 Okay, we're back, but I can hardly wait for this show to be talking about it, thinking about it all day long. This is Global Connections, and we have as our informed citizen, our history professor from HPU, John David Ann, and we're talking today about racism, because racism is racing its head, I think, and we kind of agreed with that notion, we want to explore that about the sine curve, if you will, of racism, and also the baseline of racism, and how it continues, you know, you never really get away from it, and if it exacerbates in a given part of the sine curve, you can expect it will continue, and there'll be another sine curve later. Anyway, welcome to the show, John, welcome to your show. Yes, thank you, thank you Jay, happy to be here. So this country has seen a bit of racism, I mean more than a bit of racism come back in recent years, and maybe it's the press, maybe it's just the violence that catches the interest of the press in there for the public, but it seems to me over the past few years we've had more than we were, say, having before, and the people are more interested in it, and then again it's a really interesting phenomenon, how a leader, or an elected leader anyway, however he got there, can exacerbate this by giving it a pass, you know, I mean everybody expects for example Donald Trump to say, no you can't do that, that's really obnoxious, stop doing that, and he doesn't do it, he makes very modest statements about it, and the result is that people take, especially people who are inclined to be racist anyway, they take that as a pass, and then they do more of it, and we've seen that, so we've seen it grow on his watch in this administration. So what are your thoughts about the embedding of racism in this country in the history of the United States? Yeah, okay, that's a huge question. Some historians and even some pundits have argued that race is the issue for this country, not just one issue, but the most important issue in the history of the United States. I'm not sure I would go that far, but it is one of maybe the four or five really crucial issues that shape the country going all the way back to when slavery was founded in this country in the 1600s. And so if you go back, we don't have to go all the way back, but we can go back to the time period of the 19th century, the Civil War, which was fought over the issue of race and slavery, the racialization of slavery in the 19th century. The thing is before the 19th century, you could actually have indentured servants who are white folks. Many Irish came to the United States. On contract. That's right, they came on contract. That's correct, they were indentured servants and they were treated slaves and indentured servants were at one point in the 1600s, treated very similarly. But then at the end of the 1600s, early 1700s then, new laws were passed in areas where slavery became attractive because it was in some ways cheaper than indentured servitude. You had a lifetime, if the slave lived longer than 10 years then it was definitely a better deal economically than an indentured servant. You had a return on investment. That's correct. Economics. That's correct and there were plentiful slaves because the slave trade was operating between Africa and the Caribbean, between Africa and South America, so you could get access to slaves. So the establishment of slavery as a racial institution that was divided by race was a significant development in the history of this country and it was a development that took place into the 19th century where Southern slave holders became convinced that the North was intent on abolishing racial slavery and thus they became the best defenders of racialized slavery and they did this by denigrating African Americans, by denigrating slaves and saying these people are not intelligent enough, they're not worthy enough, they need to be driven by and under the will of other people. And this is a way to perpetuate the whole institution. Absolutely. For them it was their profit, slaves served both as capital and labor. It was an enormous source of wealth. The most wealthy people in the country at the time of the Civil War, the six millionaires, were all in the South and they were all major slave holders. I'd like to go a little further on this. You speak as if this was limited to the United States and indeed it's a very important issue in the United States but slavery has existed and if you will racism is part of the human condition and it goes way back and I myself I can't actually understand it. I can't get my mind around it. Why is it necessary for the human condition to put down other races? Why is it necessary? When we came in I told you that I've been thinking about this and I decided that slavery is an example of being in a bad mood. It's like lots of people in a bad mood and the condition of life is sometimes hard and frustrating and all this and so they take it out on people, they take it out on people who are different than them. So it's an expression of a hard time, a bad mood and that has existed as long as the species has existed. You differentiate someone who is not the same as you and you try to overcome that person. Right. This idea of racialized slavery, that's what becomes important in the new world and very important in the United States in the 19th century. Now of course slavery ends with the end of the Civil War, game over, not necessarily. Reconstruction. This is where we can talk about reconstruction after the Civil War and we can talk about the development of civil rights for former slaves. The development really of civil rights for all Americans because of course the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, the 14th Amendment, establishing parameters of American civil rights and then the 15th Amendment allowing barring prohibition of voting on the basis of rights. They were now all noble, but actually they were implemented imperfectly. They did not work as intended. Yes, right. They were hardly implemented, especially the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment of course had lots of holes by which people could go around it in order to disenfranchise all kinds of people of other color. They were still fighting