Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

—The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

  In the plants and factories of the North and the West, racial strife did not begin with the influx of white Southerners. Neither did it begin with the influx of Black workers from the Great Migration. Black labor, Asian labor, and Mexican labor had always been a flash point for white workers. From the beginning of the US expansion west through the industrial age, the United States needed more manpower than the white citizens of a still relatively young country could provide. And if businesses could get that dirty and dangerous work done for as little money as possible, all the better.

  Wherever white workers encountered nonwhite workers vying for similar jobs, there was trouble. Strikes, riots, even murder were not unusual in areas where white men believed they might be in danger of being replaced by workers of color—even though the companies that paid their wages would not have been viable without the cheap labor of workers of color.

  But although white Northerners had long resented the presence of workers of color, white migrants from the South endured the added insult of having to put up with people they were supposed to own. Furthermore, they were being regarded as lowly as Black workers. Their entire world had been turned upside down—they had gone from masters-in-training to everyday working nobodies. How was a white man supposed to be a man in a world that seemed to be functioning to disempower him?

  THE NORTH’S RAGE

  Many white people like to think that racism is really just a Southern problem. Sure, there are ignorant people everywhere, and yes—occasionally—racist incidents happen in California or New York, but those are exceptions. The South was the place that wanted slavery, and the rest of the country fought to end it, right? So how bad can it be once you leave the South?

  The answer is very bad. Rodney King was not beaten in the South; he was beaten in Los Angeles. Eric Garner was not choked to death in the South; he was choked in New York. Laquan McDonald was not shot sixteen times while walking away from police officers in the South; he was shot in Chicago. I could, to my great despair, go on for quite some time.

  Although white people in our progressive cities and towns may pat themselves on the backs for having never called anyone a nigger, many of them also hope that we will not notice the strict racial segregation of neighborhoods and schools, the overpolicing of Black and brown neighborhoods, the job discrimination, or the persistent racial wealth gaps. The concept of race in America was created for the subjugation of Black and brown bodies for the seeming benefit of white Americans. There are no pockets of America that are exempt from this. There is no liberal utopia that got a different memo.

  The story of the hardships that people of color have faced in this country does not end when Black people left the South, and the story of violent white male supremacy doesn’t stop at the Mason-Dixon line.

  The lot, nor any part thereof, shall not be sold to any person either of whole or part blood, of the Mongolian, Malay, or Ethiopian races, nor shall the same nor any part thereof be rented to persons of such races.

  —From the deed of a property in Seattle, Washington, added 192916

  During the Great Migration, Blacks relocated in a steady stream from the South to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Black workers, Black families, came in search of work, school, and dignity.

  The letters that Black migrants sent home reporting their successes encouraged more flight from the South. “I should have been here twenty years ago. I just begin to feel like a man. It’s a great deal of pleasure in knowing that you have got some privilege. My children are going to the same school with the whites and I don’t have to be humble to no one,” crowed one migrant to a friend back south.17 Some of the country’s most iconic artists, athletes, and leaders—including James Earl Jones, Zora Neal Hurston, Malcolm X, and Ella Baker—were Southern migrants or came from Southern-migrant families.18

  But this honeymoon was short-lived. While many businesses and cities thrived economically with the influx of much-needed labor, local whites were unprepared for such rapid changes to their communities. Between 1910 and 1930, the Black population of Chicago grew by 600 percent. In that same time period, the Black population of Detroit grew by an astronomical 2,000 percent, from a population of 6,000 to 120,000.19 As soldiers began returning from World War I in greater number, many white men were coming home to find themselves in direct competition with Black laborers for the first time in their lives. Black migrants found themselves facing hostility that felt a lot like what they had faced in the South. Suddenly, they weren’t allowed to shop in white stores, they were rarely hired for jobs white men wanted, and employers who did hire them often faced the fury of white workers.

  White anger exploded in the summer of 1919, known as Red Summer. Across the country, anti-Black riots broke out in cities including East St. Louis, Chicago, Omaha, and Houston. Whites in approximately twenty-five cities enacted widespread violence on Black residents.20

  In the Chicago riots, the first victim of racist violence was a Black child. Seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams was playing in Lake Michigan on a hot summer day when his raft wandered over the unofficial border between the white and Black sides of the beach. Enraged by Williams’s transgression, George Stauber, a twenty-four-year-old white man, threw rocks at him until he drowned.21 When police officers arrived and Black witnesses identified Stauber as the man responsible for Williams’s death, officers refused to arrest him.22 Black and white crowds clashed on the beach, and the local violence soon spread into the city, igniting the long-standing white resentment over having to compete with Blacks for jobs in the meat-packing industry. Violence broke out throughout South Chicago, terrorizing Black neighborhoods. Eight-year-old Juanita Mitchell, her sister, and her mother had just made their journey north from New Orleans to Juanita’s uncle’s home in Chicago when she witnessed Red Summer. Nearly a hundred years later, at 107 years old, she still remembered it well: “We were in the living room. That’s when I saw my uncle at the window, and I heard him in a gruff voice say, ‘Here they come!’ I didn’t know what he meant. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ My uncle said, ‘The race riot. The white people are coming down 35th Street with loaded guns.’”23

  After five days of violence, 23 Black and 15 white Chicagoans were dead, and 520 Chicagoans (most of them Black) were injured. One thousand Black families were left homeless. A burgeoning Black community was psychologically and economically scarred.

