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A history lesson for Ben Stein
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: November 21, 2014
Recently on one of the Sunday talk shows, Ben Stein accused President Obama of being “the most racist president there has ever been in this country.” Stein was criticizing what he sees as an effort to mobilize black voters to vote for Democratic candidates. “It is a way to racialize voting in this country.”
Stein is most recognizable as a comically laconic character actor most famously playing the befuddled teacher who kept calling out for Ferris Buehler. But before he wandered into that side job, he was a conservative political operative, who cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns. As a pundit he maintains an air of intelligence and reasonability but occasionally pops off with the sort of outrageous hyperbole that makes for good cable news show fodder.
In this latest instance Stein is implicitly claiming when black voters choose a particular candidate as the one perceived more likely to advance the interests of blacks, this constitutes the only “racialized voting” that has ever happened in this country. Given that Richard Nixon’s campaigns pioneered the Southern strategy – persuading white Southern Democrats angry over Democratic support for civil rights legislation to switch their votes to Republicans – Stein’s claim is particularly bold.
Not surprisingly, Stein is wrong. In fact voting in this country was “racialized” for much of the 20th century because for much of that century most Southern voters chose candidates based on who would preserve their right to maintain the system of segregation, disenfranchisement and white supremacy known as Jim Crow. And it was racialized in the 19th century over the issue of slavery. Twelve 19th century presidents owned slaves, eight of them while in office. These included luminaries like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson.
Turning to last century, Woodrow Wilson was notorious for his view of black inferiority. Those beliefs were manifested in racial policies that were retrograde for his day. He approved the segregation of federal facilities, overturning a 50-year tradition of maintaining a desegregated civil service.
President William Howard Taft publicly declared that he thought the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing that the right to vote could not be abridged on the basis of race, to be a mistake. He lauded vocational education for blacks, proudly proclaiming “I am not one of those who believes it is well to educate the mass of Negroes with academic or university education.”
Calvin Coolidge, was the only presidential candidate in the 1924 campaign who declined to criticize the Ku Klux Klan at a time that the organization conducted a campaign of terror and lynching against Southern blacks.
These are instances of presidents voicing clearly racist views or enacting clearly racist policies or both. The list of presidents who refused to enact civil rights legislation or used administration resources to protected black rights at the risk of agitating Southern whites includes pretty much every 20th century president up to Johnson (though Truman could arguably be excluded). In short, American history presents many better candidates than Obama for “most racist president.”
It would be easy to write off Stein’s remarks as of somewhat more than usually outrageous hyperbole from a political pundit. But Stein’s remarks are important because they say a lot about what we are willing to say about race these days. Stein can get away with making a claim this patently a historical because we don’t like looking at our racist past.
His remarks come at the same time certain activists are attempting to remove from public school history curricula any reference to either slavery or discriminatory racial policies of the 20th century. That willful historical amnesia travels lockstep with the other facet of Stein’s claim – the idea that acknowledging race as an issue with continuing salience is itself racist. Indeed, the Steins of the world seem to believe that it is the only racism that matters today.
For much of the 20th century, racism was synonymous with white supremacy – a system of laws, social norms and private actions that kept blacks in state of social, political and economic subservience. That history is the sole reason that the accusation of racism can have any resonance. Otherwise, appealing to voters on the basis of race would be no more questionable than appealing on the basis of income or occupation.
The racism that matters is the racism that denies the humanity of a race of people. If we want to debate the most racist president – or the most racist anything – that should be our measuring stick.