. There, as in Creed II, he was the villain. The Soviets touted him as a boxing machine that could destroy anything in its path. He rarely spoke, and when he did, it was to say things like “I must break you.” He killed Apollo Creed–Adonis’ father–in an exhibition fight and showed no remorse for doing so. When Rocky beat him in Moscow, we celebrated more than a great fighter winning a match. We enjoyed seeing a vicious man get his comeuppance.

But we wouldn’t have enjoyed seeing what came after. When he lost to Rocky, Ivan’s own wife left him and their son. His country turned its back on him. This left deep wounds that Ivan’s still dealing with in Creed II. He was made to feel like he was worthless to everyone in his life merely for losing one match. Part of why Ivan pushes his son Viktor so hard is to prove his worth. If he can train Viktor to be a heavyweight champion, then he won’t be a failure anymore. He would be worthy of his ex-wife and country’s affections. He would be loved.

It’s sad that his worldview is so transactional–he wins a boxing championship and then he wins love. And yet, that isn’t so different from the way we treat our sports heroes. We laud them when they make the big catch or the tough shot to win the game; we scream for them to be traded when they mess up.

And it unfortunately is not always far from how we view love. Sure, most of us wouldn’t abandon a spouse or a child for losing a boxing match. But how many children get good grades or pursue certain professions out of a desire for love on some level? They think they’ll become high achievers, and then they’ll be worthy of love and hence loved by their families. We fear that love is conditional, and let’s face it, sometimes it is.

That’s what makes the final fight so moving. After crushing Creed in the first fight, Viktor was a huge favorite to win their rematch. But by the end of the second match–despite being an overwhelming favorite–Viktor is getting beaten so badly that he looks likely to suffer grievous injuries or worse. Ivan throws his towel to end the fight. He tells Viktor “it’s ok.” Later, we see them running together.

Tellingly, Viktor’s own mother had left when he started getting pummelled. And the fans turned their backs on him. This is exactly what happened to Ivan. But in throwing the towel and embracing him, Ivan rises above the conditional view of love his mistreatment has conditioned him to expect. Viktor is his son, and he’ll stand by him and love him, champion or not.

For the last 30 years, Ivan has been in a far tougher fight than the one he lost to Rocky: the one for his humanity. At the end of Creed II, he won it. And in so doing, he taught us something valuable about love.

What Kids With Autism Have to Teach Us

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We expend a great deal of effort to make kids normal in school. We have all sorts of interventions to help students with learning and intellectual disabilities live a “normal” life. The show Atypical should make us reconsider how we view autism. Most of the time, we think “how can we help autistic kids become more like us.” The question the show raises, is “in what ways should we become more like them?”

The show focuses on a high school senior named Sam as he navigates school, work, and family drama with autism. His autism imposes some limits–it makes it hard for him to be in crowded environments or unfamiliar settings–but he is able to function well. He holds down a job from which it looks like he’s managed to save every cent he’s ever earned. He maintains a close friendship with a co-worker and is a loving sibling. He has a talent for art and gets accepted to a scientific illustration program. Most parents, I’m sure, would be proud to have a son like him.

His biggest problem is that he struggles to lie. It is wrong to lie, simple as that. Living by this clear moral vision makes it hard for him to engage in the white lies almost everyone else does. He’s so bad at lying in fact, that he asks his mom to help him. Knowing that she cheated on his dad, he figured she was an expert at lying and tells her so to her face. It is the sort of truth that perhaps only someone lacking in social graces would tell, and one that she probably needed to hear.

So he convinces his coworker and friend Zahid to teach him the “pants on fire” lying technique to hilarious effect. It’s a simple three step process: first offer the person being lied to praise, second, respond to every question with “obviously,” and third, flee the scene. Sam manages to successfully lie, but not without experiencing great discomfort–the sort of discomfort the rest of society would be well-served to feel before lying.

We manage to give kids mixed messages about truth telling. We extol the virtues of honesty and then expect kids to tell others that they look nice in that ugly outfit, or that they enjoyed someone’s cooking even though it’s terrible. Perhaps these white lies are necessary to keep the peace. We would all get upset really quickly if everyone confronted us with their every thought. Perhaps they help us keep relationships and self-esteem intact.

But even these noble goals don’t provide clarity about when to tell the truth. You could justify all manner of lies by telling yourself you’re doing it for other people. Sam’s autism doesn’t allow him to go down that slippery slope. For him, truth is truth and should never be obscured. Right is right and wrong is wrong. These are simple insights, but ones we fail to realize all the time.

Injustice Doesn’t Pay in the Long Run

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Spartacus was an entertaining series while it was on the air. And it contained a simple but profound message: injustice doesn’t pay in the long run.

The show was–loosely I’m sure– based on the slave revolt in ancient Rome. Spartacus was minding his business in Thrace when the Romans came by asking them to fight a common enemy. When their commander, Claudius Glaber instead used the men to fight a different enemy to gain greater glory for himself, Spartacus led a mutiny. When it was put down, Spartacus’ village was burned down, his wife was sold into slavery, and he was sentenced to die.

Surviving his execution, Spartacus became a slave to a gladiatorial trainer. He and his fellow gladiators lived in cages. Their sole purpose in life was to amuse Roman crowds in brutal spectacle where someone invariably died. It already wasn’t much of an existence, but then his master promised to buy his wife, only to have her killed lest she distract him from his gladiatorial pursuits.

Unsurprisingly, he came to hate the Roman system enough to revolt. He started by killing the master who had treated him so horribly and convincing his fellow slaves to join him. Across two seasons, he pillaged, killed, and humiliated his Roman enemies until subdued in a costly battle. And it’s wasn’t only slaveholders affected. I suspect many of the soldiers who fought him and the civilians killed by enraged followers did not have slaves. Slavery may have brought the Romans free labor and entertainment. But then it brought them destruction.

You’d think would-be slave owners throughout history would have learned. You’d think the Romans would have said “this whole slavery thing hasn’t turned out that well for us, maybe we should give it up. We could even pay people a fair salary to compete as gladiators and keep all the spectacle.” You’d think plantation owners in the antebellum era would have said “slavery sure brought those Romans a lot of pain. Being out here in this heat is no fun, but maybe we should do our own work.”

But no. The lure of cheap labor was too strong. People weren’t willing to pay for their wealth with honest work. So amid slave revolts, some paid with their lives. When people are robbed of hope and dignity like Spartacus was, they will consider doing desperate things like, I don’t know, stirring up a bloody rebellion.

Oppression doesn’t just hurt the oppressed. It eventually results in ruinous consequences for the oppressors. And everyone left in their wake.