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THREAD: Tonight’s images of the police response to protests over the murder of #GeorgeFloyd have me thinking about the juxtaposition of two images out of the Midwest in recent weeks: one from Minnesota and one from Michigan. This isn’t random- it’s a deliberate result of history.
You may have heard of the Southern Strategy and how Richard Nixon brought two-party polarization to the South, “whistling Dixie” to try to pry ardent racists away from the Democratic Party. But I believe the reverse also occurred: Southern politics went mainstream.
Toward the end of the 19th century, a political tactic emerged in the Reconstruction/nascent Jim Crow South in response to the integrated political parties that kept popping up in opposition to the socioeconomic power structure that had existed since slavery.
The tactic was simple, plucked straight from the antebellum days — tell non-wealthy white folks that they (obviously) can never be lifted up to the level of the elite, BUT stress that they can greatly improve their status above the now freed slaves in a rigid hierarchy.
The impoverished majority was split, thus preserving the elites’ grip on power. Whites were told that they could never be in coalition with the minority. To do so would to threaten white wealth, white status, white power — a message spread both legally and extrajudicially.
This is the message Nixon and his advisers latched on to. They saw the political power of men like George Wallace, preaching great (but not too great) advancements for poor whites while warning about the dangers of sharing that progress.
That message became a standard, thinly-veiled talking point, from anti-busing rhetoric to “welfare queens” to Trump’s faux concern for “inner cities.” Thus, the police officers in MN and MI have heard this rhetoric all their lives. It’s become internalized, normalized.
There’s a reason any group of black people making demands is seen as immensely more threatening then even armed whites doing the same. It’s why Dylann Roof survived his encounter with the police while George Floyd, like so many before him, did not.
Our politics created this. These aren’t self-evident truths; like all of racism, these narratives have been carefully and deliberately crafted to benefit the ones telling them. However, this means that our politics could have the power to change this.
Step one is to acknowledge that the politics of race in this country is a contrived white supremacist framing that goes back centuries. It’s never random. It’s never about bad apples. It’s about how American history has led to this moment, over and over again. — END THREAD
