Editor's note: Clarence Lusane teaches political science at American University and has authored a number of books, including Hitler’s Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, Afro-Europeans and African Americans During the Nazi Era (Routledge, 2002), Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century (Praeger, 2006). His latest book The Black History of the White House is now available from City Lights Books.
PA: Your new book, The Black History of the White House, offers a model of historical writing, I think, that challenges what you call the dominant narratives of our history. What do you mean by “dominant narratives” and why is it important to challenge those things?
CLARENCE LUSANE: That’s a good question. Most of us have grown up with a particular framework about American history and particularly the history of the presidencies. For the most part it has been a cleansed history, meaning that the foibles, errors and mistakes that were made by presidents were essentially not part of that history, particularly when it comes to race. Correcting that was part of the motivation for doing the book. We can see even today that this continues to be a battle. The decision in Arizona, for example, to ban ethnic studies, meaning that the histories of people of African descent, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians are more or less written out of the curriculum now in Arizona. Even more recently, this has been happening in Tennessee where a group of Tea Party activists also wants to rewrite history in a way in which only, as they see it, the positive parts of the lives of the Founding Fathers are taught, and any history related to what happened to African Americans as slaves, or what happened to Native Americans, who were frequently massacred, all of that should be written out. So we are always in a battle over how we understand and how we present history.
PA: Based on your experience in teaching history in this way, do you see change over time in how students respond to this or come to understand this counter-narrative?
CLARENCE LUSANE: Students, and I’ve been teaching close to 20 years now at the university level – each generation of students seems to forget what happened not only in the past, but almost immediately what has happened in front of them. The students who are coming in now, for example, are students who matured in the early 2000s, and we so have students now who think of Bill Clinton much as they think of George Washington – he’s an historic figure. So it becomes important that we revitalize and help them to either remember what they’ve forgotten or to learn what they have never learned. I think it has been a difficult transition, in many ways, for the universities, because the students who are coming in, this last generation, are coming in trained or in many ways educated through the Internet, and that means that a lot of the more rigorous kinds of book reading and learning that generations before went through, even with the imperfections, probably gave somewhat of a broader sense, or a more rigorous sense of history. Although students today have access to more information, they are coming with less knowledge. That’s what I’m finding and many of my colleagues are finding.
PA: You mentioned the Tennessee Tea Party’s drive to “cleanse” the history of the Founding Fathers, and in the book you analyze that tendency, broadly speaking, that we want to view the Founding Fathers as heroic figures. But a careful examination of the record, as you do in great detail in this book, reveals a lot of contradictions. Why should we resist the tendency to cleanse?
CLARENCE LUSANE: I think it is important for a number of reasons. President Obama, in his speech in Philadelphia during the campaign when he was responding to the Reverend Wright controversy, took advantage of that opportunity to talk about not only specifically how he was trying to deal with the controversy, but to frame it in a larger context of the history of race in the country. As he noted toward the end of his speech, part of being able to recapture that history is to recognize how it also resonates in the present, to see that the legacy of the many disparities we have seen for generations, the racial disparities in education, housing, in employment, and across the board in criminal justice, have their roots in this long history of unresolved racial questions in the US.
Part of going back to look at this history was not only to complete the overall historic record, so that we have the inclusion of everyone, but it was also to get a better understanding why, even in 2011, issues of race are so toxic and so passionate. That is because we have this long, long history, much of which is either ignored or unknown, that prevents the country as a whole from resolving these questions of inequality. Though I have spent a great deal of my life studying US politics and race politics, as I researched this book much of the information was new to me, because I had never particularly focused on it. Part of what I was trying to do with the book was to fill in this gap that nobody had focused on: how to understand this iconic place we call the White House, particularly with an African American and an African American family now in it. Obama often says that he stands on the shoulders of the previous occupants, and he is mostly referring to people like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, but he also, and his family also, stand on the shoulders of the African Americans who have come through there, because the building is a prism for the history of race relations in this country from the presidents who had slaves to policies that enforced segregation, to the policies that opened up space for attempting to address some of the country’s racial issues.
PA: You mention the President. The 2008 Presidential election plays such a big role in your story, as you’ve noted, but a lot of people insist that we're in a "post-racial era." What would you want readers to take away from your book about this?
CLARENCE LUSANE: We are in a period where there are countervailing trends and that are part of a long history. On the one hand, it’s absolutely true that there have been milestones and there have been advances. Certainly race relations in 2011 are not the same as race relations in 1959 or in 1869, and so we know that there has been that advancement. And this is often what the conservative movement focuses on, and solely focuses on. At the same time, though – and again I would underscore that even the President himself notes this – the persistence of racial disparities, which are well documented across the board, tells us that even reaching this milestone of having an African American reach the White House, given all the history that the country has had, doesn’t erase the broad reality being faced by tens of millions of other African Americans and other people of color and poor whites in the country today.