the Civil War, weren't they? Well, I think they've lost the war, but they're still going to do it. It was a legacy of that defeat and the fear that that defeat would destroy their very way of life, which energized Southerners into trying to defeat congressional reconstruction in which all of these amendments were put into place and then to try to bring back a semblance of the old self. If not slavery, then sharecropping in which the black man was still under the white man in economic terms. So really the connecting tissue is, as you said, the incompleteness of the first reconstruction, even though we had the 14th Amendment. And there's a federal policy. We are going to reconstruct the South. It was kind of like the Marshall Plan. We're going to make it better. We're going to bring everybody together. This is a post-war gathering. That's an interesting comparison, although there was no economic reconstruction in the South. There were promises of economic reconstruction, but it never actually panned out. That's part of the reason, quite frankly, that reconstruction failed. Because the South was doomed after the Civil War to poverty and pinnury and really no capital for new development like industrialization. Corporate beggars comes to mind. Well, yeah, I mean, that's a little different matter. I mean, that's a term that Southerners used for Northerners who came down to the South. And many of these corporate beggars were actually noble citizens who taught in schools for African-Americans who provided social services. But Southerners did not like Northerners coming into their territory. And there were a few who were legitimate corporate beggars who exploited the situation to make themselves wealthy. So yeah, I mean, that's where that term comes. But it never got corrected. Reconstruction or no reconstruction never got corrected. And if you fast forward to the 30s and the 40s, the African-Americans are being put down, they're being fined to sit at the back of the bus and use a separate bathroom. That's correct. The whole structure had been built to marginalize them over 100 years. Yeah, so in the North, informal institutions of racism, housing redlining where there are certain neighborhoods that African-Americans couldn't buy houses in or even live in in big cities like Chicago. In the South, it was official policy and it was- The law. The law of the land in the South allowed by the federal government because of some court cases and an agreement after the Civil War. I can't understand the North, though. The North was on the other side of the Civil War. The North was on the other side of the 13th Amendment. The North was, you know, the noble side of that whole equation. How come this happened in the North? Yeah, but the North had as much racism as the South. In some would argue, some scholars have tried to demonstrate this, that before the Civil War and even after the Civil War, you have more types of segregation in the North than you do in the South until Jim Crow's laws come into being in the 1890s. And then it becomes the law of the land and it becomes very entrenched in Southern life and culture. But you still have lots of instances of racism and discrimination and even lynchings in the North, not just in the South. So then the incompleteness of Reconstruction leads us to the second Reconstruction, which is in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement, is the second Reconstruction. Because it's an attempt by African-Americans to grasp at those civil rights promised after it happened. Was it an attempt by the African-Americans? Or was it an attempt by the moral, value-driven, liberal people who had had some education and wanted to improve the quality of life for everyone? I think there were noble people involved. Of course, but in its generating moments, it was African-Americans. The NAACP was founded by a group of African-Americans. And there were some whites involved, but this is driven by African-Americans, W.E.B. Dubois. This was right before Martin Luther King. This is in 1909. Thurgood Marshall, an African-American lawyer who works for the NAACP. Now, he takes this further in prosecuting court cases that are discrimination cases. He's very successful and gets rid of starting to shave away at Jim Crow in the South. It's very frightening for whites. And of course, by the 1960s, there are liberals. But this is really being led by a race that wants its freedom. So when you look at the generating moments of the Civil Rights Movement, I mean the Montgomery bus boycott, that is not white liberals. That's actually African-American females, female college professors and high school teachers who organized this bus boycott. So the story here is one of a group of people taking charge of their own destiny. And it's very exciting to see. There are definitely whites involved. And liberals support this in the North. And one could argue that without support of liberals in the North, there might not have been substantial change. It would have been different anyway. It would have been more difficult. But the white Northern liberal public became enamored of the Civil Rights Movement. And that definitely helped Washington DC to move on some of these very important issues. Who are the leaders, say in the 60s? I mean, looking back down the trail of history, if you will, who are the leaders who made this happen? The black leaders who made this happen in the South in the Freedom Rides and the Marches and whatnot. Who were they? Well, the Freedom Rides. This is some liberals from Washington DC, some whites, some African-Americans, put together really by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SCLC. I remember that. Yes, put together by this group. And they start that journey into the South to ride buses and refuse to ride buses in a segregated manner. Open it up. That's correct. So the Blacks and whites of this group are actually sitting together. And the bus drivers are very uncomfortable. And they refuse to back down. But then there's a firebombing of the Freedom Riders bus. These white liberals, they go home. They go back to Washington DC. And African-American activists from Fisk University in Tennessee embraced that challenge. And they continue