The ridiculously over-the-top accusation is shameful and self-discrediting.
The ridiculously over-the-top accusation is shameful and self-discrediting.
I t’s axiomatic in American political debate that anyone calling someone a Nazi has automatically lost.
Resorting to the Nazi charge is a sign of rhetorical and intellectual desperation. It shows an inability or unwillingness to make distinctions, since whatever is being condemned is unlikely ever to be anything like Nazism. Finally, it exhibits a moral bankruptcy by taking the unspeakable suffering of countless millions of people and using it to make what is typically a cheap argument for self-serving ends.
It’s time to begin to think of invocations of Jim Crow in the contemporary debate as just as loathsome and self-discrediting as the Nazi charge.
People who call anything in today’s America “the new Jim Crow” are advertising their own lack of seriousness and ignorance of history, as well as — in many cases — their naked cynicism.
There are legitimate arguments to be had about our criminal-justice system, voting rules, and alleged social and political failings more broadly, but nothing is remotely in the same universe as Jim Crow.
That hasn’t stopped progressives from reflexively invoking “a new Jim Crow.” It was the title of an influential book by Michelle Alexander on imprisonment in America. The drug war supposedly constituted a new Jim Crow. The filibuster is a “Jim Crow relic.” The Supreme Court’s Shelby decision in 2013 risked catalyzing a new era of Jim Crow. Voter ID is a Jim Crow measure, and, of course, so is the new Georgia voting law — so bad, according to the president of the United States, it “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”
Even a brief, superficial account of the old Jim Crow demonstrates the perversity of all the charges of a new Jim Crow.
Jim Crow involved a system of racial repression and violence that touched all aspects of life for African Americans, enforced by law, custom — and mobs, thugs, and murderers. (Most of the examples below are drawn from American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow by Jerrold M. Packard.)
In 1890, Mississippi adopted a post-Reconstruction constitution meant to lock blacks out of politics. It instituted poll taxes with unpaid taxes accumulating over time. Registrars had the authority to judge whether a potential voter had passed a literacy test, and reliably approved whites and never blacks.
The notorious bigot and future governor of Mississippi James K. Vardaman declared, “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n***** from politics . . . let the world know it just as it is.”
And so it went everywhere in the South. In Louisiana, which was fairly typical, the black electorate collapsed from 130,000 to a few thousand. At the time the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, only a tiny percentage of eligible African Americans could vote in Mississippi.
That was Jim Crow.
“Jim Crow had to be obligatory on every passenger train traveling through the South and on every streetcar (or later, bus) plying the streets of every Southern city,” Packard writes. “Not only could offending passengers be fined or jailed (or sometimes, merely kicked out or off), but the transportation official whose job it was to see that Jim Crow was obeyed could be assessed precisely the same penalty as the transgressing passenger.”
The arbitrary rules were to control and humiliate blacks. Usually they were confined to the back, occasionally to the front. “It isn’t important which end of the car is given to the n*****,” one observer said. “The main point is that he must sit where he is told.”
That was Jim Crow.
The mandates for segregation were set out in detail. In 1917, South Carolina made sure that there was no racial mixing at circuses. “Tent shows are to maintain separate entrances for different races,” the law said. “Any circus or other such traveling show exhibiting under canvas or out of doors for gain shall maintain two main entrances to such exhibition, and one shall be for white people and the other entrance shall be for colored people, and such main entrances shall be plainly marked ‘For White People,’ and the other entrance shall be marked ‘For Colored People,’ and all white persons attending such show or traveling exhibition other than those connected with the said show shall pass in and out of the entrance provided for white persons, and all colored persons attending such show or exhibition shall pass in and out of the entrance provided for colored persons.”
Noncomplying circuses, it continued, “shall be fined not more than $500. The sheriffs of the counties in which such circus or traveling show shall exhibit shall be charged with the duty of enforcing the provisions of this section.”
That was Jim Crow.
Cities throughout the South mandated residential segregation, and some banned blacks entirely and prohibited overnight stays. The message to blacks from white jurisdictions was occasionally spelled out, as Packard notes, in Burma Shave–style signs along highways: “N***** if you can read / you’d better run. / If you can’t read / you’d better run anyway.”
That was Jim Crow.
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations recounted the situation in that city, “From July 1, 1917, to March 1, 1921, the Negro housing problem was marked by fifty-eight bomb explosions. Two persons, both Negroes, were killed, a number of white and colored persons were injured. . . . With an average of one race bombing every twenty days for three years and eight months, the police and state’s attorney’s office succeeded in apprehending but two persons suspected of participation in these acts of lawlessness.”
That was Jim Crow.
From 1891 to 1905, more than a hundred blacks were lynched every year (except one), according to the book The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. The so-called offenses ranged from trying to vote to looking the wrong way at white people, especially white women. The lynchings drew public crowds to luxuriate in the cruelty.
A newspaper account described the sadism of one of these atrocities: “The mob sliced his body with knives, burned his body with red hot irons, hung him by the neck until he almost choked to death, then revived him and continued the torture. Next they dragged him to the home of the victim’s parents where several thousand people were waiting. When they stopped in front of the house, a woman came out and plunged a butcher knife into his heart.”
That was Jim Crow.
Of course, this is only a very cursory review. The same malice and repression can be found across any number of other dimensions, from public accommodations to marriage. Anyone who doesn’t understand the difference between this regime and that of contemporary America is either thoughtless, or dishonest, or both.
Regardless, the Jim Crow charge, like the accusation of Nazism, says more about the people making it than the targets of their ire.