Customer Reviews

Anti-Racism in U.S. History: The First Two Hundred Years (Contributions in American History)

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Mr. Aptheker, a much-respected historian and Socialist thinker, in my view has taken a couple of "nuances" - the utter absurdity of racism and the mere existence of anti-racism -- and elevated this into a full-scale argument? Thus while his thesis holds water on an abstract intellectual level, in the face of anti-racism's utter failure given the "persistent of racism" -- reduces his argument to little more than a revisionist sideshow. Allow me to explain:

His thesis, including his careful but selective "culling of history" for anti-racist facts to support it, that anti-racism has existed throughout American history, is just an historical detail, a difference in degree rather than kind along the spectrum of racism. For while it is true that anti-racist sentiments have always been a part of American social and political thought (in fact at the opposite end of the spectrum from virulent racism). The sad truth is that in comparison with virulent racism it has been consistently ineffectual. So clearly, the issue is not just whether anti-racist sentiments have existed in American history, but whether they have been effective or efficacious in altering the course of American social and political attitudes on race? I believe, even today with a black President, the jury remains out on that question. In short, I do not believe that the author's arguments have been persuasive.

In my view, his attempt to resurrect anti-racism from the dead has been a skillful exercise in "American style" intellectualization, a technique often used to revise and elevate American moral history upward through "backward propagation." But all attempts to so in this case are bound to fail because today's reality is the final test of whether anti-racism has succeeded or failed . And in that regard, the cold-blooded fact is that the controlling psychological mechanism on questions of race in America, since the nation's inception, tragically has been, and remains, the overpowering sentiments of racism, not sentiments of anti-racism.

One of the most important reasons this attempt fails is because the truth is that (as the author notes as an aside) even the most committed anti-racists throughout American history have also been profound and committed White Supremacists? Included in that list are the Abolitionists, most U.S. Presidents up through Franklin D. Roosevelt; and of course, with rare exceptions almost all religious leaders. And although religious leaders have come around somewhat (kicking and screaming) since (not before) the Civil Rights revolution, for the most part they remain a force for the racist status quo rather than for anti-racism.

The author's brand of intellectualization then has simply "skimmed the cream off the top," marshalling sporadic facts, exaggerating the impact of anti-racist thinking, and always ignoring the deeper realities of the firm foothold that racism has on the American mind and on American society.

Given what we know today from the latest brain research and from advances in social psychology, this is very unfortunate. We are finally beginning to understand that moving from a "profoundly racist world" to an "anti-racism one" cannot be done by fiat, or through after-the-fact intellectual gymnastics. Historians cannot simply get together one day and decide to revise American history so that what once was white is now suddenly decreed to be black? The collective mind we are now told, does not work in that way.

Like the human brain it too is built up of modules based on repeated cycles of experience. What we act on is the subconscious programs running in the those experience-based modules in the background. Thus if there are no repeated and sustained cycles of anti-racist experiences for the collective brain to build its modules on, then anti-racism will have little or no effect on American culture. And that is where we are in today's American society. QED. Three Stars