How did issues concerning race and ethnicity influence U.S. immigration policy since the nation’s founding? You should be sure to use illustrative examples that span the entirety of A

Overview:

The paper must be 5 pages of prose. (Prose does not include images, title pages, bibliographies, etc.)

• The term paper must written in 12-point, Cambria font or an equivalent font with one inch margins.

• You must make specific references to the course materials (primary and secondary sources)

The paper will be graded on the following criteria:

a) The quality of your historical analysis—Do you have a coherent thesis? Does your paper trace change over time? Does its argument demonstrate historical specificity ?

b) The quality and clarity of your writing—Did you proofread your essay for misspellings, typos, and word choice errors? Do you break your essay into paragraphs? Do you have a strong introduction and conclusion? Did you use proper and complete citations?

c) Incorporation of primary and secondary sources from the class readings. The exam is meant to demonstrate mastery of the course materials. Using outside sources is not required, so focus instead on using the work you have already read this semester. Do you cite readings from a variety of weeks? Do not simply use one week's readings. This is a final exam and should show comprehensive knowledge.

To make it less stressful for you, I have made this is an open book exam. However, students are expected to hand in original work. As stated at the beginning of the semester and posted to Canvas, students are not allowed to share work with one another, use sources without proper acknowledgement, or use AI and AI adjacent technology to complete this exam. If you have questions, please contact the professor. Again, remember to cite all sources fully.

ESSAY QUESTION:

How did issues concerning race and ethnicity influence U.S. immigration policy since the nation's founding? You should be sure to use illustrative examples that span the entirety of American history. In other words, choose a minimum of three examples to cover early America, the 19th century and the 20th/21st centuries. You should aim to discuss how things changed over time and/or what trends stayed the same.

"Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New Historicism

Author(s): George Lipsitz

Source: American Literary History , Winter, 1995, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 700- 725

Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/490070

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"Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac": White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New Historicism George Lipsitz

Racism is like a Cadillac.

Malcolm X

Old Cadillacs never die.

Dizzy Gillespie

The Scar of Race By Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza

Harvard University Press, 1993

Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class

Experience By Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P Sikes

Beacon Press, 1994

Race in America: The

Struggle for Equality Edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr.

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

The Black Atlantic.

Modernity and Double Consciousness

By Paul Gilroy Harvard University Press, 1993

In the first volume of his autobiography (published in 1971), Chester Himes recalls how his African-American family offended their white neighbors in rural Mississippi at the end of World War I by becoming the first owners of a private automo- bile in their county. The sight of a black family riding around in such a modern, expensive, and noisy vehicle (loud enough to frighten their neighbors' mule teams) outraged white farmers to such a degree that they secured the dismissal of Himes's father from his job at Alcorn A&M University and then forced the fam- ily to leave the state. Writing from a distance of more than 50 years and in the aftermath of the passage of major civil rights legislation ending de jure segregation, Himes insisted on the en- during relevance of his childhood memory, explaining "… I must confess I find white people just the same today, everywhere I have been, if a black man owns a big and expensive car they will hate him for it" (8).

The story serves as an appropriate introduction to Himes's autobiography, which at every turn emphasizes the ceaseless and unremitting pressure of white racism on the author's life. But his story is one of a man who relishes resistance as well as a man who suffers repression. Immediately after detailing the incident about that car, Himes concedes that part of the hostility that it

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American Literary History

caused among whites came from his mother's "attitude," noting "she always carried a pistol on our car rides through the country, and whenever a cracker mule driver reached for his rabbit gun she beat him to the draw and made him drop it" (8).

Malcolm X also talked about cars to emphasize a point about white supremacy when he told his followers in 1964 that racism was like a Cadillac. He explained that the General Motors Company brought out a new model of their car every year, that the 1960 version differed from the one produced in 1950, but both automobiles were still Cadillacs. Similarly, Malcolm X ex- plained, racism also changed its contours and dimensions. The racism of 1964 might not look like the racism of 1954, but it was still racism. He warned his audience against thinking that racism had ended because it looked different, while at the same time cautioning them that they could not defeat today's racism with yesterday's slogans and analyses.

The dialectical tension between continuity and rupture in- forming the metaphors about racism deployed by Himes and Malcolm X offers important epistemological insights for schol- ars trying to understand the role of white supremacy and anti- black racism in the American literary imagination. Although both men's observations appear to make broad and essentialist claims about the "nature" of white racism, both the puckish pes- simism of Himes and the shrewd skepticism of Malcolm X stemmed as much from the strategic imperatives of their respec- tive speech situations as from any commitment to abstract prin- ciples. Like all utterances, their remarks intervened in a dialogue already in progress, in a tactical situation where metaphors about continuity and change held ideological force.

