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At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose both what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our political moment going into the presidential election in 2020. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with bylines in publications big and small but with a sense that more of us in the media need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
So far, I’ve announced the #GonzoPrimary by defining the broad parameters for what healthy media coverage might look like as we start from scratch. Most recently, I dove into the time when the GOP thought it had died and the insane turn of events that led to new charges against Jeffrey Epstein and grappled with how to do this newsletter thing a bit better.
The Gonzo Primary: Reckoning with history
Iowa Caucus Countdown: 123 days
Several political moons ago, Joe Biden’s record on busing and school integration was the feast du jour of the Washington press corps. It was a rare moment, if one conceived in the made-for-TV format of a party debate, as close to a gladiatorial spectacle in politics that the American psyche simply can’t resist. It also came fully digestible for the press, with horse race implications for the still slowly fading frontrunner former vice president.
Still, even if the brief uproar over busing was confined to a corner of the Twitter and media-obsessed universe (and I think it went beyond that), in the aggregate the busing episode was an early high point for doing all the things good debate and journalism should: inciting a dive that looked at history, political records and both the past, present and future of civil rights, the defining issue of our time.
During that June debate, Biden had made a muddled argument to defend an ancient position on a seemingly old but incredibly relevant and consequential issues: busing. Soon after, I argued that Biden had actually made a stronger case for his opposition to busing in 1975. To be clear, what is most troubling about Biden as a politician and a candidate is his inability for his rhetoric to match his actions as a senator, especially around the issue of civil rights.
But I got a bigger part of the argument wrong when I approached this the first time. I wrote:
History has borne out many of his worries of those on the side of integration and civil rights had in how to create a more equal education system for black and white students and whether busing would work.
First, it’s important to remember that busing sparked violence all around the country and particularly the South, something very much on Biden’s mind, he said at the time. But just as importantly, Biden’s opposition to busing was rooted in a far more noble cause — equal resources and dollars for public schools, regardless of what neighborhood they were in.
That is not to say that busing wasn’t a noble cause and didn’t have some immediate positive effects, especially for people like Senator [Kamala] Harris. Her education undoubtedly would have been stunted without being able to go to a white school with more resources more quickly.
But Biden’s concerns—and not the awkward dance he did around the truth on the debate stage—carry far more water than his argument that busing should be left up to local governments.
I’d stand behind part of that argument. Biden had, as far as this example, made a far more coherent argument in 1975 about busing by arguing that civil rights had to be fought on multiple fronts (his failure to genuinely pursue those avenues means that he is a creature of all creatures of political expediency, really and seriously a favorite topic of mine, up there with the hypocrisy/general shittiness of Rahm Emanuel. )
But what I missed about busing’s history, pointed out in an episode of NYT’s The Daily pointedly called “The Myth That Busing Failed,” were some of the complexity of that history. Busing was messy, divisive and, yes, violent. It’s also true that schools remain segregated today, a failure of federal courts, local school and government leaders to enact the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. Busing forced communities grapple with racial integration head-on, exposing equally deep rifts in both the South and North, where communities dealt with integration in vastly different ways. But in many ways, busing was an unqualified if fleeting success — in the South.
New York Times’ reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones explains:
so very, very quickly, the dominoes fall in the South when the South is being blanketed with desegregation orders. And when the court says, you actually have to move bodies, the South moves bodies. And black and white kids are attending schools together. … The South goes from complete apartheid to being the most integrated region of the country in a matter of 10 years. Busing can work, but it has to work under certain conditions. It’s a very brief moment in time where all three branches of the federal government actually work together to secure the civil rights of black children in the South. And when we put our minds to it and we decided that this is what we are going to do, it actually was extremely effective. And amazingly, most white people in the South, once they were forced to, simply dealt with it.”
It’s a worthy listen, as Hannah-Jones also explains that suburban white flight also came about in part due to busing. In the north, white parents figured out pretty quickly that the best way to avoid the whole issue — having their White kids sit next to Black ones — was to avoid the whole issue, ie move to a suburb that was mostly white. In this way, American society re-sorted itself to avoid integration, a trend we see now along both racial and political lines.
The avoidance of reckoning underscores just how hard actual reckoning is.
For the modern GOP, the avoidance of reckoning took the form of “dog whistle” racial politics, a Southern Strategy based on forming a solid voting bloc out of the South by turning poor white voters against poor black ones. For the Democrats, it has meant a finger-in-the-air approach to civil rights, rhetoric that matches reality only when politically expedient.