the Freedom Ride. And they do, yes. And they get arrested. There were some murders. They spent time in jail. John L. Lewis is one of the Freedom Riders. He spends time in a jail. There were some murders. I don't think anybody was. Remember those guys? There were a bunch of kids from New York City. They went on a Freedom Ride, and they got killed for their help. OK, I'm not familiar with that one. But the folks who really broke the back of the segregated busing system, they were African-Americans. None of them were killed. But they spent time in jail in one of these very nasty prisons in, I believe it was, Mississippi. So yeah, it's a great story. And I think not enough Americans actually have been told this story or nobody has. But it's not over. It's not over. And in fact, in some ways, it's more angry now. And the dynamic is, of course, very different now. But it's not resolved. And there's no sign that it will be resolved in the near term either. So out of the civil rights movement, you have a backlash. And especially white immigrant voters begin to vote in large numbers against politicians who support civil rights. And they begin to vote. They change parties and begin to vote for the Republican Party. The Democratic Party now is the party of civil rights. That's where we stop and have a break. We come back. We're going to enter the modern age, or at least ramp up to the Trump age anyway. That's John David and Professor of History at HPU. And we're examining racism in the Trump administration. We'll be right back. Thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii. And look forward to seeing you at Education Matters on Tuesdays with me, Carol Mon-Lee. Hi, everyone. Ted Rolson here, host of our Think Tech show where the drone leads. And a lot of you, of course, have been setting your clocks at 4 o'clock on Friday so that you can make sure you see our show. It's not changed. It's not going to be at noon on Thursdays. Noon on Thursdays, new standard time for where the drone leads. And where the drone leads is two systems like this, capabilities that we're using here in Hawaii these days. And we need you to pay attention to this to be part of it. So see you at noon on Thursdays. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Cheng, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m., where we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in, and aloha, and thanks for watching. You did it again. You weren't listening during the break. John was going, ah, there's so much here, so much here. This is a fundamental process of the United States. And we all have to know about it, appreciate it, and participate in the resolution of it. Anyway, so let's ramp up to modern times. Right, so after the civil rights movement, then there was this backlash against the civil rights movement and against what I would call rights consciousness. And politicians began to win elections on that basis, on kind of responding to white folks' resentments. And the Republican Party developed a strategy called the Southern Strategy, in which they were going to emphasize race and racial divisions, and they were going to emphasize black welfare mothers in their campaign advertisements and play upon this resentment of those who didn't like how, especially in the South, how they had had their old system taken away from them. That's horrendous. How, that's so destructive. How could they be forgiven for that, honestly? Yeah, it's true, though. And one of the key strategies for the Reagan campaign, Lee Atwater, later admitted on his deathbed, he apologized for this strategy. But during that time, it was very effective of Republicans moved working class white voters into the Republican category from Democrats who had normally held those voters. It was a very effective strategy. And so the- It switched? Well, from the Civil War, it switched to 180. That's correct, but Democrats then responded with the Clinton campaign to go more moderate and not emphasize civil rights as much and actually criticize some civil rights leaders at that point. And so that got the Democrats back in this game, but at a price. And so then we come to today when in 2016, Donald Trump ran really on a modified Southern strategy. He used race very heavily in his campaign. How did he do that? It was subtle, wasn't it? Well, what's- Well, it doesn't have to be gross about this to actually have a negative effect. It was not subtle with immigrants, but it was much more subtle with the African-American community. At one point in September, Donald Trump made a statement about the African-American community and said, you know what, you have nothing to lose. Why don't you vote for me? Consider voting Republican. This was the statement you have nothing to lose was a real slap in the face of the African-American community. It suggested that their prospects were nil, their times were bad. And it kind of reflected that the struggle of African-Americans unemployment- You haven't achieved anything. You're still at the bottom of the heap. Right, it was- It should be angry. Come with me, I'll fix it. Yeah, yeah, it was a very insensitive comment, but I think it was a deliberate, insensitive comment- I agree. To dampen African-American voter turnout. To dampen it? Yes, because- Reverse twist. Because there's nothing more effective to dampen voter turnout of a particular group than kind of dismissing their concerns in a kind of negative degrading. Interesting, so he knew what he was doing. So he's not that stupid after all. Well, it was- You had it here. It was a savvy campaign in some ways. I would say his missteps were his own, but his campaign came under leadership, which used some very sophisticated mechanisms to mobilize his side. So you mobilize your side by criticizing Eastern elites at criticizing the capitalist system, criticizing immigrants, criticizing immigration policy. And then you try to dampen the other side by making kind of derogatory, not derogatory, but kind of negative comments and saying, you don't have much, so you could come with me. Just kind of a black mark on that group, but also saying, you could vote for me. So you work in both ways. You work at it, you've denigrate some groups, and