There's a small cottage industry among conservatives of placing much of the culpability for societal and government enforced racism in U.S. history on the shoulders of the American left. The latest is Daniel Flynn's article,
"America's Racist Left" in
The National Review which argues that racism "stains the history of homegrown radicals just as it stains the history of the nation which those radicals sought to change so radically." While it would be easy to just scoff at such an assertion, Flynn has some important points to make. However, by ignoring the role of the American left's role in combating racism, Flynn presents a history that is both overly static and highly selective.
First of all, let's give Flynn's assertions credit where it is due. Racism is an American problem that has seeped into almost all American political ideologies, including the left in the U.S. Nor has this been an accident or an oddity in left-wing thought, but rather an important strand (although one that has diminished with time). For example, Flynn is right to point to the anti-abolition views of antebellum American leftists; this was an issue for example among the labor movement of the time. Important labor leaders and allies such as New York politician
Michael Walsh held to the view that calls for abolition represented one more method that the ruling class used to suppress the common (read white) folk. As
Michael McGerr,
Gwndolyn Mink and other scholars have discussed, the Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth century were by no means allies of struggling African-Americans and many Southern Progressives tacitly and even vehemently supported segregation (see George Packer's wonderful memoir
Blood of the Liberals for more on this specific topic).
That said, Flynn picks his representatives of the various stages of the American left carefully to avoid dealing with some of the more heartening spots of the white American left's history. Take Flynn's history of the Communist Party in the United States. He cites the party's support of "separatism" as evidence of white on black racism, yet this position arose from a national liberation strain of thought, making it a stretch to label it as "racist." Noticeably absent is a mention of the Communist Party as one of the first white civil society organizations that fully integrated itself or more importantly the history of the Party combating racism actively (
remember the Scottsboro Boys?) Don't like the Communists? Well, how about the Socialists? Perhaps one of the most important figures in the black freedom movement before Martin Luther King, Jr. was
A. Philip Randolph (whose idea the March on Washington was). Randolph was an African-American, a union organizer, and a socialist.
Flynn's post-war history is also somewhat absurd. While conservatives like to harp on the racism of the Democratic Party this is always based on ignoring the virtual civil war within the party between (mostly) Southern reactionaries and the progressive parts of the party. One should remind Flynn of the words of
former House majority leader and far-left Congressman Newt Gingrich who noted that "it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended segregation." Looking to the left social movements of the 1960s Flynn seems to think he has a "gotchya" moment in pointing to the lack of black "officers" in
Students for a Democratic Society. Except that SDS was intended, in part, as a counterpoint to the already existing Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which was of course majority African-American. References to SDS of course also beg the question of how many black officers there were in its conservative equivalent, Young Americans for Freedom?
Furthermore, there is the issue of Flynn's attitude which assumes that the left is unwilling to criticize its own on such issues. Of course, any good lefty knows that a core aspect of being on this side of the divide is
loving to criticize others. "Moderates" attack radicals, radicals attack moderates, radicals call other radicals too moderate, and so forth. On the issue of American communism and race, Flynn's views were echoed, among other places, in one of the great pieces of American literature
Richard Wright's Native Son which holds a skeptical view of the intentions of American communists. McGerr and Mink's books are also highly critical of the white left for its positions and actions regarding race relations. In fact, this was all a core undercurrent of the whole new social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s. History is fluid and one of the chief roles many left-wing academics see themselves in is keeping their activist sisters and brothers honest about the past. But you wouldn't know that reading Professor Flynn's piece.
Apparently an upcoming Rolling Stone article has Barack Obama citing For Whom the Bell Tolls as one of his favorite works of fiction! Ah ha, we finally got him! Citing this novel I believe gives us a clear insight into the dangerous leftist politics of Senator Obama. After all, this is a novel written by a man who consorted with known communists and the book itself details the story of a man participating in a known communist front group, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting for a totalitarian communist state as oppossed to the softer, cuddlier tyranny represented by Franco and the fascists. Seems like perfect Jonah Goldberg material to me!