Himes and Malcolm X knew that self-satisfied narratives

lauding progress in race relations functioned as strategic weap- ons on behalf of a program of "gradualism" that evaded the just demands of black people and irresponsibly deferred remedial ac- tion to some moment in the distant future. But they also under- stood that stories denying the possibility of change worked to fuel defeatism and resignation within their own communities. The speech situations they faced required them to neutralize the rhetoric of progress without belittling the important gains that had been made through struggle in the past-or that might be obtained through social contestation in the future. Thus, their comments were not so much claims about cars, white people, or even racism as much as they were ways of encouraging listeners to look beneath surface appearances, to distrust deterministic paradigms of inevitable progress or hopeless resignation.

With their metaphorical stories, Himes and Malcolm X

Racist Culture:

Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning By David Theo Goldberg Blackwell, 1993

Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America By Cornel West Routledge Press, 1993

Towards the Abolition of

Whiteness. Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History By David Roediger Verso Press, 1994

Race Rebels

By Robin D. G. Kelley Free Press, 1994

701

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702 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

communicated principles about inquiry and interpretation that are as relevant to scholars today as they were to activists in the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. By understanding the tac- tical and strategic imperatives of the discourse in which they found themselves, Himes and Malcolm X displayed what Walter Benjamin called "presence of mind" (One-Way Street 98-99). Benjamin argued that people consult fortune-tellers and mystics because they are afraid that some important part of the present might be escaping them. I submit that we do intellectual work for much the same reason. This is not to advocate "presentism," a term used by historians to describe the process of distorting facts about the past in order to suit our present needs, interests, and inclinations. What I mean by "presence of mind" entails the search to know as fully as possible the forces that shape us as we engage in research, analysis, and argument. Writing about race today requires us to understand the suppressed and silenced di- mensions of racial power in our time as well as its long legacy in our individual and collective pasts.

The books under review here present interpretations of the role of race in US society. They display many of the same anxie- ties over continuity and change that occupied the attention of Himes and Malcolm X a generation ago. Valuable in their own right as systematic studies of an overwhelmingly important issue, they also offer us tools for acquiring the presence of mind neces- sary for studying the racial imagination in American literature.

In recent years, an impressive array of original, innovative, and generative scholarship on African-American writing, white supremacy, and antiblack racism in American literature has un- covered a broad range of new authors and new works to study, developed dynamic ways of rereading familiar classics, and raised important questions about the connections between liter- ary texts and their social contexts of production, distribution, and reception. From Houston Baker's Foucauldian archaeology to Hazel Carby's delineation of the intersections of race and gen- der, from Henry Louis Gates's sophisticated examination of can- ons and canonicity to Valerie Smith's illuminating evaluations of subjectivity and self-discovery in African-American narratives, antiracist writing in the 1980s played a prominent role in the development of new ways of reading, critiquing, and understand- ing literature. Superb studies by Thadious Davis, Frances Foster, Claudia Tate, and Mary Helen Washington of previously ignored or undervalued writers, along with innovative explorations of the role of race in the white literary imagination by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Toni Morrison, and Eric Sundquist, have definitively demonstrated the richness of looking at literary production, dis-

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American Literary History 703

tribution, and reception in its broadest social and historical con- texts.'

This flowering of research signals something positive: it stems, at least in part, from the victories of movements for social change in the 1950s and 1960s, from the ways in which egalitar- ian and antiracist struggles opened up cultural and social oppor- tunities for aggrieved individuals and groups. At the same time, the centrality of racial issues in contemporary literary scholar- ship also demonstrates our failures: the discouraging continuity of white supremacy in our society serves as a register of a broader racial crisis that brings home the inability of yesterday's social movements to transform sufficiently the power of racism as a force framing culture, ideology, and life chances in America.

All around us, we see both stasis and change, continuity and rupture in race relations. Black writers are doing surprisingly well in publishing houses and bookstores at a time when black people are faring very poorly in the economy and in the courts. Black culture has made its way into classroom lessons and onto required reading lists at a time when black students are finding it harder to stay in school. Black idioms circulate everywhere in popular speech, song, slang, and style, but police repression, poverty, and prejudice leave black people with ever declining ac- cess to public places and public resources. Many of the key insti- tutions of our society seem open to black culture, but not black people. They want the music, but not the musicians; they want the art, but not the artists; they want the literature, but they ig- nore the context that gives the literature its determinate con- tours.2

The accomplishments of antiracist scholarship have been real and substantive, but they emerge from and participate in complicated and contradictory realities. Our ability to address adequately and accurately the role of race in American literature increasingly depends upon producing a better theorized under- standing of race itself, as a social text as well as a literary trope, as an ongoing historical process as well as a historically specific object of study. Recent research on white supremacy and anti- black racism in American literature has succeeded brilliantly in delineating how authors have struggled with literary apparatuses and institutions, how battles over words in print have reflected broader social divisions and antagonisms.

