"What Happened on Jan. 6 Is Far Less Significant Than What Happened Before Jan. 6—and What Has and Has Not Happened Since Then"

"As we approach the one-year anniversary of the violent assault on the Capitol, the prevailing argument on the left and much of the center is that the Republican Party poses a novel threat to American democracy. This is a flawed assessment, which oversells and understates the danger we face."

Corey Robin at Politico issues warnings about minority rule.

"What Good Is the Promise of Fair Employment When There Is No Employment for Black Americans?"

"Scott King saw economic precarity as not just a side effect of racial subjugation, but as central to its functioning. Political enfranchisement was just the first step. As she explained in 1976, 'People couldn't see the economics of the movement because of the drama. . . . [The] next step was parity in income distribution.' The solution Scott King promoted is an old one, but its time has come: legislation to provide federal governmental guarantees to employment, at living wages, where people are located, and in areas that serve social needs—rather than those of the market."

In a 2017 Boston Review article, David Stein discusses "Coretta Scott King's vision of full employment."

"Because of Sex"

"When Smith introduced the amendment to Title VII, he read this spoof letter from a woman complaining that there are more women than men where she lives, and arguing, 'Doesn't every woman have the right to a husband?' Everyone was laughing—what a huge joke, how silly the idea of women's equality is … Griffiths stood up and said, If we needed some proof for the necessity of this amendment, this chamber just gave it to us. Pretty much silenced the place."

Rebecca Onion at Slate interviews Christina Wolbrecht about the outlawing of sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"Geography Was Far More Predictive of Voting Coalitions on the Civil Rights [Act] Than Party Affiliation"

"In this case, it becomes clear that Democrats in the north and the south were more likely to vote for the bill than Republicans in the north and south respectively. This difference in both houses is statistically significant with over 95% confidence. It just so happened southerners made up a larger percentage of the Democratic than Republican caucus, which created the initial impression than Republicans were more in favor of the act.
"Nearly 100% of Union state Democrats supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act compared to 85% of Republicans. None of the southern Republicans voted for the bill, while a small percentage of southern Democrats did."

In a 2013 Guardian article, Harry J. Enten answers the question, "Were Republicans really the party of Civil Rights in the 1960s?" 

"Bill's a Bully"

"Buccola is less interested in who won the debate (according to the audience, Baldwin trounced Buckley by a three-to-one margin) than in what the event signified politically and culturally. Each man had 'reached the height of their prominence at nearly the same moment,' Buccola says, and both had a major impact shaping popular attitudes about the civil rights movement. By studying how the two men got to share a stage, we can learn something more profound about the struggle for black equality and the origins of the modern conservative movement—two legacies that remain with us today."

Robert L. Tsai at Boston Review reviews Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America.

"Smith's Own Little Flea-Bitten Booby Trap"

"On February 8, 1964, as the House of Representatives debated passage of the bill, Howard Smith, an ardent segregationist from Virginia, rose to propose changes to four pages of Title VII, the section of the bill barring hiring and firing 'because of' race, creed, religion, or color. 'After the word religion, insert sex,' Smith drawled, urging his colleagues to rectify 'this grave injustice … particularly in an election year.'
"The result was two hours of pandemonium on the House floor."

Todd S. Purdum at The Atlantic depicts the odd history of the Civil Rights Act and sex discrimination.

"Language of Post–Civil Rights White Supremacy"

"The expressions 'racially tinged' and 'racially charged' emerged during the modern civil rights movement. Newspaper databases show the same pattern as Google Ngrams: regular use began in the 1950s and '60s, increased in the late twentieth century, and has been rampant since 2010. ('Racially provocative' also skyrocketed in the 2010s.) Historian Barbara J. Fields has written that the substitution of 'race' for 'racism' 'transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of an object.' More than twenty-five years ago, Fields observed that 'the neutral shibboleths of difference and diversity' had replaced terms such as 'slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation.' Fields noted that such language enhanced 'the authority and prestige of race,' a phrase given meaning via the creation of hierarchies of power. The scientifically incoherent concept of 'race' becomes real through such speech acts, which serve to stabilize 'race' as a reality rather than denaturalize it as a social construction."

Lawrence B. Glickman at Boston Review criticizes euphemism that "masks the danger of racism."

