America’s favorite bedtime story
about race goes something like this: Daddy,
tell me a bedtime story? Well sugar pie,
once upon a time, there was a wicked
South full of cartoon villains in gray
uniforms, and a noble North full of
freedom-loving white folks who bravely
marched off to war because they just
couldn’t stand the thought of Black people
in chains. The good white people beat the
bad white people, slavery ended, the credits
rolled, and everybody held hands on both
sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.
And that, to put it gently, is
authentic, genuine all-American historical
gibberish.
Yes, the Civil War was absolutely
about slavery – specifically about the South
seceding to protect and expand it. Southern
states literally said so in their own
secession declarations, spelling out that
their “way of life” and “civilization”
rested on keeping Black people enslaved.
But that does not mean the
North was one big integrated Quaker retreat,
eagerly workshopping “We Are The World” in
1861.
Most white Northerners weren’t
fighting to prove Black people were fully
human; they were fighting to keep the Union
together and to stop aristocratic
slaveholders from running the whole
political table. Many opposed the expansion
of slavery because it threatened white
farmers’ land, white workers’ wages, and
Union states’ power – not because they were
ready to send Frederick Douglass a fruit
basket, a white woman and a 3-level condo in
Boston
Here’s the part America hates to
say out loud: There was never a clean 50/50
moral split over Black humanity. If you zoom
out, white attitudes toward Black people in
that era looked more like a three-tier caste
system than a morality play.
Tier One was the openly
pro-slavery crowd – South, yes, but not just
the South – who sincerely believed bondage
was “right and socially beneficial” and part
of the Southern “way of life.”
Tier Two was the “slavery
is a problem, but so are free Black people”
crowd. They didn’t want plantations
expanding into every new territory, but they
also didn’t want Black neighbors, Black
voters, or Black in-laws. Keeping the Union
together and protecting white opportunity
was the priority; Black freedom was, at
best, an awkward by-product. Send them …
somewhere, anywhere but Cleveland or Salt
Lake City.
Tier Three – the smallest of
the bunch – was the abolitionist sliver: the
people willing to say publicly, “This entire
system is evil and Black people are fully
human, period.” The John Browns. The
Negro-Lovers.
That’s the group our textbooks put
the halo on. Everyone else gets
quietly airbrushed in the class picture.
Perhaps the foundation of today’s true Progressives.
Recognizing this is the
uncomfortable truth is the Rosetta Stone for
decoding not just who America is
circa today, but what it’s always
been. Because this isn’t some newly-hatched
ideological squabble. It’s the same war -
just simmering now, not red-hot - the same
blood feud over race, power, and belonging
that’s been simmering ever since Appomattox.
The muskets may have been replaced with
microphones, and the plantations with policy
think tanks, but the lines are still drawn.
The Civil War never ended. It just put on a
suit, bought a cable network, and started
calling itself a culture war.
Examine the operating system with
which the country launched: In theory, the
founding creed says “all men are created
equal.” In practice, the democracy was so
“equal” that only a narrow slice of the
population – mostly white male property
owners – could vote, serve, or really
matter. Everybody else – women of all races,
enslaved Black people, most free Black
people, Indigenous nations, poor whites,
anybody not “free white” by law – was
basically told, “You’re here for background
scenery and cheap labor.”
The law didn’t just accidentally
forget Black humanity – it wrote their
non-human status into legal stone. By 1857,
the Supreme Court went full mask-off in Dred
Scott v. Sandford, declaring that
Black people had been regarded as “beings of
an inferior order” with “no rights which
the white man was bound to respect,”
and could “justly and lawfully be reduced to
slavery for his benefit. That wasn’t some
rogue judge on a bender. That was the
highest court in the land calmly summarizing
how white America largely thought about
Black people – North and South – less than a
decade before the war.
And even after slavery “ended,”
white America did not suddenly wake up and
say, “Wow, we’ve been monsters.” The South
swapped slavery for Black Codes and
then Jim Crow – a neat little legal
package explicitly designed to re-create
slave-like control and cheap Black labor
under a new name.
