George M. Fredrickson
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002
$35.00
207 pp.
Reviewed by Robert S. Griffin
On the History Channel recently, I saw what has become classic documentary footage from the mid-1950s of the entry of black students into the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower had dispatched federal troops to Little Rock to ensure that white resistance would not disrupt the court-ordered desegregation of the school. Two grainy black-and-white images come to mind from the footage: The first, a hundred or so soldiers marching down a city street twelve abreast toward the camera, rifles held diagonally in front of them, helmets obscuring their faces, heavy boots striking the pavement in unison. The second image, a black girl of about fifteen, dark-rimmed glasses, hair straightened and neatly combed, in a white blouse and dark skirt, clutching her school books tightly to her chest as she strides quickly toward the school steps amid soldiers and a throng of protesting whites.
I had seen these pictures time and again over the years and, as always, they were riveting—an incredibly tense time, a charged moment, that came through. But while the visceral impact of this footage was as strong as ever, I was struck by how drastically its meaning had changed for me this time. Always before, I had perceived these scenes in the same way. The protagonists had been the black students—I just looked it up, there were nine of them, and this was 1957. They were the focal actors in the drama, its heroes, if you will. They were the ones I cared about. Their fate was the central question at hand. Drama involves conflict, and the conflict in this drama as I had always seen it until this last time was over whether or not these black children would achieve equal educational opportunity. The antagonists in the drama were the whites who were there that day. They were the "other," faceless, nameless, the villains in the piece.
The morality in this conflict was clear-cut: the black children were on the side of justice, on the side of fairness and decency, on the side of progress, on the side of history. They were aligned with what America stands for at its core, at its best: justice for all. The whites, in contrast, represented the oppressive and cruel system of racial segregation. They embodied bigotry and backwardness. As for the soldiers, until this last time I saw them as being on the side of righteousness as they protected the innocent and peaceful black children from the mob of racist and violence-prone whites that pressed in upon them.
And every time but this last time the drama had had a happy ending: Through their bravery and determination, these black children, with the support of an enlightened civil rights leadership and a benevolent federal presence, won the right to go to school just like all children have the right to go to school, and that was a victory not only for them and the civil rights movement generally, but for us all. Their victory was a victory for America.
But this time for me the story was a different one. The pictures and the narration were the same as they had always been, but the drama had changed. This time, the protagonists weren't the black children but rather the white parents. I found myself looking beyond the faces of the black children in the foreground to the white faces in the background, bringing them into focus if I could. This time, instead of being "them," the white people were "us," my people. Who were they? I asked myself. Why haven't I ever heard from them? This time, the central issue wasn't justice for blacks; instead, it was whether the whites' cultural and racial integrity and freedom of association would be compromised. This time the drama was about democracy and the right of a people to control their own destiny rather than have it dictated from afar. This time the drama was about whether white children, as well as their parents, would be compelled at the point of a bayonet to acquiesce to something that in the deepest recesses of their beings they found abhorrent. This time the soldiers represented tyranny, not protection. And this time the story didn't have a happy ending. This time freedom lost, our republic lost, people of European heritage—white people, the white race—lost ... and this time I lost.
Those basic messages are what I am left with two weeks after reading Racism: A Short History, and I suspect that that is what the university students who will read book for courses will be left with two weeks after the test.
So what do I conclude from all this?
First, unless you have insomnia that you are trying to combat I'm not recommending you read Racism: A Short History. Second, we need to keep in mind that the personal, social, and cultural impact of a book—or television show, or movie, or lecture, whatever—isn't what it says so much as it is what readers/viewers take away from it. Fredrickson's book may not be all that good as a piece of scholarship and work of prose, but it is very good at getting across certain fundamental messages to readers who choose to or, more likely, are compelled to read it. Third, what I am calling the flow of public discourse is very powerful in shaping how one perceives and lives in the world. To his credit, Fredrickson has actively participated in this public forum, this public dialogue, and other ways to put it. He has written books that generations of university students have read and will read. He has taught and graded thousands of the best and the brightest at one of America's premier universities. If you and I have a story about race to tell different from the one the Fredricksons of the world are telling, we are going to have to find a way to get our boats into the mainstream waters.