COUNTERREVOLUTION

A critical examination of the erosion of civil rights over the past few decades.

One of the veteran sociologist’s targets in his unsparing assessment is the bland phrase race relations. Here he quotes Charles Blow: “From the beginning, the racial dynamics in America have been about power, equality and access, or the lack thereof….So what are the relations here? It is a linguistic sidestep that avoids the true issue: anti-Black and anti-other white supremacy.” The better and more comprehensive term, he suggests, is racial oppression, which gets to the point of a power dynamic that privileges White supremacy over all. In that vein, Steinberg examines the steady emergence of the idea of a “model minority”—at first, Jews, most of whom arrived on these shores as impoverished immigrants and carved out a place in American society, and lately Asians, who, in excelling in business and academics, are held up as somehow different from Black Americans. Though certainly not treated without prejudice, they suffer less from the systemic racism that holds Black citizens back. Steinberg considers the dilatory, blame-the-victim effects of the 1965 Moynihan Report, much of which was written by Nathan Glazer, a sociologist who held by commission or omission that Blacks were the authors of their own problems of poverty and other hurdles that could instead be reasonably attributed to systemic racism. Responded one Black activist at the time, “we are sick unto death of being analyzed, mesmerized, bought, sold, and slobbered over while the same evils that are the ingredients of our oppression go unattended.” The White supremacism implicit in the report came to the fore in the Reagan years, disguised in terms such as states’ rights and limited government. It emerged in full fury during the Trump regime, which achieved disenfranchisement by suppressing the Black vote—a process that is ongoing in many states.

An alarming report on the state of civil rights today, which favors White supremacy over any other consideration.