As an advisor to President Richard Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase, “benign neglect”, in January 1970 to characterize the desired approach that the Nixon Administration should take toward the country’s racial tensions. But there was and is nothing “benign” to “neglect” racial healing when historically racism against Blacks by whites has been the nation’s largest and most embedded domestic problem, bar none. Maybe, that was the best Moynihan could have said then and that we can say now about those white individuals who conjure up reasons for being pacified with the reigning status of Black and white relations.
For we have learned the costly lesson that neglect of racial healing will lead to regression. It is not hyperbolic to connect the absence of consequential attention in recent years for racial healing to the rising influence and political favor of white nationalism and the concomitant, rising specter of a new Jim Crow in daily life, such as recent attacks on the Black electorate, manifested in the reduced representation and political influence of Blacks.
I can even attest personally to the corrosive effect of this regression through a single example. Less than ten years ago, news media in Arkansas, where I grew up and where I have often called home, gave an appreciable amount of attention to me as a white, Arkansas native son, writer, and poet and to the project in which a number of other persons and I, Black and white, were thoroughly then committed to disclose and explain – the Elaine Race Massacre and, more generally, to related Black and white, racial relations.
Now, however, presumably as a result of the continuing acknowledgement given to my book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, together with these “For Racial Healing” essays I write for a fairly wide and diverse audience of several thousand persons, it has become more difficult to engender interest in publishing a meaningfully sized, paid advertisement in pages of certain news media in the State that I would use so that friends, fans, and readers of my work in Arkansas can know what book of mine has recently been published of a completely different genre – Reading Whispers: A Book of Triple Haiku. But not all the news media in the State of Arkansas can be described this way – there are still those who will allow the publication of ads for my new book. Is the reservation that I just set forth about certain news media in Arkansas merely a reaction to the general state of affairs?
There are many other, much more important developments that illustrate the descent and regression impacting the present reality and negative prospects for racial healing between Blacks and whites in the country, such as the Congressional redistricting that has occurred in Southern states, which, in some respects, reminds us of the previous use of the poll tax to induce the disenfranchisement of the Black voter.
There are no new “Selmas” or major bus boycotts or marches on Washington or “I Have A Dream” speeches to adopt and vigorously support, if not enhance a more energized approach toward racial healing. Neither do we recognize yet in our midst the likes of John Lewis, Malcolm X, Martin, Andrew Young or the rest to inspirit whites to become sufficiently engaged. It is a given that we are past the white-hot phase of the Racial Revolution. Indeed, we whites have too willingly applied in our collective behavior the clever Moynihan phrase.
It is informative, however, to speculate the degree to which the power force of the Racial Revolution that exploded in the 1950s and 1960s could have created a juggernaut that would have swept over the neo-Wallaces of the present. Or is it adequate to conjecture what such a collision could have meant to this country? Whites know that they were given a multi-decade reprieve, but the cost of that reprieve has led to neglect and regression – a pretension over the years by many that significant progress was being made, and it was only a matter of time until wellness could be glorified across the land. But the pause – and its resultant lack of attention to racial healing – not only helped to create the immigration policies of the present but also a wave in the country that has now meant a re-establishment of attitudes and behavior that often reflect the days that predated the Racial Revolution. Thus, this pause has become an undoing.
Is it a coincidence that in the United States that has promoted itself in recent history as being in a curative state to the malignant centuries of Black subjugation to have 14% of the country’s population as Black but less than 2% of chief executive officers of its major corporations? Even in the midst of the curative state period forecasting that subjugation of Blacks would be broken, we witness the destruction of the mandate that promised equitable treatment in the halls of our representative government.
I am therefore reminded of the art of pretense in which I was raised along the Mississippi River Delta when whites lived their lives with Blacks that often had populations equal to or in excess of whites, who then, in turn, lived their lives with Blacks according to a veneer of normalcy even though Blacks were not tolerated after dark in the white parts of town and not allowed to frequent restaurants where whites ate, when the physical infrastructure in the Blacks’ part of town was several generations behind that of whites, when the white public schools fielded football, basketball, track and field, tennis teams, and a band, and the Black school only a basketball team, and when school textbooks were passed along to Black students only after white students had worn their way through them.
But the art of pretense conveyed to whites the tincture of normalcy notwithstanding the disequilibrium in the existence of the two groups of people. It took a special kind of perception and pretense to continue to accept the conditions as normal. How far can our own sense of normalcy be stretched today and tomorrow between Blacks and whites if current trends continue? To what extent are we whites comfortable in espousing normalcy today and tomorrow in the theatre of the absurd, especially as neo-Wallace, current, and future programs and governmental decisions would mean to leave Blacks and whites divided in our country?