{"id":121479,"date":"2018-02-13T09:00:02","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T14:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121479"},"modified":"2018-02-12T14:35:33","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T19:35:33","slug":"white-supremacy-dangerous-discourse-liberal-tolerance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/13\/white-supremacy-dangerous-discourse-liberal-tolerance\/","title":{"rendered":"White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

A scene at the race disturbance in Wilmington, North Carolina.\u00a0Originally published in Colliers Weekly<\/em>, November 26, 1898.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Watching Donald Trump speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville last summer was a surreal experience. Not the first press conference where he referred to neo-Nazi protestors as \u201cvery fine people.\u201d I mean the second time, when he repudiated those fine people. \u201cRacism,\u201d he intoned, clearly reading from a teleprompter, \u201cis evil \u2026 white supremacists and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.\u201d Nobody could mistake his droning boredom for actual investment in the words he was speaking: his attempt to embrace the decorous discourse of liberal tolerance was baldly hypocritical.<\/p>\n

As the summer ended and the fall semester began at U.C. Berkeley, where I study literature, far-right agitators descended along with the cool weather. A succession of activists and pundits\u2014Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and their ilk\u2014made their way to campus. They brought the far-right protestors and threats of violence along with them, all the while invoking the language of tolerance and free speech. Berkeley\u2019s former chancellor Nicholas Dirks even cited<\/a> the campus community\u2019s \u201cvalues of tolerance\u201d in defending Yiannopoulos\u2019s appearance. The myriad ways in which people were deploying the word tolerance<\/em>\u00a0managed to drain the already-insufficient term of its content. All that was left was am empty concept that could accommodate any agenda. It was more clear than ever that the language of tolerance had become ineffective, just a mask behind which antipluralist demagogues could hide.<\/p>\n

Admitting that Trump and the far right are capable of surprising me makes me feel unforgivably naive. At this point, to be surprised feels like a luxury, and I find myself bored with the chorus of outraged liberal critics who sound the alarm every time Trump breaks another democratic norm. But it\u2019s worth inquiring why white supremacy continues to surprise us when white-race hatred is such an intractable aspect of American society. And how\u00a0our shock perpetuates that violence.<\/p>\n

In Charlottesville\u2019s aftermath, I turned to Charles Chesnutt\u2019s 1901 novel,\u00a0The Marrow of Tradition<\/em>. In his novel, Chesnutt\u2014an impossibly industrious author, activist, lawyer, and educator\u2014looks back at the wreckage of post-Reconstruction racial politics and attempts to answer these questions via historical fiction. Marrow<\/em> is, among other things, an examination of how the genteel language of tolerance obscures and enables antiblack violence. In his focus on historical calamity\u2014the Wilmington massacre narrowly and the collapse of Reconstruction more broadly\u2014Chesnutt uses the form of the novel to examine how our shared language reinforces white supremacy\u2019s grip on American society.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Even after Reconstruction\u2019s end, the Fusion Party\u2014a coalition of Republican-affiliated blacks and white Populists\u2014had achieved dominance in North Carolina\u2019s state government and set about systematically dismantling white Democratic power. In the 1898 state elections, Democratic leaders retaliated against black political power with a campaign for white-supremacist government. Wilmington, North Carolina, loomed large in the white imagination as a symbol of dreaded \u201cNegro rule.\u201d It featured a biracial municipal government and a prosperous black community. And when, despite the targeted racial propaganda, Fusionists prevailed in Wilmington\u2019s elections, white supremacists rebelled. On November 10, 1898, Democrat-aligned vigilantes killed hundreds of black citizens, drove hundreds more from their homes, and removed the city\u2019s Fusionist leaders from power. Chesnutt followed the episode with mounting disappointment. Writing to his publisher friend Walter Hines Page the day after the coup, he called it \u201can outbreak of pure, malignant and altogether indefensible race prejudice, which makes me feel personally humiliated, and ashamed for the country and [North Carolina].\u201d<\/p>\n

The Marrow of Tradition<\/em> is set in the fictional Southern town of Wellington, and the novel tells the story of a white cabal\u2019s plot to ethnically cleanse Wellington\u2019s black population. The characters are drawn from across the town\u2019s racial and class categories. The protagonist is William Miller, a black doctor who has returned to Wellington to practice medicine along with his wife, Janet, the illegitimate black daughter of a prominent white businessman. The Millers represent Chesnutt\u2019s own status as a member of the so-called talented tenth, or bourgeois black leadership class. William and Janet find their white doubles in Major Carteret, a prejudiced newspaper editor who spearheads the antiblack campaign, and his wife, Olivia, Janet\u2019s embittered half sister. A host of minor characters both black and white expand the novel\u2019s purview beyond the cultivated upper classes. The vengeful Josh Green, a black drifter seeking revenge for his father\u2019s death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, is the most crucial of these minor characters. He has his own double in Captain McBane, the poor white upstart and Klan member who murdered Green\u2019s father. Carteret\u2019s loyal servant Jerry cuts a subservient figure, as does his maid Jane.<\/p>\n

