The Black History of the White House Read Free

the limits of the social and broader historical constraints of their times. The political status quo is stubborn and, within a system of checks and balances such as exists in the United States, rarely elastic enough to answer civil society’s incessantcall for change. It is only under extraordinary conditions, such as when the efforts of ordinary citizens are focused on social movements whose demands threaten the elites with crisis, that massive and fundamental social transformation occurs. This trend is particularly pronounced throughout the history of race relations in the United States. In other words, whether Obama will have the opportunity for major advancements in the area of race relations and social equality will depend much more on the evolution of the political balance of forces, the state of the economy, the viability of political and social institutions, and the ideological atmosphere than simply his will (or lack thereof).
    The black history of the White House is one in which the institution of the U.S. presidency has, generally speaking, only seriously and qualitatively responded to the nation’s unjust racial divide in the face of crisis, when an uncertain future loomed, critical and divisive decisions had to be made, and black and anti-racist resistance were focused, intense, and spreading. Whether the White House response led to progressive social advances, conservative rollback—or both—has been determined by each era’s particular factors, the personal predilections of the president in command being only one such element. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson faced crises, arguably, under which the coherence and very existence of the nation itself was at stake. Civil war, economic catastrophe, and urban unrest challenged the legitimacy and power of the state, creating opportunities for radical social proposals that were normally ignored and dismissed.
    It is hardly a given that the state’s response to crisis will result in progressive democratic change. The Bush White House, for example, responding to the September 11 attacks, instituted antidemocratic, authoritarian, ultraconservative policies thatwould have been impossible to implement under normal circumstances. These included launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; curtailing civil liberties with the harsh USA Patriot Act; violating international human rights conventions with opened-ended detentions, military tribunals, the legal limbo of Guantánamo Bay prison, secret prisons, torture, extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial assassinations, and negligent killing of foreign civilians; and other legally and morally reprehensible actions.
    Black Challenges to the White House
    There is a long history of both black challenge and black accommodation to the White House. Every point in this country’s past has seen black resistance to social injustice, including direct calls to the president for relief from, reparations for, and remediation of institutional racism. The black challenge has taken the form of slave escapes, revolts, underground networks, creation of maroon societies, literacy campaigns, petitions, participation in the Revolution (on both sides) and the Civil War, grassroots Reconstruction efforts, sit-ins, sit-outs, mass mobilizations (and threats thereof), voter registration drives, leadership in massive social movements, campaigns for political office including the offices of president and vice president, and countless other collective and individual counterassaults against white domination and discrimination. All have factored into the policy and political decisions made by U.S. presidents. The squeezing of the president for the juice of justice has been indispensable to black political and social movements in the enduring struggle for equality.
    It could not be any other way. Racism and the exercise of white racial hegemony were at the core of the American Revolution and the founding