Yet, by focusing mainly on the technologies of writing and their attendant social relations, literary critics have often over- looked the ways in which racial identities and hierarchies have been "written" into existence in "social texts" like law, labor or- ganization, and ideology. It is necessary but not sufficient to add

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704 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

black authors to the curriculum and the canon, to interrogate the overt and covert role of race in the cosmologies of canonized authors and texts, and to challenge both the static universalisms that deny difference and the static essentialisms that fetishize and reify it. But we also need to see how the contexts in which we work shape our stances toward canonicity itself, toward litera- ture as an institution, and toward questions about the con- junctural, composite, and contested nature of social identities.

We need to know more about the uses and effects of literary texts as nodes in a network, as parts of a system of overdetermi- nation rather than as independent crucibles of identity and meaning. We need to know how race becomes textualized in American social life, as well as how it becomes instantiated in literary works. In addition, while the best studies of race and the American literary imagination have been firmly grounded in the methods of New Historicism, they have too often privileged transhistorical generalizations about race and culture over more nuanced delineations of change over time. Sometimes they re- duce all of black history to the question of slavery or treat the history of race in isolation from the histories of class, gender, and social institutions.

Issues of rupture and continuity are always at the core of historical inquiry because they set the boundaries for the difficult task of periodization-of deciding how to explain both the things that change and the things that remain the same over time. But periodization is never fixed in historical events themselves: it is a hermeneutic tool utilized by researchers to enhance under- standing and analysis by emphasizing some parts of the past over others.

These issues of social textualization and historical periodi- zation are crucial to the future of New Historicist criticism of

race and American literature. Acquiring new objects of study and developing new methods of interpretation and analysis will not suffice if at the same time we misread the enormously com- plex social, cultural, and ideological forces that have congealed to create the special pathologies of racism in the US. If New Historicist criticism is to offer more than a thin historical gloss on literary appreciation and interpretation, if it is to live up to its professed goal of delineating the mutually constitutive rela- tionship between literary texts and social contexts, we need to move beyond the narrow limits of our disciplinary training in the humanities or social sciences and become truly interdisciplinary. This means that scholars trained in the humanities need to move

beyond textual issues and develop expertise about social struc- ture and history, while social scientists need to learn from hu-

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American Literary History 705

manists how to account fully for the role of language and culture as active forces shaping history and social structure.

I review here eight books on white supremacy and antiblack racism in the US. Written by political scientists Paul M. Snider- man and Thomas Piazza, sociologists Joe R. Feagin, Melvin P. Sikes, and Paul Gilroy, legal scholars Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., philosophers Cornel West and David Theo Goldberg, and historians David R. Roediger and Robin D. G. Kelley, these books offer literary scholars important evidence about the struc- tural and historical dimensions of American racism. But they also show that social scientists and humanists outside of litera- ture still have much to learn about textualization and about lan-

guage as a social force. Most important, they raise issues that help us understand the importance of textualization and periodi- zation in our own scholarship, no less than in the literature that we analyze.

Sniderman and Piazza emphasize rupture over continuity in The Scar of Race. They argue that racism today differs dramat- ically from the racism of the past, boldly declaring that "race prejudice no longer organizes and dominates the reactions of whites; it no longer leads large numbers of them to oppose public policies to assist blacks across-the-board. It is … simply wrong to suppose that the primary factor driving the contemporary ar- guments over the politics of race is white racism" (5).

In arguing that few whites openly endorse discrimination or claim that blacks are innately inferior (40), Sniderman and Piazza rest their conclusions largely on interpretation of data they assembled through survey-sample public opinion polls of whites in the San Francisco Bay area. They find strong support for fair-housing laws and other pieces of legislation outlawing discrimination (98, 124). They learn from their interviews that educated people are less likely to approve of bigotry than people with limited schooling (47), and they discover that respondents who hold negative views of blacks in general are nonetheless will- ing to endorse government and private assistance for individual blacks who demonstrate good character (76). Perhaps most im- portant, they utilize a sophisticated polling system that demon- strates that aggressive counterarguments can change the minds of respondents who express bigoted opinions, especially when negative stereotypes of blacks are connected to social welfare is- sues (11, 137).

Yet the picture presented by Sniderman and Piazza's inter- view data demonstrates the continuity of racism as well. Their findings disclose that 61% of whites believe that "most blacks on welfare could find work if they wanted to" (40), that nearly 50%

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706 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

of whites agreed that "if blacks would only try harder, they would be just as well off as whites" (41), and that an equal number of whites claimed that "black neighborhoods tend to be run down because blacks simply don't take care of their own property" (42). Indeed, the two political scientists concede that "what is striking is the sheer pervasiveness throughout contemporary American society of negative characteristics of blacks" (50).

