Everywhere I turn these days I keep seeing or hearing the words, “No More Excuses.” From black self-help book titles to black pundits on CNN, these three words have become the mantra of post-racialism in the Age of President Obama. Whether intended or not, the mantra fuels the belief that because of individual black achievements, we have finally reached the promised land of a color-blind, equal-opportunity America.
But this is not the first time we’ve been to the mountain top. Roughly a century ago, many Americans, from white social workers to black motivational speakers, declared that racism was no longer a determining factor in whether individual black people succeeded or failed.
As John Daniels observed then: “[I]n most American communities…the fact that” African Americans are “steadily becoming better able to pay for privileges are [their] best guarantee of possessing these privileges. Restaurants and theaters, for instance, find that a [black man’s] money goes as far as a white man’s profits. A cab driver deems it wiser to pick up a fare from an” African American “than to let his vehicle stand idle. Stores of all kinds, even the most select, see no good reason for declining to sell” to black people. “Banks draw no color line in accepting deposits.” And black folk can live anywhere they choose.
In 1914, Daniels was not delusional. As a white social worker from the great liberal state of Massachusetts, and as the foremost expert on the history of Black Boston’s antislavery movement, he knew exactly what he was saying. Any remaining disparities between the quality of white and black people’s lives had nothing to do with racism. Fifty years before President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Daniels declared: The problem is “not race feeling. It is not color-feeling. It is inferiority-feeling.” White people “feel and act toward” black people “accordingly.”
Yet that same year, fifty-one African Americans were lynched, a number that grew year by year reaching seventy-six in 1919. By then racial violence had grown to epic proportions, claiming hundreds of black lives as nearly two dozen race riots erupted from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. There is a powerful cautionary tale in remembering the words of John Daniels and so many others uttered during the first post-Civil Rights era. Many Americans believed then that the heavy-lifting of building racial democracy had been completed. What better proof, they claimed, than the election of more than a dozen African Americans to the United States Congress. From the 1870s through the turn of the twentieth-century, 14 black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and two black men served in the U.S. Senate. Undeniably, these were historic times, watershed events, and moments for great optimism.
But when Reconstruction ended in 1877, the nation’s political winds changed directions, loosening black people’s foothold on the mountain top. White Democrats took back the South with violence and subterfuge. By 1880 there were no more black Senators, by 1896 segregation was legalized through Plessy v. Ferguson and, by 1901 there were no black Congressmen. The grand experiment in racial democracy had come to a precipitous end. It would take much of the rest of the twentieth-century to return race-relations to the political status quo of the late 19th century. Indeed it took 125 years, with the 2004 election of Senator Barack Obama, to surpass the number of black Senators who had served briefly in the 1870s.
Every generation of Americans since Reconstruction and Daniels’s day have wanted to believe in the country’s greatness and goodness and its fairness, its willingness to become a “more perfect union.”
But the myth of American Exceptionalism, of a divine mission to always triumph over evil, has been arguably as much a factor in persistent racism and racial inequality as residential segregation, bank redlining, discrimination in public education and, yes, even among taxi cab drivers. American Exceptionalism has left us continuously wanting, decade after decade to believe that we’ve moved past racism. John Daniels, a good guy in his day, was wrong about 1914, and about the future of race relations.
Indeed, Obama’s election has provoked new assertions that the nation can only move forward, can only progress: that there are “no more excuses” for failure.
As motivating as the mantra may be for some, it masks the very real challenges many African Americans face today in the midst of The Great Recession and The Era of Mass Incarceration. Those who chant it risk perpetuating a troubling legacy that we ignore at our own peril.
As the old adage goes what goes up must come down. If you don’t believe me, ask Alan Greenspan.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.
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