Chesnutt\u2019s complex character system yields incessant mirroring and doubling, suggesting some troubling similarities between the black and white members of Wellington\u2019s genteel elite. Most crucially, elites of both races deploy the rhetoric of patrician refinement and tolerance. Early in the novel, Major Carteret awaits a crucial surgery upon his newborn child when he gets news that Miller will be participating in the operation. Turning to a white doctor with \u201cthe suave courtesy which was part of his inheritance,\u201d he appeals to their shared whiteness to convince the doctor to dismiss Miller. When the doctor responds that he is a gentleman before he is a white man, Carteret responds curtly: \u201cThe terms should be synonymous.\u201d When, during a cabal meeting, Carteret advocates for tolerance toward William Miller on account of his being \u201ca very good sort of Negro,\u201d McBane retorts that \u201cno nigger has any business [in Wellington] when a white man wants him gone.\u201d Carteret rejects this \u201cbrutal characterization of their motives,\u201d for it \u201crobbed the enterprise of all its poetry, and put a solemn act of revolution upon the plane of a mere vulgar theft of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

McBane\u2019s bald declaration of racial hatred, its vulgarity, is an unwitting critique of the role gentlemanly refinement plays in obscuring the intents of white supremacy. Carteret\u2014a suave newspaperman and skilled propagandist\u2014knows that a certain amount of what his coconspirator General Belmont calls \u201cdiplomacy\u201d is necessary to convince as wide an audience as possible of the legitimacy of their goals. No matter how refined an upper-class white racist\u2019s rhetoric might be, their underlying logic is the same: \u201cNo nigger domination,\u201d as McBane blurts out during one of the cabal\u2019s meetings. In that moment, McBane is stating a political commitment and neither Carteret nor Belmont has any problem toasting in agreement. But Carteret and Belmont are immeasurably more dangerous than McBane, because they have mastered a public discourse of genteel tolerance behind which their ugly intentions masquerade.<\/p>\n

As Carteret\u2019s double, William Miller adopts a similar concern for refinement\u2014though in his mouth that concern registers as naive rather than diabolical. When he takes a train from Philadelphia back to Wellington, the conductor forces him to sit in the colored car upon passing into Virginia. Miller finds himself among a raucous group of black farmers. He isn\u2019t as offended at being made to sit in the colored car as he is at the collapse of social distinction between himself and black laborers: their \u201cdirty\u201d and \u201cmalodorous\u201d bodies offend his bourgeois sense of decorum. \u201cSurely, if a classification of passengers on trains was at all desirable,\u201d Miller opines, \u201cit might be made upon some more logical and considerate basis than a mere arbitrary, tactless \u2026 drawing of a color line.\u201d The language here fascinates me. Miller\u2019s offense is not drawn from his sense of egalitarianism or equality. What grates is racism\u2019s insufficient sense of refinement in drawing social distinctions. Later, when a black opinion editor publishes an article condemning white racism, Miller objects\u2014on the basis that it would disturb the white elite\u2019s charitable disposition toward blacks: \u201cIt could do no good, and was calculated to arouse the animosity of those whose friendship, whose tolerance, at least, was necessary and almost indispensable to the colored people.\u201d We begin to see that Miller\u2019s idea of tolerance depends upon a mutual understanding between two sides of Wellington\u2019s elite. Above all, he values a kind of gentleman\u2019s agreement that maintains the social order in exchange for stability. Tactfulness of tongue is key.<\/p>\n

Placed next to the harsh racial realism of Josh Green, the black drifter, Miller\u2019s appeal to tolerance looks unbearably guileless. Green is a social outcast who, like McBane, has little use for the Southern elite\u2019s delicate racial rhetoric, nor the social order that it upholds. When we first meet him, he is climbing down from the side of a train car, \u201ca great black figure \u2026 stretching and shaking himself with a free gesture.\u201d He has ridden upon the train rather than inside it, and Chesnutt\u2019s imagery\u2014the magisterial proportions of Green\u2019s, and the \u201cfree gesture\u201d that characterizes his physical presence in the world\u2014establishes him as a character who has not been pushed to society\u2019s margins. Rather, he has chosen to linger there, warily eyeing the society that conspired to kill his father.<\/p>\n

