Privileged Fragility

America in the Age of Racial Paranoia Part Two

Dylann Roof and the Convenience of White Supremacy

“Even today, blacks are subconsciously viewed by White people are lower beings. Modern history classes instill a subconscious White superiority complex in Whites and an inferiority complex in blacks. This White superiority complex that comes from learning of how we dominated other peoples is also part of the problem I have just mentioned. But of course I dont deny that we are in fact superior.” Dylann Roof, Last Rhodesian Manifesto

“Living in a white dominant context, we receive constant messages that we are better and more important than people of color…. While one may explicitly reject the notion that one is inherently better than another, one cannot avoid internalizing the message of white superiority, as it is ubiquitous in mainstream culture.” Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility

In the October 1903 edition of The South Atlantic Quarterly, its editor John Spencer Bassett, who was a Tarboro, North Carolina native and professor at Trinity College (now Durham University), wrote an article entitled “Stirring Up the Fires of Racial Antipathy.” The article was about an incident in Hamlet, North Carolina involving Booker T. Washington and the breakfast seating accommodations provided for him and his black companions in a hotel dining room. Even though the hotel’s proprietors, following Jim Crow laws, believed all whites had eaten and the dining room could thus be used for “negro patrons,” a group of white businessmen, which included Georgia Senator Augustus Bacon, arrived later and were given an impromptu place to eat. When Bacon discovered that Negroes were eating in the actual dining room, he was outraged. A fellow white businessman refused to eat his breakfast out of protest. The incident caused a fervor amongst newspapers across the state. Many wondered if the Republican Party, headed by Theodore Roosevelt, who himself had invited controversy in 1901 when he had Washington dine with him at the White House, was infiltrating the post-Reconstruction return of the Democratic Party in North Carolina. Lambasting newspaper editors, who he believed were stirring the flames of racial antipathy, Bassett lauded Booker T. Washington in a heretical remark read around the South:  “Now Washington is a great and good man, a Christian statesman, and take him all in all the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years….” Needless to say, Bassett’s comparison of a Negro to the South’s Christ-incarnate Confederate General Robert E. Lee resulted in immediate calls for Trinity College to fire him. Ironically, given contemporary society’s intolerance for unpopular views and the prevalence of Cancel Culture, the Board of Trustees at Trinity College, in an 18-7 decision (some sources note 17-7), voted in favor of not firing Bassett. While there were intra-political factions working beneath this vote, the overarching result was from a sincere belief in the freedom of academic speech and the integrity of the university.

The Bassett Affair, as it came to be known, occurred at a time when White Supremacy was approaching its golden age in American life, sandwiched between the 1896 Supreme Court “separate but equal decision” of Plessy v. Ferguson and the 1905 publication of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansmen, the romanticized novel about the Ku Klux Klan that was adapted into the 1915 cinematic triumph Birth of a Nation. Dixon, who like Bassett was a North Carolina native, also published a scathing essay about Booker T. Washington in a 1905 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, demonizing the educator as nothing more than an evangelical preacher indoctrinating blacks in self-reliance, which Dixon claimed would inevitably lead to America’s destruction. Interestingly, it appeared alongside The Souls of Black Folk written by W.E.B DuBois, Washington’s harshest black critic and a quasi-biblical prophet of the current Anti-Racism Movement. While dismissing Booker T. Washington as nothing more than an Uncle Tom selling out his people to the evils of White Supremacy, today’s Anti-Racism Movement sanctifies DuBois and canonizes his essays, especially Black Reconstruction in America, a justifiable if not slightly radical rendering of post-Civil War America that highlights the black achievements of Reconstruction as opposed to the Dunning School’s historical emphasis on Reconstruction’s failures.  

DuBois’s 1935 Black Reconstruction in America frames slavery as a pro-capitalistic venture, a somewhat anachronistic Marxist position that has resurfaced in the current New York Times’s 1619 Project.  The irony, of course, is that the pro-slavery South adopted the same Marxist framework as a way to condemn the Northern free market economy and align slavery as the perfect form of socialism. John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh both advocated this idea and even went so far as to propose the benefits some “whites” might gain as slaves. More importantly, Black Reconstruction in America is the first historical account of the Reconstruction Era that illuminated the agency of newly freed people and rightly criticized the way White Supremacy violently obstructed the progressive agenda of the Radical Republicans, most notably the 14th and 15th Amendments. Crucial to DuBois’s analysis of White Supremacy is how the ideology actively sought to drive a wedge between freed people and poor southern whites, two groups that shared the common cause of equality and social mobility in the South after the Civil War. According to DuBois, the wealthy, white landowners, bereft of their human property, investments, and collateral, employed the same benighted view of the white race it had in defense of slavery as a way to convince poor southern whites of mutually shared interests after the war. DuBois termed this the “psychological wage,” payment made through race rather than salary. In turn, poor whites ignorantly accepted the gilded value of their supposed racial superiority, and this curtailed the formation of any coalition between poor whites and freed blacks, which would have undoubtedly threatened the interests of white elites. Although DuBois correctly identified the primacy of the “psychological wage” within White Supremacy and indeed, many poor whites swallowed the ideology hook, line, and sinker, the extent to which all whites bought into and benefited from this wage is central to the mischaracterization of our national understanding of White Supremacy’s function and power.