In this context, it’s no wonder that so many on the left have reacted so viscerally to Biden’s candidacy. As Paul Blest ably explored the history of Biden’s stance on busing for Splinter, he nicely connects what this whole episode really says about Biden as a candidate:
More broadly, though, the thread that connects Biden’s busing record to his likely current run is his supposed standing—both implicit and explicitly stated—as a man who can “connect” to “ordinary” white people. What this bluntly means, of course, is that he places a premium on his ability to navigate the forces of white reaction to a changing society. In the 1970s, he did that by joining forces with racists, and there is little to suggest that his concept of politics has changed substantially since then. That makes it all the more troubling to imagine how that instinct might guide him now, when white backlash is spiking at such incendiary levels.
Of course, the former vice president is currently leading in the polls, which begs the question of whether we actually want to confront and reckon with our history. Most people? No. No way, not ever. For me, the reaction to the New York Times groundbreaking 1619 project, which makes, really, a not-so-radical argument, tying America’s slaveholding past to its current economic and political might. The project draws a long narrative of African American patriotism despite this contradiction and says that spirit of enacting America’s promise versus its rhetoric will be led by formerly disenfranchised, namely people of color.
While I certainly didn’t expect the right to raise a glass to the Times for their ambitious work, I also didn’t expect for a broad swath of the mainstream right to simply reject the project entirely, which, of course, is what happened. A denial of the history about the foundation of American wealth (and, for that matter, much of Europe, which even if they banned slavery financed the practice and profited from it greatly) and race as a thru-line in American civic and political life is to reject history itself. There can be reasonable debates had about emphasis, the role of individual leaders and presidents, for example, but to declare America a product only of white Americans is the foundation on which white supremacy is built. Such a mainstream bear hug to those ideas even in the age of Trump is still a shocking and mystifying thing to witness, exemplifying the depth of our dysfunctional civic and political abyss.
This was also underscored to me recently through the Showtime documentary “16 Shots,” about the murder of teenager Laquan McDonald in Chicago in 2014 by a white police officer. Ousted former police chief Garry McCarthy, the fall guy for then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s face-saving ineptitude, seems utterly sincere when he says he sees society teetering on the brink of oblivion, using the rare instance of a police officer being held accountable as his example. McCarthy’s view is that the officer, later convicted of murder in a historical first, did the right thing. To think otherwise pushes us toward a cataclysmic emptiness, lawless streets and a lawless society, he says.
Young people in particular pushing back against police tactics and even being encouraged not to comply with police, McCarthy says, is “putting the Constitution in danger. I’m not optimistic at all. We’re reaching anarchy.”
Chicago journalist Jamie Kalven, a civil rights crusader who broke the McDonald story and played a crucial role in the eventual charges filed against the officer in the case, also understands the McDonald case in terms of its stark implications for American society. “It’s a story at the center of our racial nightmare in this country,” he said. “I would go so far as to say it’s a matter of life and death.” (Full disclosure: I am working on a project with Kalven and his Invisible Institute).
Our president recently hit at the undertones of this and the Trump era in general with the nuclear invocation of politics — mention of a civil war. Unambiguously, our failure to reckon with the Civil War, its underlying factors and the deep brokenness of a country that took up arms against each other is playing itself out in the background of all of these debates.
I understand what Garry McCarthy is saying. It’s the same thing that segregationists said in the ‘60s: that we as a society have to live with a pre-ordained order or it all falls into a violent abyss. That order means that police departments do what they have to do to maintain control — and if a relative few are shot and killed in the process, that is the price of order. The opposite of order is chaos, so what’s the real alternative?
It’s a damn cataclysmic view of the world, reinforced daily by the deep conspiracies and bloodshed run on a loop by Fox News. But, I would concede, it especially feels like a realistic one. A true reckoning with America’s long history of racism and its roots won’t come from one election, political party, bill, Twitter debate or protest. It takes imagination, especially right now, to think of a different reality.
That said, we should all refuse to succumb to such black-and-white dismal view of the world. When Barack Obama was elected, journalists and academics seriously considered whether we had now entered a post-conflict, post-racial society. While they couldn’t have been more wrong then and now, it’s hard to imagine even the Times or another mainstream institution considering a project like 1619, or Democratic voters seeing the need to understand the legacy of busing in order to make a judgment on a 76-year-old former vice president for the first Black man elected to the White House.
We’ll find out some day, maybe not in our lifetimes, whether Martin Luther King was generally more right than wrong and the long arc of history does bend toward justice. In the meantime, let us note that our current uncomfortable reckoning with our misdeeds of the pasts and the ghosts we have created could just be a necessary start.