"All the More Urgent in the Era Where Donald Trump Has Made Obvert Racism a Cornerstone of Republican Politics"

"Rather than suggesting that we need to have more conservatives write on the history of conservatism, Kabaservice should ask why the existing literature of conservatives writing about their own movement is so poor. He closes by suggesting 'liberal historians' subscribe to conservative magazines, that their anger might be 'better informed.' Yet it's not so clear that liberals would be surprised by what they find in the pages of conservative publications. Conservatives, if one is to take their amnesia at face value, might be."

Jeet Heer at The New Republic reacts to Geoffrey Kabaservice's criticism of liberal historians of conservatism.

Beware "Bad Faith Claims of Bigotry"

"Ending racism is a necessary, critical goal. But that goal should be pursued in tandem with efforts to address the effects of racism. The wage gap, the health care gap, the education gap, the debt gap — all these disparities would be narrowed by progressive, intersectional economic programs. As popular opinion coalesces around these policies, it’s crucial that we not let our best impulses be weaponized against our interests, any more than conservatives weaponize the worst impulses of their constituents against theirs."

Briahna Gray at The Intercept warns against the "Race Reductionist."

Balls and Strikes

"In his opinion hobbling preclearance, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the 15th Amendment, which protects racial minorities' right to vote, 'is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.' But Section 5 did not 'punish for the past'; it used the past to determine where racial voter suppression was most likely to occur in the future. The catastrophic consequences of Shelby County suggest Section 5's forecasts were accurate. And thanks to Roberts' handiwork, the residents of Randolph County are confronting a future in which their right to vote has been quietly nullified."

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate writes that "[f]ive years later, the consequences of the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act are painfully clear."

"Defining a Conservative Idea of 'Diversity'"

"One can begin to hear how Warren's multicultural argument intersects with Powell's defense of segregation in the Keyes concurrence. But Powell's biggest contribution to the modern history of race and law came in the Court's decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), when he argued that diversity could be taken into account as a factor in college admissions, but not to respond to historical injustice against African Americans. Instead, Powell thought that the only reason diversity could be taken into account was when it was designed to promote 'academic freedom.' As Walker notes, this kind of argument, like the Southern moderates' position examined in his first book, purportedly seeks to protect the 'diversity' of cultural institutions but is, in fact, 'hostile to aggressive government efforts aimed at achieving equality.' Like Warren, Powell made a case for multicultural pluralism that ultimately weakened the idea of social, as well as cultural, integration."

At The Nation, Robert Green reviews Anders Walker's The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America.

"Identity Is Not About Returning to Your Roots, but About Coming to Terms With Your Routes"

"I think we have to be open to understanding that our identities are not foundations for anything; they are unstable, they are multifarious—and that can be unsettling. But we have to find ways to become comfortable with that, and part of how we can do that is by creating new ways of relating to each other, which can come through mass movements. The way we can overcome the fragmentation that identity seems to lead to now is precisely by recognizing what the Combahee River Collective proposed: being able to assert a political autonomy and also being in coalitions. I think that's very practical. It's not going to come from having endless arguments on Twitter; it's something that has to come through political activity. It's through working on concrete, practical projects in coalition with others."

Rashmee Kumar at The Intercept interviews Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump.

"Maybe Liberals Need to Keep Trying"

"Yet one of the lessons of the history I've just recounted is that liberals drove themselves into a dead end that nobody saw coming in 1948. The sense of superior moral standing that liberals derived from defending the rights of the marginalized often blinded them to the effect of their policies on white Americans (and at times on the marginalized themselves). This is hardly a new insight; the neoconservatives built a movement on it. Yet it seems piercingly relevant today. Donald Trump can speak the unfiltered language of George Wallace because so many white Americans feel victimized the way Wallace voters did 50 years ago. The fact that your racism is sincerely felt does not, of course, make you any the less a racist; but Trump voters also may have reason to feel that something precious is being taken from them. Maybe it behooves today's Democrats to take those grievances more seriously than they're inclined to. Maybe, to take one example, our current system of immigration, which delivers a wonderfully diverse world to cosmopolites and cheap workers to employers, is a raw deal for working-class whites."

James S. Traub at The Atlantic uses the career of Hubert Humphrey to trace the post-World War II history of the Democratic Party.

