The problem of white backlash in American politics isn’t new. Every instance of black political advancement—Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, or Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency—has provoked it. Backlash politics define moments in American history when white identity, threatened by the advance of African American civil, political, or economic rights, reasserts itself in ways that go beyond naked racism. Both Reconstruction and the late 1960s were defined by such appeals to white identity politics, and included calls to clean up governments that seemed, at least in the eyes of many white Americans, to cater too much to the interests of African Americans. We saw this in the nearly century-long condemnation of Reconstruction-era governments that tried to secure black civil rights. We witnessed it once more in the late 1960s in calls for “law and order” and denunciation of the War on Poverty’s attempts to help the black poor.
Today, we’re seeing it again. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent piece in the Atlantic, “The First White President,” is an eloquent meditation on the topic. “To Trump,” Coates wrote, “whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power.” In other words, Coates argues that the backlash to African American progress is premised on maintaining the edifice of white supremacy upon which, he believes, American political life rests. But in contrast to Coates’s vision of an immutable white supremacy and the accompanying sense of powerlessness it can inflict on its victims, we should remember that African Americans have always found ways to resist this American impulse and come up with new political solutions.
Three books can remind us how. Fifty years ago, African American intellectuals, deeply concerned with the white backlash politics of the late 1960s, tried to answer many of the questions the left is grappling with again today. Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here—all published in 1967—analyzed the backlash against black Americans in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. All agreed that these laws, while major achievements for African Americans, were not enough to vanquish racism in American society. The perspectives these authors offered, each shaped by their individual ideological outlooks on American culture and society, have much to teach us today.