Meanwhile, the so-called “good”
North innovated its own upgrades. It
perfected residential segregation and
“restrictive covenants” that barred Black
families from buying in white neighborhoods.
It refined school segregation and tracking
systems that made sure Black kids got the
crumbs of public education. It pioneered
exclusionary zoning that “accidentally”
produced white suburbs and Black ghettos.
And then there’s the grand Northern
invention: sundown towns – thousands
of overwhelmingly white communities from New
England to the Midwest to the Pacific
Northwest where Black people were warned by
sign, policy, or violence not to be caught
inside city limits after dark. Sociologist
James Loewen spent years documenting these
places and found that strict racial
exclusion was the norm across much of the
country, most of it outside the
South.
So while the national fairy tale
says, “The South had racism, the North had
conscience,” the actual map looks more like
this: the South specialized in lawful
racial terror; the North specialized in polite
racial exclusion.
Which brings us to Dr. King and
Chicago.
When King went north in the
mid-1960s to challenge slums and housing
segregation, he wasn’t greeted with lattes
and liberal brunch. White Chicagoans met him
with bricks, bottles, and mobs that looked
like they’d been flown in from Birmingham on
a hate-tour package. During a 1966
fair-housing march, after being hit in the
head with a rock, King said:
“I have never seen, even in
Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as
I’ve seen here in Chicago.”l
Let that sink in.
The man who faced Bull Connor’s
dogs and George Wallace’s Alabama said, “These
Northern folks hate harder.”
What does that say?
It says the myth of the “good”
North and “bad” South is a comfort blanket
for white America – a way to locate racism
somewhere else, in somebody else’s
ancestors, so nobody has to look at zoning
boards, school boundaries, police unions,
real estate portfolios, or the homeowners
association today.
It says there never was a
noble 50/50 split where half the country
believed in Black humanity and half didn’t.
For most of U.S. history, the default
setting was: Black people are profitable,
dangerous, inferior, or all three – and the
real debate among white folks was just about
the best management strategy for
that “problem.”
-
Chains and auction blocks.
-
Sharecropping and Black Codes.
-
Redlining and sundown towns.
-
“Law and order” and mass
incarceration.
Different costumes, same script.
Which is why the MAGA mindset
doesn’t feel new. It’s not some weird
mutation that suddenly appeared in 2016.
It’s the spiritual grandchild of the people
who wrote Dred Scott, enforced Black
Codes, drew redlined maps, and threw rocks
at King in Chicago. The slogans change; the
hierarchy doesn’t.
“America has always been a racist
land” isn’t hyperbole – it’s just an
unsentimental reading of the record. And if
Black Americans fully internalized that
there was never a broad white consensus that
we were fully human – that the
“pro-humanity” caucus has always been a minority,
often led by Black people themselves – a few
things snap into focus:
-
Why progress is always
precarious.
-
Why backlash is immediate and
vicious.
-
Why “this isn’t who we are” is
less a statement of fact and more a
prayer request.
So when you say it’s
“understandable how the MAGA mindset is
rampant from coast to coast, Alaska to
Nebraska, Fargo to Key Largo” – yeah. The
through-line is brutally clear. We’re not
watching a glitch in the American operating
system. We’re watching a feature do exactly
what it was originally coded to do: protect
white comfort and white power, and label any
push for true equality as a threat, an
invasion, or a crime.
King saw it in Chicago. We see it
now in school boards, policing, housing
policy, and voting rights fights.
The lie says: Racism was a Southern
phase we outgrew.
The truth says: Racism has always
been the national default – and every inch
of justice Black people have carved out has
been won against that default, not
with it.
Once you see that, the map of
America – past and present – stops looking
like “good vs. bad regions” and starts
looking like what it really is: different
styles of the same addiction to hierarchy,
dressed up in different flags, accents, and
zip codes.
