Feb 17, 2019 5 min read

I was one of those who thought the 2008 election of Barack Obama was a significant milestone in the country’s tortured history of race relations. A post-race future beckoned for America, or so I naively assumed.

It turns out it was significant, but not in the way I imagined. Things have seemingly gotten worse in the past 12 years.

On the other hand, how much real improvement was there? The Obama election was only one measure of the distance the country had traveled. The Great Recession aside, black unemployment remained stubbornly high. Inner-city black public school students were still being crammed into classrooms where learning was more or less optional. And in far too many instances police continued to shoot first before asking questions of African-Americans.

The ubiquitous cell phone camera exposed the lies we civilian whites had been telling ourselves for years. It turns out justice was not color-blind. On the contrary, justice was color-conscious in ways that were truly distressing.

No wonder the outrage of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Donald Trump, an original birther, has exacerbated the situation. The 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., and its ugly outcome, including the president’s shameful response, exposed as never before the bigotry that’s been a hallmark of the far right for a good long time.

I used to cover Tea Party rallies in Westmoreland County that frequently veered uncomfortably close to racial ugliness. Organizers always denied the charge, even as they themselves edged to the precipice of out and out bigotry.

The fact is, the Republican Party has indulged in racially-tinged politics, consciously or unconsciously, since 1964. The party of Thaddeus Stevens became the party of Barry Goldwater, whose opposition to civil rights legislation opened the door to the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, to the Welfare Queen motif of Ronald Reagan, and to the Willie Horton attack ads that helped propel George H. W. Bush to the White House in 1988.

Of course, Democrats have hardly been above reproach. With a strong Southern inflection, the party provided the political underpinnings for slavery and later Jim Crow. The Democratic bourbon South in alliance with the urban, labor North racked up one presidential election victory after another beginning in 1932 before the alliance came to a smash up in the early ’60s.

It was not for nothing that Jackie Robinson was a Republican, supporting Richard Nixon against the Democrat for president in 1960.

And now comes the Virginia governor and lieutenant governor, both Democrats, who as young men painted their faces black, insinuating the full-on bigotry of earlier years in American history.

Within living memory — in this case, mine – blackface minstrel shows were staged in Uniontown. In those pre-civil rights days, I was hauled to charity minstrel shows at the Uniontown High School auditorium. I was a kid, and I don’t recall thinking anything of it. The adults who took me – I think it was a dear aunt and uncle — apparently saw nothing wrong. I’m pretty sure the men on stage, members of a certain service club, hardly batted an eye at the prospect of donning blackface. As I say, the show was a charitable endeavor. They probably felt they were doing good.

I recall the days of segregated movie theaters in Uniontown. Black youngsters were shuttled to “peanut heaven” at the State, the section furthest from the screen. African-Americans were denied access to local swimming pools until the Southern-based civil rights movement of the 1960s came along.

Shady Grove pool was an all-white preserve; blacks were as locked out there as they were in Mississippi and Alabama, or, for that matter, South Africa.

Even if I had been old enough to be outraged, I probably wouldn’t have been. It was the way things were. A majority of whites if they were not bigots were at the very least oblivious to the informal or de facto segregation of the North, and to the second class lives of the black Americans who lived nearby in Uniontown’s segregated neighborhoods.

In my youthful recollection, the only jobs blacks filled were menial ones: women were elevator operators, men collected trash.

For many whites, bigotry is baked in. It goes way back. A great uncle songwriter of mine at the turn of the 20th composed vaudeville and minstrel show tunes, several of which, such as The Stuttering Coon, reflect the blatant racism of the day.

On the eve of the Civil War, the Uniontown Genius of Liberty, from which this newspaper is descended, published an editorial in defense of slavery, citing Scripture no less. Slavery, the editorialist declared, was a “divine institution, consequently right: for whatever is divine is right.”

Does it do any good for whites to declare, But look at the progress that’s been made? I’m not sure. Resentment on the part of black Americans toward white Americans hailing black progress is only natural, not when so many problems remain unsolved and the future looks so fraught, and after centuries of white people treating black people as children, as objects of hate, ridicule or derision, in short, as blackface caricatures of real human beings.

Hobbled by the reality of the past, stymied by the intractable present, it is clear that the great multiracial society the United States should be remains a work in progress.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.