  Red Summer continued, moving west. In East St. Louis, tensions had long been brewing over jobs at Aluminum Ore Company. When workers went on strike, Black workers, who were already barred from union membership, were brought in as strike breakers. This unenviable position was one that many Black factory workers across the country found themselves in.24 The backlash against Black strike breakers was swift. Local papers published false stories of a crime wave being perpetrated by Black migrants against white people. White people drove through Black neighborhoods at night, shooting at Black-owned businesses and homes. Black residents armed themselves for protection.

  On the evening of July 1, 1919, Black residents shot at a vehicle that looked like one that had driven through their neighborhood earlier that evening, whose occupants had fired at their homes. The two men inside the vehicle were killed. They were not among the feared local terrorists; they were undercover police officers.25

  The next day, white residents of East St. Louis went on a murderous rampage. Black residents were beaten, shot, raped, lynched. For three days, East St. Louis was in flames as homes were burned to the ground. W. E. B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening traveled to East St. Louis to interview survivors for The Crisis and gave a grim account of what had happened there: “from noonday until midnight; they killed and beat and murdered; they dashed out the brains of children and stripped off the clothes of women; they drove victims into the flames and hanged the helpless to the lighting poles.”26 Historians estimate that over one hundred Blacks
were murdered and seven thousand terrified Blacks fled to neighboring cities.

  Violence against Black migrants went beyond physical endangerment. One of the most widespread ways in which Black communities were harmed—and are still harmed today—was through the use of racist housing covenants. When outright bans of minority groups in white neighborhoods through the use of zoning was deemed unconstitutional in 1917, white communities and developers banded together to form housing covenants, which they wrote into their deeds and community charters. These covenants typically banned property owners from selling or renting property to anybody who was nonwhite.

  Across the Northern and Western United States, people of color seeking a better life for themselves and their families were pushed into smaller, less desirable, and more crowded areas. The use of covenants was so widespread that by 1940, 80 percent of the property in Los Angeles and Chicago banned Blacks.27 Housing projects that were built to provide shelter in Black neighborhoods were soon dangerously overcrowded, filled with families who had nowhere else to go. Schools serving these segregated Black communities quickly became overcrowded as well. The housing fell into disrepair, creating pockets of crumbling infrastructure and poverty concentrated within cities.

  In 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Chicago at the invitation of the Chicago Freedom Movement, a coalition of civil rights organizations dedicated to fair housing for Blacks in the city. When King and his family moved into a dilapidated west-side apartment, a typical example of the housing available to Blacks, the news coverage brought national attention to the issue of housing discrimination in Chicago. King marched with members of the Chicago Freedom Movement through all-white neighborhoods in a push for open housing in the city. The marchers were met with violence. Angry white residents hurled racial slurs and rocks at the protesters. One rock hit Dr. King on the back of the head hard enough to knock him to the ground.

  King was shocked at the extreme violence and vitriol he saw in Chicago—in a region that was supposed to be so much less racist than the South. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” King commented. “But I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”28

  Just about anywhere that Blacks pushed for greater integration into the broader community and for more open housing, they were met with violent resistance from Northern whites. Northern whites have taken pride in being on the right side of history regarding slavery, which they saw as a Southern problem. It was a Southern problem, however, because Northern whites had apparently expected that freed Blacks would stay chained to the South. When Black people migrated North, whites forced them into areas of concentrated poverty and misery. Then they pointed at the conditions Black Americans were living in—pointed at their desperation—and harnessed it to justify further discrimination.

  But just as Black labor was needed to maintain Southern agriculture, Black labor was now needed to support Northern industrial economies. The North’s need for Black labor, and its hatred of Black people, was nothing new, and neither was Black survival while fighting against it.

  SEGREGATION FOREVER

  George [Wallace] doesn’t give us some mealy-mouth “on the one hand and on the other” spiel. He tells it like it is and if it offends some government bureaucrats and loudmouth civil rights agitators, so what? He’s standing up and fighting for real Americans.

  —Wallace supporter, 196829

  When George Wallace is elected president, he’s going to line up all these niggers and shoot them.

  —Wallace supporter, 196830

  The thing about anger is that it needs a home. When you are angry because you are a white man stalled in your career—uncomfortable with a changing world and uncertain of your financial future—it is very hard to find a concrete target for your anger. When society is constantly telling you that you are not supposed to be facing any of these problems, because you are a white man, your anger will convince you that somebody has stolen what should be yours. The danger with this type of anger becomes most apparent when a savvy populist decides to name that target for you. In the 1960s, the opportunist who exploited white male fear and anger was George Wallace.

