by ADAM SHATZ
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp, £21.98)
One of the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ‘post-racialism’ may have been the most powerful man in the world, yet he remained a prisoner of his race, of his ‘black body,’ as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in Between the World and Me.?1 In the face of repeated police shootings of young black men or atrocities such as the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama did little more than deliver one of his formidable speeches. And – as he did in Charleston – sing ‘Amazing Grace’, as if only a higher power could cure America of its original sin, and end the nightmare.
That nightmare began in the early 17th century, when Africans were packed into slave ships and transported to the American colonies, where they – or those who survived the Middle Passage – were sold at auction, stripped naked for the perusal of prospective buyers. With the defeat of the South in the Civil War – by 1804, all the northern states had abolished slavery – four million slaves won their freedom. Under the protection of federal troops, they gained the right to vote, and to elect representatives to state legislatures and the US Congress, in the unfinished revolution known as Reconstruction. But the forces of white supremacy in the former Confederacy proved resilient and inventive, and succeeded in overturning the gains of Reconstruction: black captivity wasn’t liquidated so much as reconfigured. When the last federal soldiers left the South in 1877, Southern legislatures passed a series of laws that mandated segregation in public facilities (housing, schools, restaurants, drinking fountains and bathrooms), and banned interracial marriage. White tyranny was also enforced by a sharecropping system that kept black farmers tied to the land; a ‘poll tax’ and literacy tests that prevented blacks from voting; elaborate codes of deference to white authority that black men defied at risk to their lives; and lynchings, which many whites attended with their families for pleasure. (Between 1877 and 1950, nearly four thousand black men were lynched.) This brutal racial caste system, which lasted from the late 19th century until the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were signed into law, was known as ‘Jim Crow’ (the origins of the term remain mysterious). Perhaps the greatest lie of Jim Crow was that segregation meant ‘separate but equal’. During and after the First World War, many of the South’s black captives voted with their feet in the ‘Great Migration’ to the North. They settled in the slums of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles under a form of residential segregation they would discover to be no less thorough, and sometimes no less ruthless, for being ‘de facto’ rather than ‘de jure’. As Malcolm X remarked, ‘the Mason-Dixon line begins at the Canadian border.’
London Review of Books for more