How can Sniderman and Piazza declare that white racism

has become less important when their own findings reveal such hostility to black people? Their answers are not convincing, but they are instructive. Sniderman and Piazza concede that simple prejudice does feed negative opinions about blacks among whites, but contend that these opinions cannot be reduced to bigotry because "these characterizations capture real features of everyday experience" (43). To support their claims, they note that blacks "were responsible for one in every two murders" in 1990 and for "more than six in every ten robberies" in 1989, that in 1988 "63.7 percent of black births were out of wedlock," and that "the average Scholastic Aptitude Test score of blacks, in 1990, was 737, compared with an average white score of 993" (44).

Aside from their ingenuous presentation of these statistics as if they have never been challenged (by scholarly studies exposing the hostility of police officers and judges to black sus- pects, explaining the logic of extended households and female- headed families given current employment, wage, and welfare policies, and examining the cultural biases and poor predictive capacities of standardized tests), Sniderman and Piazza at this point inject speculations that their research does not support. Their original questions ask whether blacks on welfare could get jobs if they tried, if blacks could be as well off as whites if they would only try harder, if black neighborhoods tend to be run down because blacks do not take care of their property, if most blacks have a chip on their shoulder, and if blacks are more vio- lent than whites. One might argue that the large numbers of blacks convicted of murders relates to the question about the vio- lent nature of black people, yet that question drew the lowest level of white agreement with only 20% claiming that blacks are more violent than whites. But what is the relevance of SAT scores

or births out of wedlock to questions about keeping up neighbor- hoods or working hard? These spurious connections do not come out of the data but are inserted by Sniderman and Piazza as mo- tivations for answers to questions about completely unrelated is- sues. Only if one assumes that any negative action by any black is evidence about all blacks-or that homeowners generally worry about their neighbors' SAT scores-could we possibly conclude

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American Literary History 707

that the "facts" cited by Sniderman and Piazza explain the opin- ions in their data.

Sniderman and Piazza also attempt to minimize the role of bigotry in shaping the negative comments their respondents make about black people by turning to data from the 1991 Na- tional Race Survey that found that African Americans were even more likely than whites to agree that black people are aggressive and violent, boastful, complaining, lazy, and irresponsible. Be- cause these results make it seem that black people have a low opinion of themselves, Sniderman and Piazza conclude that the negative comments made by whites in their own survey are justi- fied and based on experience. Had this standard been in effect during the Brown v. Board of Education case, Kenneth Clark's experiments showing that black children had negative self- images would have been used as justification for segregation rather than as a rationale for integration as the Supreme Court decided. But more important, it should be noted that once again Sniderman and Piazza assume that any negative statement about blacks becomes equal to any other. If blacks think other blacks are boastful, then whites are justified in thinking that the mate- rial advantages they enjoy in comparison to blacks should be attributed to black people's laziness rather than to unequal op- portunity.

The authors of The Scar of Race do not ask blacks the same questions they ask whites, nor do they draw upon existing survey data collected by others about black opinions and attitudes. They pointedly ignore, for instance, the in-depth experiential survey by Feagin and Sikes that forms the basis for Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience. Interviews with middle-class blacks in the Feagin and Sikes study reveal their attitudes toward whites, but they also disclose important evidence about how white people actually behave-an important counter to the self- serving representations of white open-mindedness so evident in The Scar of Race. The middle-class blacks surveyed by Feagin and Sikes detail the pervasiveness of racial insults and indignities in every sphere of American life, from navigating public places to pursuing an education, from building careers and businesses to securing shelter. The book's chapters about public space and educational institutions initially appeared in scholarly journals in 1991 and 1992, two years before the publication of Sniderman and Piazza's book.3 Yet the authors of The Scar of Race chose to use their own data and ideological justifications for what white people say rather than looking systematically at what white people actually do or how they appear to black people while they are doing it.

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708 "Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac"

In their opening and concluding chapters especially, Snider- man and Piazza frame issues of rupture and continuity in Ameri- can race relations in a particularly deficient way. They construct a narrative that looks back to the civil rights era as a golden age when race "was a problem of the heart" (1). For them, defense of de jure segregation hinged on notions of black inferiority, and the civil rights movement triumphed when a consensus formed around the idea that "it was wrong-unequivocally wrong, un- ambiguously wrong-to make it a crime for a black to drink from the same water fountain as a white … or to attend the

same school" (1). They argue that blacks shattered this integrationist consen-

sus themselves whe

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