So there is still a lot to be done, and as we have seen in the last two years, beyond all that, the resentment on the part of many whites has led to a surge in what I would call public racism, where what we had thought had become unacceptable at least for a couple of generations – where regardless of what real feelings people may have had about race, there was an intolerance to expressions of racism at the public level, and you would not see signs and you would not hear speeches that seem from another era. But we have seen that come back, and we have seen it not just from the fringe but from mainstream elected officials; we’ve seen it from a very broad range of propaganda from right-wing radio and right-wing television, and we’ve seen it in parts of the Tea Party movement and its relationship to people like Sarah Palin.
We are in a very very difficult moment, and we need a counter-surge, I think, not only from the Black community and people of color, but from across the board, from progressives and others who want to make sure that we don’t revert back to another time. We need those kinds of voices. Hopefully this would include the White House, but I’m a bit skeptical, because I think in many ways what we have seen over the last two years is a very skittish kind of politics around race from the Obama Administration. Part of that I understand. I think that there is a sense that they can’t win on the issue of race, and that if it comes up in any context they automatically lose. At the same time, though, it is an issue that should not be avoided, because what they have done is surrender the discourse and surrender the debate to the more conservative and the more right-wing forces. This is why they have gotten in trouble on issues like the firing of Shirley Sherrod from the Department of Agriculture, where you just cannot imagine, if the circumstances had been reversed, that the Bush administration would not have defended one of its employees, certainly if it thought it was being attacked by somebody from the left. I think the administration needs to become more proactive on some of these issues, and hopefully such incidents are pushing it in that direction.
PA: Turning to the book itself, each of the chapters opens with a little story about an African American individual with some relevant link to the history you relate in the chapter. Why did you want to organize the book that way?
CLARENCE LUSANE: Well, the book didn’t start off that way. In 2007, when Obama announced that he was running, as I traveled around the US and around the world for the work I do, I was constantly being asked by people, “Can Obama win?”, “What is the meaning of having an African American in the White House?,” but also people were asking if there were ever other Black people in the White House - what’s the history? Part of my writing the book was to try to fill that gap, because as I looked around I saw that there wasn’t any comprehensive work that specifically talked about the history of Blacks in the White House.
There are a number of books that focus on the racial politics of US presidents, but they are told from the perspective of those administrations. I wanted to write a work that was told from the perspective of these African Americans and their many, many roles, throughout the White House. I had envisioned a book that would be 150-170 pages, but as I began to do the work, and I began to discover all of these stories, the book began to suggest to me a different way of presenting it. I decided that it was really critical to highlight the voices of these individuals who had been more or less written out of the history, who are unknown to all of us, including many people well versed in Black history. I wanted each chapter to start with the narrative of someone whose life experiences were a prism through which to begin to tell the story of how, in this particular time and in this particular era, all of the issues that later get addressed are embodied in this person’s particular experience. That’s what I wanted to do – to make sure that these voices were highlighted.
PA: One of the arguments you lay out is one which I think many people will find controversial and will cause debate. You argue that leading figures in the Southern colonies were motivated less by a desire for democracy and a republican government, in joining the Revolution, than they were by fears that the British were going to outlaw slavery, and that this was going to change their whole political economy down there. Could you comment on that particular issue?
CLARENCE LUSANE: I know that was being provocative, but as I began to go back and look at the literature and look at the debates, and began to focus on what was happening in the pre-Revolutionary War period I started to see these really different dynamics in the South. Now slavery was legal in virtually all of the colonies, so the issue of slavery by itself wasn’t a dividing line – but the future of where the country was going, and what role slavery would play in that, really was. For many in the North the Boston Massacre was the line in the sand and led people to commit to the Revolution. But for many in the South, they began to see the need to break from England based on a judicial decision that was handed down in England in 1772 called the Sommerset Decision. (That decision is written about in Slave Nation by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, which is a really detailed history of how this particular decision animated the South). The court decision in England essentially said that any slaves that came to England at that time would be set free, that England would no longer tolerate or accept slavery. So rather than there being parliamentary legislation or an order from the King, it basically came through this court decision.
Though the decision did not directly affect the colonies, there was the fear in the South that eventually it would, and all of that came to the fore in the debates around the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and especially the Constitution. For the South, the real issue was the protection of slavery, not states rights or a strong federal government. That is important because this is the 150th anniversary [2011-2015 ed.] of the start of the Civil War, and we’re going to be hearing a lot about the Civil War for the next four years.