His skepticism extends to the scripts his more genteel brethren use to talk about race. When Carteret\u2019s uprising finally erupts and Green vows to defend the black community, Miller warns Green to \u201cput away these murderous fancies \u2026 The Bible says that we should \u2018forgive our enemies, bless them that curse us, and do good to them that despitefully use us.\u2019 \u201d Green\u2019s reply, rendered in dialect that approximates Southern black English, is blunt: \u201cBut it \u2019pears ter me dat dis fergitfulness an fergiveniss is might one-sided. De w\u2019ite folks don\u2019 forgive nothin\u2019 de niggers does \u2026 De niggers is be\u2019n train\u2019 ter fergiveniss; an\u2019 fer fear dey might fergit how ter forgive, de w\u2019ite folks gives \u2019em somethin\u2019 new ev\u2019y now an\u2019 den, ter practice on \u2026 Don\u2019 talk ter me \u2019bout dese w\u2019ite folks,\u2014I knows \u2019em, I does!\u201d<\/p>\n

Familiar as he is with white-race hatred\u2019s depths, Green refuses to cloak the reality of the situation in Miller\u2019s decorous Christian language of forgiveness and tolerance. He recognizes that the language of a properly Christian outlook obscures and enables systemic brutality against Wellington\u2019s black population. His likening of forgiveness to a white supremacist pedagogical tool points out the fact that Miller\u2019s indebtedness to Christian propriety is a learned outlook used to perpetuate the subjugation of black people.<\/p>\n

As the uprising proceeds, Green is vindicated: McBane\u2019s bloodthirsty vision supplants Carteret\u2019s poetic revolution, resulting in a campaign of wholesale racial extermination. With the Captain at its head, a white mob begins to slaughter black women and children. All Carteret can do is look on in disbelief that \u201cany white man in town would be dastard enough to commit such a deed intentionally.\u201d Meanwhile, Miller\u2019s trust in white people\u2019s tolerance is rewarded with the death of his only son. Jerry\u2019s loyalty to his boss ends with him burning to death inside the black-owned newspaper. The conflation of whiteness and patrician refinement comes undone\u2014and the fiction of a discerning tolerance unravels along with it.<\/p>\n

Chesnutt\u2019s novel was not well received in its day. White critics who had previously applauded his collection of folktales The Conjure Woman<\/em> decried The Marrow of Tradition<\/em> as a bitter and deranged affair. William Dean Howells, a literary critic who had championed Chesnutt\u2019s prior work, regretted that Marrow<\/em> had \u201cmore justice than mercy in it.\u201d I suspect that their reaction had to do with the incisiveness of Chesnutt\u2019s insight into the rhetoric of race. He identified the hypocrisy that shadows the language of tolerance. He demonstrated how it camouflages white supremacist violence and therefore allows race hatred to burst out into American politics. And, perhaps even more damningly, he perceived how those of us who too readily invest our trust in that language have a hand in perpetuating the racist order that kills us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ismail<\/span> Muhammad is a writer and critic living in Oakland, where he\u2019s a staff writer for the<\/em> Millions and contributing editor at <\/em>ZYZZYVA. His writing has appeared in <\/em>Slate, the<\/em> Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em> New Republic,<\/em> The Nation, and other publications. He\u2019s currently working on a novel about the Great Migration and queer archives of black history.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Watching Donald Trump speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville last summer was a surreal experience. Not the first press conference where he referred to neo-Nazi protestors as \u201cvery fine people.\u201d I mean the second time, when he repudiated those fine people. \u201cRacism,\u201d he intoned, clearly reading from a teleprompter, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32905,11628,32910,32907,32906,32908,9716,32909],"class_list":["post-121479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-charles-chesnutt","tag-nc","tag-post-reconstruction-america","tag-the-conjure-woman","tag-the-marrow-of-tradition","tag-tolerance","tag-wellington","tag-wilmington-massacre"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhite Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Post-Charlottesville, Charles Chesnutt's 1901 novel helps us understand how the genteel language of tolerance enables antiblack violence.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/13\/white-supremacy-dangerous-discourse-liberal-tolerance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance by Ismail Muhammad\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 13, 2018 \u2013   Watching Donald Trump speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville last summer was a surreal experience. Not\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/13\/white-supremacy-dangerous-discourse-liberal-tolerance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-02-13T14:00:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/chesnutt.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"536\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ismail Muhammad\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" 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