Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  Eastman’s feminism and ethical principles took a back burner as he dedicated his life to crushing communism. “We’re in a political fight, not an ethical argument,” he said in defense of McCarthy’s targeting of American citizens for their political beliefs. “You go into battle like women in silk dresses, more concerned with keeping your skirts clean than defeating the enemy.”14

  Eastman now had no patience for weak-minded liberals who couldn’t stomach some oppression in the great battle against the evils of communism, just as he previously had lacked patience for the weak-minded liberals who couldn’t stomach revolution in the great battle against the evils of capitalism. In trying to understand his friend’s monumental political shift from left to right, Dell theorized that his continual hatred of liberals was his sustaining consistency.15

  Eastman and Dell had little in common toward the ends of their lives. Eastman was now dedicated to fighting the socialism that had brought him to prominence, and Dell was devoted to subverting the feminism that had brought him fame. The two men had stopped speaking, any friendliness between them frozen over by their ideological differences.

  Eastman and Dell are not special outliers. They were two white dudes who came into a movement and made it about themselves. In their activism, they became momentary rock stars, despite having little skill or dedication to the movement itself. Then they wreaked a little havoc before deciding to set fire to the building as they left.

  But in that lack of singularity lies the problem: their story is a common one. Mediocre, highly forgettable white men regularly enter feminist spaces and expect to be centered and rewarded, and they have been. They get to be highly flawed, they get to regularly betray the values of their movement, yet they will be praised for their intentions or even simply for their presence—while women must be above reproach in their personal and public lives in order to avoid seeing themselves and their entire movement engulfed in scandal. Even in today’s feminist movements, there is a push to show men what they will get out of supporting feminism. You should be a feminist, we argue, because it will also benefit you. And it’s true that feminism can help men in many ways. As the mother of two sons, I’m constantly trying to protect them from the damaging patriarchal messages that tell them that their only power is in domination, that the only emotions they can feel are lust and anger. I see firsthand what harm the patriarchy can inflict on men and boys as I watch my children and their peers battle to be whole people in a society that tells them that “men” can only exist in one particularly violent way.

  But when I tell my sons that they should be feminists, I don’t try to sell it to them based on the benefits they will reap. I tell them what I also tell white people who are looking for reasons to be antiracist: Yes, it will offer some real benefits for you. Your life will be better in many ways when we work to end oppression. But it will not always benefit you. Sometimes it may seem like justice is disadvantaging you when the privileges you’ve routinely enjoyed are threatened. But you have to do it anyway, because you believe that women and people of color are human beings and that we deserve to be free from oppression, even when that means you personally have to give some things up.

  When that true commitment to equality isn’t there, when white men waltz into social justice movements with their privilege unchecked and expect to feel rewarded and comfortable at all times, they slow us down. They also hurt people, and they compromise the integrity of our movements.

  We don’t speak a lot about Eastman and Dell these days, but when they are remembered, they are remembered almost universally fondly. Even socialist commentators seem to have found a way to forgive Eastman’s betrayals of the movement—even though his support of McCarthy put his former colleagues at serious risk, and even though he spent more of his life trying to destroy communism and socialism than he spent supporting them. Contemporary articles sing the two men’s praises while glossing over their later conservative work. Indeed, in articles about Dell’s life, when attention is given to his legacy as a proponent of male feminism, almost no attention is paid to the harmful antifeminist and homophobic nature of his later work. History is very kind to the memory of mediocre white men.

  JOE BIDEN IS BOTH FOR AND AGAINST BUSING

  When a young Joe Biden was campaigning to represent Delaware in the US Senate in 1972, he was, like many liberals of the time, not openly opposed to busing. After the landmark 1952 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, desegregation efforts were put in motion throughout the South. Black students were bused into white schools, sometimes needing the protection of the National Guard. When the Supreme Court gave federal courts broader power to use busing to desegregate schools across the country in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, busing began to be mandated in Northern cities as well.

  In the 1950s and early ’60s, busing had primarily been a Southern issue, and images of white parents shouting and spitting on Black students who were desegregating white schools had long painted opposition to busing with a broadly racist brush. When white Republicans tried to pass an amendment ending busing, Biden accused representatives of using busing as a scare tactic to secure white votes. But as more Northern cities faced their own busing orders, many politicians like Biden who had supported busing efforts in the past found that their own white constituents suddenly had a very big problem with the practice.

  From the beginning, Biden was in a tricky spot. He had long touted not only his liberal record but also his close connections to Delaware’s Black community. By the end of Biden’s senatorial campaign, he had created a confusing stance on busing that was all his own. Biden’s stance was so convoluted that local papers wrote that he was both “for and against” busing.16

  Biden stated that he was for busing to correct “de jure” segregation and was against it to correct “de facto” segregation, meaning that he was in support of busing where school segregation had been purposefully built and maintained, and against it where it just happened to occur due to factors outside of racist segregation efforts. In other words, busing was good for the South, where racist laws had been written to keep Black and white kids in separate schools, and was bad in the North, where Black and white kids were apparently separated by coincidence or magic.