then you have this phony kind of, I appreciate your problem, or the other group. And then at the end of the day, everybody's mad at everybody. You've got nothing to lose. Nothing to lose. A reminder of how little progress they've made. And that's not actually completely true, of course. Clinton administration, tax credits for lower income tax credit, right? And then more recently, actually lots of entrepreneurship and business development among African-Americans. Obamacare, definitely a boon to- Obama himself. To a minority community- Obama is just 10 feet tall. That's correct. And the election of Obama himself. But some have called what's happening right now third reconstruction. And we could be in a stage where, where voters are responding in a negative way to progress by minorities, especially African-Americans. It's possible. And that's where race still plays a role in the electorate and in American life, is that voters will still respond in a visceral manner to race-based appeals, even if they're kind of covert race-based appeals. So with an African-American president, then there was a backlash in the Berther movement. Trump embraced that movement and used that movement to gather those resentments. And then you saw this kind of broadening of those resentments into all different kinds of groups during the campaign. Women, immigrants, other minorities, Mexicans, and then to a certain extent, African-Americans. So- Well, there was something in the paper recently, the last couple of days and times about how the African-Americans did not come out in that election. They could have beat them. They could have beat them, but maybe they were not interested. They didn't see themselves part of the process in order to vote, like in Hawaii, we have that. And as a result, they didn't feel the full strength of their political clout. Right. What was happening there? Right, so I think it's the Trump campaign statement about, you've got nothing to lose. I think that dampened voter turnout. And then I think the Clinton campaign might have taken this group too much for granted. Thought that Bill's popularity, Bill Clinton's popularity among African-Americans could have brought them more votes and a lack of excitement in general about the Clinton campaign, all the negativity that was connected to Hillary herself. I think that dampened turnout. Look, this is a demographic which has been marginalized in American history, African-Americans. And there are still many African-Americans where unemployment is higher and other social problems are higher. And so I think this is a group that you can take out of the electorate more easily than other groups. Yeah, is that gonna change? Is that changing? Well, I think when they realize the power they have, they would do something different. I think Black Lives Matter matters. I think it's another way of expressing that African-Americans matter, that they're a part of this society. It's positive, it's empowering. So I think that's important. I think African-American young people are hearing that and feel more energized and empowered. I think that's part of this advocacy movement that we're seeing develop during the Obama administration. And now with Trump, there's been a real boost in advocacy among minority groups, among other kinds of groups. I think it's a positive thing. It has an effect, it has a reverse as what he might have expected. But Ferguson was not a good thing. A lot of people were much too angry with that. Baltimore, not a good thing. And following on Baltimore, that fellow, the Howley guy that went to New York with the specific intention of killing an African-American, that was really sick stuff. But you find this kind of anger in the community. You find this kind of, oh gee, I don't know what you wanna say. It's racism. It's more racism and it's violent. Is it, are we gonna have more of this actually, John? It depends, I think, in part on what the president does because he's got a bully pulpit and if he says, if he continues. Now, my sense is in the last month, the tweets have definitely diminished. So I think somebody else is in control of those tweets. And so if that diminishes, then it's quite possible that the level of violence against minorities, including Jews, African-Americans, Mexicans, will diminish with that. It doesn't mean the racism is not there. It just means that these folks feel less empowered, right? And I think actually the recent defeat on healthcare by Donald Trump, by the Republicans being disunified, I think that actually bodes more positive for minority groups. They're already helped by Obamacare. They have a voice. People in the South actually made statements. Yeah, and it's disempowering for those who would take a racial approach. But you know, it's not just the African-Americans. I mean, we've heard so many stories about how Trump has aggravated people from Muslim countries, aggravated the relations of them and the US mainstream, aggravated relations between Asians and US mainstream. And he's made statements that have made an incendiary effect on anti-Semitism. The guy is all over the lot on racism. And from what you say, it sounds like this is part of his thing. He wants this, this helps him politically. It's not without some madness as a method. But the thing is, he didn't win the popular vote. He won the Electoral College by a very thin margin. So looking into the future, if you don't have Hillary Clinton with a lot of baggage, then I think the Democrats have a very good chance of taking back the White House in 2020. If Trump does not get a lot of his agenda passed or alienates, well, it's all connected, right? He alienates even his own supporters that he can't pass legislation and then people will run from him. It's happening already. So I think that over the long haul, does the Trump administration do damage to racial relations? Does he kind of enhance racism in this country? Probably to a certain extent. But I think taking the long view, I'm not too concerned. I think there are avenues for racial progress. We started off on a very negative aspect of this and now it looks a little better. I'm even just a little optimistic. Thank you, John David, the HPU History Professor. Always great.