Jamelle Bouie at Slate disagrees with Traub.

"It Was the Angriest I Have Ever Been in My Life"

"'I refused to go to the back of the bus,' but 'the teacher pleaded with me. She said it would be advisable.' Eventually, with passengers looking on and the bus ride at a standstill, ML reluctantly gave in. ML, Hiram, and Miss Bradley walked to the back of the bus and grabbed a handle. 'I had to stand all the way to Atlanta,' King remembered decades later, his anger still there. As the bus went up the rural highway, ML had nothing to look at but seated white people and the darkness outside. 'It was late at night and I was tired, but that wasn't the point. It was the humiliation.'"

The Atlantic presents an excerpt from Patrick Parr's The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.

"White Women Have Made White Supremacy a Much More Formidable and Long-Lasting Force"

"The point, here, is neither to catalog nor to celebrate white women's contributions to white supremacist politics. Instead, their work should change how we understand history. It is easy to denounce the racist pronouncements and white-supremacist politics of a George Wallace or a Roy Moore. But what white women teach us is that white-supremacist politics is sustained at a much more grass-roots level by our neighbors, school boards and even friends."

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae at The New York Times writes about "the ways white women sometimes used white supremacy for their own gain."

"Racial Equality Could Only Be Achieved Through a Combination of Anti-Discrimination Policies and Social-Democratic Economic Policies"

"The horizontal organization of Black Lives Matter ensures a diversity of perspectives among participants and even branches. Nevertheless, the now-commonplace claim at the heart of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against Sanders is that white liberals have long reduced racism to class inequality in order to deflect attention from racial disparities.
"This is not just wrong, but the formulation—which ultimately treats race as unchanging and permanent rather than a product of specific historical and political economic relations—undermines both the cause of racial equality in general and pursuit of equitable treatment in the criminal justice system in particular."

In a 2015 Jacobin article, Touré F. Reed explains "Why Liberals Separate Race from Class."

"Overwhelming Evidence Showing the Central Role Racial Politics Played in the Republican Party's Rise to Power After the Civil Rights Movement"

"Buoyed by the surprising strength of Workman's campaign, South Carolina’s junior senator, Strom Thurmond, abandoned the Democratic Party in 1964 and joined the Republicans. Sixteen years earlier, Thurmond had left the Democrats briefly to run for president as a 'Dixiecrat' on the States’ Rights ticket. His surprise announcement in 1964 signaled the start of what political scientists call the 'great white switch.'"

Sid Bedingfield at The Conversation discusses the rise of the Republican Party in 1960s South Carolina. 

The Last Republican

"He supported the Equal Rights Amendment, freedom of choice on abortion and food-stamp programs. His reversal of support for the Vietnam War by the early 1970s and his early call for President Richard Nixon's resignation during the Watergate scandal placed him in sharp relief against a growing conservatism in the Republican Party."

Anne Kenderdine at the Chicago Tribune writes an obituary for John Anderson.

Chris Ladd at Forbes asks, "How did the Republican Party become a dangerous cult?"

And at New York, Jonathan Chait describes the "Republican War on Economics."

"Art Need Not Be in a Temple"

"In those two decades, people who were artists, activists, and both, did a great deal to mark blackness as an identity: the Black Panthers organised to stop police brutality, while also creating free breakfast and community medical programmes; Nina Simone released To Be Young, Gifted and Black; and Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black power fists at the 1968 Olympics. And during these years, artists such as Lorraine O'Grady were asking: what is art, who is it for? Taking their work to the streets to insist, as William T Williams put it, that 'art need not be in a temple'. Art could be everywhere."

Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian discusses the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in London.

"Have Much to Teach Us Today"

"These books aren't perfect. They were all written right as the second wave of feminism was taking off in the United States—so they largely leave out gender in their analysis of the problems of American culture, economics, and politics. But all three books still have much to teach us about the relationship between African Americans and their government. African Americans have always provided the left with its most searing critiques of American society. But African Americans have also, time and again, given the left—and the rest of the nation—the most clear-eyed understanding of America’s highest ideals."

Robert Green at Dissent looks back to 1967 and writings by Martin Luther King, Jr., Harold Cruse, and Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton about "How to Fight White Backlash."