  But courts had not found much magic in the school-segregation issues in Delaware. In the 1970s, Wilmington, Delaware, was about half Black, half white. Yet Wilmington schools were 82 percent Black, while the schools in the nearby, wealthier suburbs of Newcastle County—which also educated white students living in the wealthier outskirts of Wilmington—were 79.8 percent white.17 Black parents saw that white schools had more funding, better buildings and learning materials, and better student outcomes than Black schools. But they were unable to enroll their children in these better schools because of strict Delaware laws that had split the urban and suburban schools into separate districts. Black parents sued, and in 1974 federal courts decided that the segregation of the schools around Wilmington violated the law.

  Suddenly, liberal white families in Delaware not only faced the prospect of Black kids attending their lily-white schools; they also faced the potential horror of having their white kids sent directly into the heart of darkness that was Wilmington public schools. When the young Biden voted against two amendments in 1974 that would have dismantled busing-desegregation programs, his white constituents rallied against him. In June of 1974, white families gathered at an antibusing event in Newport, Delaware, determined to force Biden to listen to their concerns. When Biden tried to explain the “de-facto/de-jure” reasoning behind his halfhearted support of busing, he was loudly jeered by the crowd.18 White people stopped Biden around town to accuse him of ruining their children’s lives by sending them to Black schools.

  Biden got the message. If he continued to defend busing, he ran the real risk of becoming a one-term senator. In 1975, Joe Biden stunned his Senate colleagues by throwing his support behind known segregationist Jesse Helms’s proposed antibusi
ng amendment to the Constitution. Speaking in defense of Helms’s amendment, Biden told the Senate, “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.”19 In a later television interview, Biden warned that if the US government didn’t come up with a different solution for school segregation than busing, “we are going to end up with the races at war.” Biden explained that the good white people he represented weren’t racist, but busing might make them so: “You take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school and you’re going to fill them with hatred.”20 Biden’s argument was that the white Northerners who had benefitted from schools that consolidated white wealth and excluded Black students from sharing in that wealth with legislation that kept their districts (and the corresponding property taxes and PTA funding opportunities) separate were not racist, but subjecting them to the same education that Black students had long been forced to endure would make them racist.

  Biden went even further, calling the concept of busing itself racist. Why did Black students need to sit next to white students in order to succeed? How patronizing! Were Black students not smart and talented enough to succeed on their own? Biden argued that they were, and to support busing was to assume that they were not. To Biden, busing spoke to assumptions about the inferior ability of Black culture to succeed without white influence, saying, “It implies that Blacks have no reason to be proud of their inheritance and their own culture.”21

  Now convinced that busing was wrong, likely both for the country and for his reelection chances, Biden made antibusing his cause célèbre. In 1976 Biden introduced his own antibusing amendment, aimed at preventing the Justice Department from pursuing cases that would lead to federally enforced busing. In 1981, Biden partnered with yet another well-known segregationist when he and Strom Thurmond introduced antibusing provisions into the Justice Department’s spending bill.22

  Biden was obsessed with ending busing, stating that, in his first eight years in the Senate, “No issue has consumed more of my time and energies.”23

  When Biden, a young, liberal Northern senator whose star was on the rise, came out strongly against busing, it gave other liberal senators permission to do the same. Instead of a stance taken only by the likes of George Wallace in order to preserve white supremacy, antibusing as framed by Biden became an issue that white liberals could stand behind without questioning their racist motives. The majority of Black voters at the time still supported busing to desegregate schools, but their concerns were drowned out by the wants of the white majority. Many Blacks felt the same way that NAACP leader Tom Atkins did in 1975 when he said, “An anti-busing amendment is an anti-desegregation amendment, and an anti-desegregation amendment is an anti-Black amendment.”24

  Ed Brooke, representing Massachusetts as the first Black person to win popular election to the US Senate, was a fierce supporter of busing to support desegregation of schools when other measures had failed. He was devastated over the antibusing legislation that Biden helped push through the Senate, calling the vote on Biden’s antibusing amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”25 Whereas Brooke’s support of busing would end his Senate career, Biden’s antibusing stance would help ensure his reelection.

  Today, busing gets mixed reviews. Busing did integrate schools. Funding for schools was more equalized across racial lines. A larger percentage of Black students were given the same educational opportunities as white students. Some students, both Black and white, later testified to the value and growth they’d received from a more diverse environment. But busing was often traumatic for students who were pulled from their neighborhoods and sent across town to go to school with strangers who were at times openly hostile to their presence. Busing was in many cases more damaging to Black students than white ones, as Black children faced violence from white peers and parents for simply trying to get a better education.

