The brilliant insight of Murakawa’s book is to locate today’s enforcement of white supremacy in the tool devised by liberals for “solving” the problem of violent, extralegal racism: Liberal law-and-order translated international battles against colonialism and genocidal racial violence into an agenda of procedural fairness, race-neutral machinery, and formal equality. Race liberals…set out to corrrect the lawlessness, not the lethality, of racial violence. In this sense, the fight for racially just law-and-order was already lost. In other words, black people were guaranteed safety only from violence falling outside of a fair set of legal rules. A report from Truman’s Presidential Committee on Civil Rights holds that “[a society] cannot permit human beings to be imprisoned or killed in the absence of due process of law without degrading its entire fabric.” (Emphasis mine.) Society can imprison and kill, as long as the law was followed fairly. For race-liberals this is not a contradiction: if racism is a case-by-case fairness problem, if white supremacy is an arbitrary unfairness, then a perfect and fair set of legal rules is mutually exclusive with racism. Therefore, perfectly administered rules ipso facto stop racial discrimination. Murakawa carefully traces how this legalistic perception of civil rights, codified under Truman, evolves into LBJ’s Great Society. LBJ, faced with massive black uprisings, treated the riots not as political expression but rather as pure criminality. Drawing a hard line between protest and riots, treating the former as political speech but the latter as inchoate violence, is one way that liberals discredit resistance to impoverishment and brutality. LBJ could thus, without a lick of irony, compare Klansmen and black rioters of Watts as “what the law declares them: law breakers.” He “likened police and prisons to teachers and schools: all need federal funding to build a better society.” It’s hard to imagine a framework that equates black people rioting with KKK lynchings as a framework capable of achieving racial justice. Instead, civil-rights legislation looked to achieve order, and the end of black “crime.” thenation/article/193977/how-white-liberals-used-civil-rights-create-more-prisons#
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:27:12 +0000
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