The New York Times Does PR for Segregationists

The architects of American re-segregation are getting star treatment in the New York Times: 

This description of the conservative movement’s “grand ambitions” sanitizes its neo-segregationist agenda. The Times story casts a legal movement that is repealing Civil Rights era reforms as one committed to anti-discrimination. In reality, this is a white supremacist movement, intent on strengthening its advantage by destroying the policies that led to the imperfect, partial integration of American organizations.

If successful, these legal challenges will push people of color out of public life; they are already re-segregating elite schools. But accurately describing this movement as neo-segregationist is apparently a violation of the Times’ style guide. It’s also abuser logic designed to justify the latest round of re-segregation.

Dr. Jennifer Freyd’s concept of institutional DARVO helps explain the abuser logic that frames the Times’ coverage of this neo-segregationist movement. Dr. Freyd developed the notion of DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) to show how abusers respond to exposure of their abuse. Rather than admitting their mistreatment and taking responsibility or attempting redress, abusers deny wrongdoing, attack the person or people exposing their harms, and claim that they—not their victims—have been wronged. Institutional DARVO occurs when trusted organizations (like the paper of record) confuse perpetrators and victims.

The Times’ coverage of anti-diversity zealots here is suffused with DARVO. Neo-segregationists deny racist intent, claiming that they are rolling back legal protections because they want a level playing field. Hypocritically, they ignore the fact that, despite falling short of creating full equality, Civil Rights protections helped level the playing field by making discrimination potentially costly. In the NYT piece, Dan Lennington, deputy counsel of the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, claims, “We’re looking for neutrality…We’re not interested in creating a culture of white racial grievance,” while pursuing cases grounded in white racial grievance (the article cites cases targeting McDonald’s scholarships for Hispanic students and funds for Black women entrepreneurs). The article’s author, Anemona Hartocollis, reverses victim and offender by claiming that ameliorative racial preferences have “embedded themselves in society” through affirmative action and diversity programs, but pays less attention to the overwhelming evidence that shows racial preferences for whites are much more embedded and pervasive.

In the piece, Anemona Hartocollis interviews Edward Blum, but doesn’t let readers know Blum became an anti-Civil Rights super-villain after losing a congressional race in a gerrymandered “majority minority” district. A sore loser, Blum has channeled his defeat into a legacy, including sponsoring Shelby v. Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court case that gutted the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance provisions. Blum will occasionally acknowledge that his crusade has led to some racist outcomes. For instance, Blum recognizes that “one or two” of the states formerly covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may have “gone too far” in suppressing Black votes after he created a legal pathway for suppressing Black votes.

But Blum’s realization hasn’t stopped him from chipping away at other parts of the Civil Rights Movement’s protective edifice. Blum’s claims that any use of race in American life is invidious. Nonetheless, he decided he “needed Asian plaintiffs” to mount an attack on affirmative action in the Harvard and UNC cases that limited the use of race in admissions. Blum’s strategy pits racially marginalized groups against each other, ensuring the benefits of the ensuing conflict accrue to white applicants.

DARVO’s final aspect, reversing victim and offender, is the neo-segregationists’ legal strategy. Some of the cases targeting diversity policy rely upon the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which was originally designed to protect Black people’s rights from white supremacist terrorists. Raging over Reconstruction and the slight integration of public life that it brought, the Klan and its supporters conspired to keep organizations white through legal means when possible, and through violence when legal means failed. Neo-segregationists are also relying on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was supposed to protect Black Americans from discrimination, but profoundly failed. A near-century of Jim Crow, during which anti-Black discrimination was expected and legislated, followed this failure. Neo-segregationists claim they are victims of the Civil Rights laws and policies that finally, and only partially, integrated American society. The New York Times shouldn’t give this segregationist project cover.

Adam Serwer wrote a remarkable dispatch from Minneapolis, where he did a ride-along with a mom providing groceries to her immigrant neighbors forced into hiding by ICE’s occupation of the city. It’s a portrait of a community coming together to fight an authoritarian attack on their neighbors and a hopeful reminder that people tend to protect one another. As I read it, I thought of Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant A Paradise Built in Hell, showing how people unite to survive in the face of major disasters. Minneapolis is a Trump-made disaster, and Serwer’s piece is a reminder that ordinary people are courageous and caring, and simply better human beings than the fascists oppressing them.

Ana Marie Cox also wrote a great article about the resistance in Minneapolis, showing the massive amount of work that regular people have put into supporting their neighbors. Cox gets at the eerie sense of foreboding that authoritarians hope to impose on populations they are trying to subdue. She notes that all the “useless videos” that people took—showing nothing but streetscapes and the “interactions that didn’t escalate” are part of the toll that the administration is imposing upon regular people who refuse to be cowed into supporting ethnic cleansing. The “wearying watchfulness that an occupation wrests from people” is exhausting and taxing, even if one isn’t directly targeted or attacked. Cox gets at the constant sense of uncertainty that haunts authoritarian societies.

I’ve nearly finished reading Christopher Mathias’ new book To Catch A Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, and it’s great. Mathias shows that from the very start of Trump’s term, Antifa was clear about the nature of the threat. Fancy Atlantic authors and academics who spent a decade denying reality (until the secret police started grabbing graduate students) are now coming around. But I think we should listen to the voices Mathias highlights, who were not only right from the start, but have been doxxing fascists and exposing their plans to keep us all safe. It’s a great read—lively, entertaining, and deadly serious—and I’m hoping to interview Mathias or write a longer review for Group Threat.

Header Photo “Sign from Segregated Railroad Station” from the National Museum of African American History & Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2015.23