  But busing was never supposed to be the ultimate solution to ending school segregation. The reasons behind the “de facto” segregation that Biden talked about—issues like employment and housing segregation—were at the heart of school segregation and school-funding disparities in the North. But that segregation was built by racist housing and employment segregation that white Northerners valued even more than their educational segregation. History had shown how violently white Northerners opposed true desegregation in housing and employment. When efforts to address the root causes of school segregation failed, all that was left was busing. As Brooke said in his defense of busing programs, “It is not necessarily the best way, but in certain instances busing is the only way to achieve desegregation.”26 Busing was the option that was better than nothing. But when it ended, lawmakers decided that it was time to try nothing.

  Biden remained proud of his record on busing for decades, even writing about it in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, calling busing a “liberal trainwreck.”27 His stance would fade into the background during the Obama years, when he served as vice president. But it would come to the foreground again in 2019 when Biden was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president. The voters that Biden tried to win over in the 2019 presidential primary were quite different from the voters he answered to in 1970s Delaware. Biden would need the support of Black voters in order to secure the Democratic nomination. Suddenly, he remembered his actions around busing much differently. When he was interviewed for the popular podcast Pod Save America in March of 2019, Biden decided to burnish his busing record by focusing on the time he voted to support busing in 1974—and not the decade he spent trying to defeat it. “In the middle of the single most extensive busing order in all the United States history, in my state,” he said, “I voted against an amendment, cast the deciding vote, to allow courts to keep busing as a remedy. Because there are some things that are worth losing over.”28

  I’m sure there must be some things worth losing over, but Biden has consistently decided that busing was not one of them.

  When, in June of 2019, Biden bragged about his ability to rise above partisan politics to get things done in Washington, he highlighted his working relationship with notoriously racist senators like Herman Talmage and James V. Eastland.29 Eastland was known for reportedly shouting at a White Citizens’ Council rally in Montgomery during the bus boycott, “All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.”30

  Many were shocked and outraged that Biden would brag about being able to work closely with people who proclaimed that the killing of Black Americans was one of white Americans’ inalienable rights. Cory Booker, also bidding for the Democratic presidential nomination, voiced his dismay as a Black man upon hearing Biden speak so fondly about virulent racists, and said that Biden should apologize. Biden countered that Booker should instead apologize to him for insinuating that Biden was anything but an antiracist crusader, stating, “Cory… knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period. Period. Period.”31

  But Biden’s tales of reaching across the aisle to segregationists reminded many journalists and commentators about the other times that Biden worked with unapologetic segregationists in pursuit of antibusing legislation. Biden was forced once again to try to explain to the public his support for busing in “de jure” segregation versus busing in “de facto” segregation. His explanation did not grow any more elegant in the decades since he’d first come up with that justification in 1972.

  After busing was dismantled nationally, the “other methods” of desegregating schools that Biden insisted were more effective than busing never materialized. Without federal mandate forcing integration, schools slowly resegregated, and their funding followed. A 2019 report showed that nonwhite school districts received $23 billion less per year than their white counterparts. Even when controlled for income discrepancies,
the funding was less, with poor white schools still receiving more funds than poor schools where the majority of the students were people of color.32 Funding disparities and the concentration of underprivileged students in schools with fewer resources than wealthier white schools have also led to a higher turnover of teachers in nonwhite schools. This all has contributed to persistent testing gaps between white students and Black, brown, and Native students.

  Biden’s home state of Delaware, like many states that were once ordered to use busing to desegregate their schools, has been resegregating in the years since busing ended. Busing there had been very successful at desegregating schools. In 1989, there were no intensely segregated (i.e., 90–100 percent minority-student) schools in the metro Wilmington area. But by 2010, the number of intensely segregated schools had grown to 15 percent. The average Latinx student in Wilmington attended a school where 61 percent of students were low income, and the average Black student attended a school where 56 percent of students were low income, while the average white student attended a school where only 37 percent of the students were low income.33 As racial disparities in educational funding and outcomes returned to Delaware, parents of color once again brought their case to the courts in hopes of obtaining equitable educational opportunities for their children. In a 2018 case, the state of Delaware argued in its defense that the Constitution doesn’t require that the state provide the children of Delaware with a fair or “adequate” education system.34

  We find racism in our systems when we look at what the system produces. When we find systems with outputs that negatively affect people of color in a way or to a degree that they do not affect white people, we have a racist impact that can be tied to a racist cause. Often, that racism looks little like the proud hatred professed by the senators whom Biden worked with, and more like that of Biden’s white constituents, who couldn’t imagine a worse fate for their children than having to go to the same schools that Black children had always attended. Or it looks like the racism of Biden himself, who, in catering to the racism of his white constituents, legitimized the excuses that white people used to hide the sinister reasons for their antibusing stances, severely undercutting the efforts of his Black constituents to provide a better education for their children.