Race and Progress (But also: Past and Prologue)
The first is from Friday, June 21, 1901
NO PERCEPTIBLE EXCITEMENTThe second, pithier headline (and shorter story) comes from June 26, 1901, just a few days later:Two Negroes Lynched Without the Least Ruffle of a Village Calm
THEY WERE NEGROES WHO CAUSED TROUBLE
Hence a Lawless Mob Had the Right and Privilege to Take Them Out and Quietly hang Them Until They Were Dead
SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVESThese two pieces could be the foundation of an entire article in the hands of someone with comparativist proclivities (hey, wait a second, these two pieces could be the foundation for an entire article in the hands of someone with comparativist proclivities . . . hmm). But off the cuff, they tell us a great deal, do they not?Aborigines in This Land Are Dingy Yellow Bushmen
My first thought relates to how much things have changed, especially in the United States. Spend enough time dealing with race, talking to people, teaching and meeting with students, and at some point you’ll hear a version of the following: “Things have not changed!” “Racism is as bad as ever!” I even had a student say, after reading about the genocide in Rwanda, “Things are no different on the south side of Odessa.”
But don’t these headlines jar precisely because of changes that have occurred in the intervening century? It is unfortunately true that one would not have to search too far to find a white South African who would sympathize with the second headline. One would have to dig a lot deeper but probably could find someone in America who would celebrate the sentiments of the first. But in neither country would this be a laudable sentiment. In neither country would uttering or writing something similar earn anything other than swift condemnation and quite possibly a punch in the nose. We need not even consider that such a headline or even a more anodyne version, would appear today in any American or South African newspaper.
At the same time, I had an equally strong response in almost the opposite direction: This is why race still matters. The rawest racism is still close enough to us in time and space to give pause. These headlines appeared in a major newspaper in Austin, Texas in the twentieth century. They were unobjectionable at the time. Or at least they were unobjectionable enough. There was no outcry. No publishers lost their jobs, no editors demoted to copyboy as a result. No apologies were forthcoming. The one followed quickly on the heels of the other, one endorsing a lynching in Benton, Louisiana, the other running with two (now) chilling lead sentences: “Some Englishmen call the natives of India ‘Niggers,’ with an emphatic adjective often prefixed. Persons of this kind, with the same exquisite accuracy and the same sense of just superiority, call the races of South Africa ‘niggers’ also.”
A century is not that long ago. And we know that neither lynchings nor derogatory racial typology ended soon after these pieces faded away. This was the state of race relations in the United States and South Africa not long ago. Much has changed. Both the United States and South Africa are not what they once were on the issue of race, and for that we can be thankful. But these articles should not simply be filed away and forgotten or passed off as irrelevant. They still matter because issues of race and racism are still with us, and those issues have a past, a legacy, a history. That past is ours, that legacy is ours, that history is ours. Hiding from it or pretending that those were anachronistic olden days does no justice either to the past or to the present. It sure will not help us to forge a better future.