  Wallace had made a name for himself as governor of Alabama with his theatrical, fire-breathing anti-integration stance. While his brazen antics, like standing in front of the University of Alabama to prevent Black students from entering, had made him popular with Southern whites, many pundits and politicians were sure that somebody so controversial would have no chance on a national stage. That sort of virulent racism didn’t play well in the North and the West. Their gross underestimation of George Wallace and the power of blatant racism would change American politics forever.

  It is important to understand that although Wallace had gained notoriety for shouting racist slogans like “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he likely wasn’t much more racist than the average white politician—especially in the South. Above all, Wallace was an opportunist.

  When Wallace first ran for governor of Alabama in 1958, he conducted a relatively progressive campaign. He was outspoken against the KKK and was even endorsed by the NAACP. And he got his ass handed to him in the primary by an openly racist candidate, John Malcolm Patterson. In defeat, Wallace learned that his path to electoral victory did not lie in peace and love. After the election, Wallace was quoted as saying to his friend Seymore Trammell, “I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”31

  When Wallace ran for governor again in 1962, he was able to outnigger his way to a landslide victory on a campaign of “segregation forever”—aided by the mass disenfranchisement of Black voters in Alabama. When setting out for a national run in 1968, Wallace recognized that the same anger that had motivated Alabama voters was widespread among white working-class men across the country—especially in places that were adjusting to an influx of Black industrial workers, and especially among white Southern migrants up north. Wallace revised his language to broaden his audience, but if you listened closely the message was still the same. “The dangers of integration” was replaced with more respectable stand-ins like “a need for law and order” and “fighting school busing.” “Evil commies and civil rights activists” became “evil commies and hippies.” “Northern aggressors” became “Washington elites” and “the liberal, know-nothing press.”

  There wasn’t a lot of policy talk; even Wallace’s campaign team acknowledged that they had no real plan for what Wallace would actually do if elected to office. Chances are, even setting his bigotry aside, he would have made a very bad president. Wallace’s campaign lacked any substantial policy positions and was abundant in promoting hatred of Black people, hippies, and the political elite. Even one of Wallace’s campaign workers said she didn’t think Wallace had “really thought about being president, in the sense of presiding over the country.”32 But Wallace didn’t need a strong, thorough policy platform. He promised with gusto to take on the hippies and commies and activists and establishment politicians. That was enough for the white men who had been looking for someone to punch. Wallace’s campaign slogan promised that he would “Stand up for America”—and it was clear whose America he would stand up for and whom he would stand against.

  Pundits were surprised when Wallace garnered support in cities like Akron, Ohio, but this was probably not a surprise for Wallace and his team. Wallace’s initial base was strongest in places where Southern white migrants had ended up. Wallace spoke their language, and their early enthusiasm helped legitimize his campaign and introduce him to larger audiences. And Wallace’s barely veiled racism wasn’t a hard sell for working- and middle-class white men in general. As Wallace, running as an Independent, saw his support rise into the double-digit percentages, his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, began to panic. Large portions of his support were being siphoned by this upstart, and Nixon’s campaign feared that Wallace would steal enough of his votes to lead to a
victory for Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

  In response to Wallace’s appeal to white, working-class voters, the Nixon campaign decided to outnigger Wallace with a so-called Southern Strategy. Shifting the focus of the campaign to one of law and order, protecting state’s rights, and promises of returning America to the average workingman, the campaign employed clearly recognized codes (which are still used to this day) for “we will restore your position of superiority over Black people.”

  Nixon’s move toward a white supremacist campaign, coupled with the power of the Republican Party, was enough to defeat both Wallace and Humphrey and win him the presidential election. A strong message was sent from Nixon’s victory: if you want to mobilize the white American working class, you must at least allude to reinforcing its economic and political power over communities of color. Several future presidents—from Reagan to Clinton to Trump—took the lesson to heart.

  “MAYBE WE’RE ILLEGALLY OCCUPYING YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW”

  My family is the only Black family within three blocks. That has been the case for the entire five years that we’ve lived in this working-class neighborhood. And I moved here for the diversity. This is Seattle—and in Seattle, diversity is relative. Yes, our suburb is only about 6 percent Black, but with only two high schools in our district, they can’t racially segregate the schools the way many other Seattle-area schools do. So… diversity, Seattle style. I do not think I would have the writing career I have today if I had not grown up in the Seattle area. This city has forced me to understand all that is unsaid about race and racism in America.

  Seattle is in a beautiful location, with water, mountains, and trees just about everywhere you look. It is a city where everyone recycles and everyone votes Democratic. It’s a city that has ridden multiple tech booms to many consecutive decades of prosperity and security.

  The only thing Seattleites love more than recycling is coming up with new ways to avoid talking about race and the city’s issues with racism.