Now, there is an argument out there that the Civil War was not about slavery, that it was about states’ rights, that it was about individual freedom, that it was about this oppressive national government. In fact, that is not the case at all. It really was not about states’ rights, and the South was actually by the time of the Civil War very anti-states’ rights, because they believed that under the states’ rights doctrine, states in the North like Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York were violating the Fugitive Slave Laws that had been passed, the Fugitive Slave clause that is in the Constitution, as well as the 1793 and 1850 Slave Laws that were passed in Congress. In the Declarations of Secession that came from South Carolina, Mississippi, and all those other states that seceded, they very specifically name the states they thought were violating the Federalist clauses of the Constitution. So states’ rights really wasn’t the point. It was the defense of slavery, and that was there from the very beginning. My argument is that they went to war for slavery, and everything else sort of came along behind.
PA: Related to the question of the Civil War is your discussion of the Lincoln White House. You talk about the historical role that Lincoln plays as being something that is governed by the special circumstances he found himself in, the social forces and social issues of the time, rather than personal heroic traits – which is the thing we want to do with the Founders as well. We want them to be heroic individuals who have these great ideals. Why do we do that?
CLARENCE LUSANE: I think it’s just easier, because to understand a Lincoln or George Washington, or for that matter Obama, requires much more complicated thinking and a much more nuanced kind of understanding of the relationship between the individual’s own personality, their political views and tendencies, and the context in which that person has to operate. And that is not necessarily an easy understanding that gives easy answers, but ultimately this is what is necessary to try to get a broad picture of why certain decisions were made at certain points. Looking at those who founded the country and those who became presidents, 12 of the first 16 presidents had slaves, and 8 of them had slaves inside of the White House. Now this is a glaring contradiction in a country that says it was founded on principals of independence, democracy, liberation and freedom. The easy path out of that contradiction is simply to deny those practices.
A more complex but genuine understanding of that history is to locate them in their context and show the foibles as well as the achievements. Now these aren’t just intellectual questions; they are ideological ones, and ultimately they are political questions. Because the issue of responsibility and how decisions are made very much plays itself out today. So when there is an argument that the Civil War was about states’ rights, in part this is really an argument about the question of the relationship between the states and the federal government today, and the conservative movement, the Tea Party, and the Republican Party essentially want to make an argument now that the federal government really is the problem here – it is really about the circumstances under which people are feeling all of the economic, social and cultural issues that the country has to deal with. But this is really kind of an ideological argument, and it is not really based on the reality that there is a range of variables that are playing a role, including the role of the federal government, the role of the states, the role of elected officials, and so forth. That is why I think it is really critical that there is really a fight for perspective and really a fight for making more complicated what is often presented as simple.
PA: Finally, thinking about the current situation, is the President today under special scrutiny that previous presidents were not under, in order to fulfill his particular individual heroic role, you know, the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln and so forth, and to deliver on his agenda, to lead, to be out there. Is that something that is unique to him for particular reasons, and does he deserve that scrutiny?
CLARENCE LUSANE: That’s a great question. I think he is definitely under intense pressure from a wide range of sources that other presidents have not had. Part of it, I think, clearly has to do with the issue of race. From the point of view of African Americans, there are extremely high expectations. He won 95 percent of the Black vote, which meant it was not just Black progressives and liberals and Democrats – it was conservatives, independents and, you know, I’m absolutely sure that Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell both voted for Obama. So there is a high degree of symbolism and expectation in the Black community that Obama represents, meaning that at a minimum he will be among the greatest of presidents, as people expected, if not the greatest.
On the other hand, there is pressure from whites who, even among those who supported him, did that in part in the sense of viewing him as a non-racial candidate. That puts pressure on him to not address issues specifically dealing with race, which for the most part he hasn’t; it has mostly been symbolic. In that sense there are, just on the racial front, expectations, many of which are unrealistic on both sides, that he has to confront on a daily basis.
In the broader context, he also became president in a period of global transition. The role of the US from essentially World War II up to the present has been hegemonic, but that is rapidly changing for a number of reasons, for both economic reasons and political reasons. Even on the military side, where the US has a preponderance of power and essentially is not challenged, the fact that it has to maintain that level has ramifications all the way across the board politically, economically, socially, and culturally. So Obama has to lead the country as it is going through this period when other centers of political and economic power are rising, and the US in particular is going through a very difficult time of economic transformation, where the complete ramifications of post-industrial life are now really starting to manifest themselves.
It seems very very unlikely under Obama’s watch, at least for the next two years, that unemployment is going to go down to anything near five or six percent, and it is actually probable that it might even rise to 12 percent or more, in part because there is little that the administration can do, because the Republicans are not going to let it do anything. But, in a broader sense, much of this is out of the control of whoever is president, whether it’s Obama or anybody else. And in that sense the judgment on Obama is going to really require a broader frame because of all that he is carrying, which is unique for American presidents.
