Critical Race Theory and Virginia

“America … the international Jekyll and Hyde … the land of a thousand disguises, sneaks up on you but rarely surprises” ~ Gil Scott-Heron

And tweet after tweet last night said I can’t believe they voted for another racist white businessman. My friend, Reuben Jackson, the poet said, Virginia, gonna be Virginia. Did they rename Jefferson Davis Highway yet?

The tweeters forgot that America was founded by white racist businessmen who enslaved Africans by force and got rich from the exploitation of that free labor. The tweeters were talking about Glenn Youngkin, who just became the next Governor of Virginia using racial division as his primary tool.

Youngkin spent the last month of that campaign convincing Virginia voters Critical Race Theory was coming to a school near you to hypnotize your white kid and make them hate themselves, even though it isn’t coming to any school and never has come to a school. It isn’t K-12 ready.

Everyone won’t agree but Youngkin won the election because of racist appeals to voters using Critical Race Theory and linking it up with everything else the GOP hates about America’s changing racial politics, demographics, and the official historical record.

I saw it coming and wrote about what he was doing twice. Both parties dial-up racial strategies when they need it. But the GOP does it the old way — like Wallace (a Dixiecrat), Nixon, and Reagan.

And that Loudoun County School Board meeting in the summer that got bum-rushed by busloads of people from outside the district screaming about the evils of Critical Race Theory? Youngkin was there. He denounced Critical Race Theory there.

Eric Olson, a Front Royal, Virginia resident, wrote the following of Youngkin’s tactics in the election:

“He repeatedly brings up Critical Race Theory, thereby inflaming racial divisions. CRT is an arcane area of study not found in public school curriculum. Focusing on it is a dog whistle to the White resentment that Trump stokes for political benefit.”

Another hundred tweets I read the night of the election said— they couldn’t believe the strategy Youngkin used actually worked. Earth to all of you folks, appeals to racial fears in whatever form, always work, in America. Why wouldn’t it work in the former capital of the Confederacy?

Here’s what Toni Morrison said of America in such moments as last night’s election:

“If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other’s throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me — it’s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, “I am not that.” So in that sense, becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.”

Remember, Youngkin is in favor of banning Morrison’s book, Beloved, a book about the evils of African slavery in America, from the viewpoint of the Africans. And that is what the latest push for truth is about.

It is saying there is another story here in America and it is the whole story. It is not a story of heroic Englishmen in search of their fortunes and building a democratic nation. It is about genocide and human trafficking of Africans for profit. It is ugly and the country needs to reckon with history because every American institution is poisoned with it.

But Mr. Youngkin knew what he was doing. Lee Atwater would be proud of what he did today. Atwater, political advisor to Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, famously said this in 1981 the following when asked about how to use racial fearing in a campaign:

You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can’t say nigger — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites and subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But, I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, uh that we’re doing away with the racial problem one way or another you follow me cause obviously saying we want to cut this, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than nigger, nigger, you know? So, any way you look at it race is coming in on the back burner.”

This year, and from here on out, 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and other things will become ‘busing’ or ‘soft on crime’ allegations.

As he was dying in 1991 of a brain tumor, Lee Atwater denounced the cheap racial strategies he used. He said he was wrong to embrace the “meanness of conservatism” and that the country has a “spiritual vacuum.”

Atwater’s epiphany came way too late. The legacy he helped to forge is alive and well in Virginia and America.

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