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FEAR OF LOSING THE WHITE LANDSCAPE: Wilshire Baptist Church Rev. Mason’s Idiotic Essay – Ed Sebesta 11/28/2020 In the August 19, 2020 issue of the Lakewood Advocate, Rev. George Mason of the Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas has an essay published, “Can any historical figure stand the scrutiny of our times?”1 https://lakewood.advocatemag.com/2020/08/19/george-mason-9/ The article argues against renaming the R.L. Thornton Freeway, which is named after 20th century Dallas mayor and Ku Klux Klan member R.L. Thornton and the Woodrow Wilson High School (H.S.) which is named after president Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States, who helped launch the infamous pro-KKK movie “Birth of a Nation,” and who was a racist historian, and his administration instituted segregation in Federal employment among other racist policies. It is worth closely examining this essay and rebutting it for two reasons besides defending the effort to rename Woodrow Wilson H.S. and R.L. Thornton Highway against his opposing argument. One is to discuss critically and raise the issues of the white racialized landscape. Two, and equally important, Mason’s article shows the all too common in Dallas, shallow and vacuous thinking of those who imagine they are against racism and reveals instead a fatuous and troubling, if not sinister, racism. People nowadays know enough to avoid the expression of explicit racist ideas, but lacking critical thinking when they defend the white landscape, they reveal themselves in other ways, unaware that they do, as does Mason. In the article Mason asks the question, “How should we decide whom to honor, which to preserve, which to remove and how to replace?” Mason poses it as a spiritual problem. Beyond the two Confederate statues in Dallas, who else might be removed is never suggested by Mason, only who might not. TRIVIALIZING RACISM On tactic Mason uses is to trivialize racism as being a failing in which one falls short of perfection rather than being a basic fundamental failing. This argument also simultaneously discredits those who want to deracialize the landscape by implying that they are extremists who expect historical individuals to be perfect.
1
Mason, George, “Can any historical figure stand the scrutiny of our times?”, Lakewood Advocate, https://lakewood.advocatemag.com/2020/08/19/george-mason-9/, printed out 9/13/2020. This magazine is one of four neighborhood magazines published by Advocate Magazine of Dallas, Texas, https://lakewood.advocatemag.com/about-us/contact/ printed out 11/25/2020.
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He opens the essay with a scriptural quote and states, “There are no saints who aren’t also sinners.” He mentions Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln “were not perfect.” He implies that the issue is about people expecting perfection when he comments on the racist practices of Thornton and Wilson when states, “That there is a reckoning now for being flawed human beings, like the rest of us, is just.” Nobody is perfect Mason is arguing, what human doesn’t have some flaw, he asserts. Mason also states, “… Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil passes through every human heart,” again with this “lofty” quote, Mason is again arguing that nobody is perfect. Less directly he makes it an issue of perfection when he asks, “Can any historical figure, then, stand the scrutiny of our times?” Implying that currently the judgement of historical figures is so exacting, extreme, that historical figures will have to be perfect to be honored. Mason, in his essay points out that Thornton was a KKK member, redlined African American neighborhoods, and as president of the State Fair of Texas, “he limited access to blacks.” I think the last item is normally called “segregation,” but Mason is using pastels to draw a historical picture of Thornton. Mason, points out that Wilson segregated the federal government and supported segregation and helped launch the movie “Birth of a Nation,” a movie which resulted in the re-launching of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. I think these racist practices are more than failing to be a saint, more than falling short of being perfect, more than a personality flaw like being quarrelsome or prone to anger or whatever Solzhenitsyn thought was sloshing around in the human heart. How many African Americans were burned to death in lynchings by the Klan? How many African American hopes were crushed by Thornton’s redlining? What Thornton and Wilson did were crimes against humanity, in this case the humanity of African Americans, and their lives which should have mattered. What Thornton and Wilson did wasn’t just a noisy discharge of flatulence at a dinner party. Could this argument of Mason be more trivializing of racism and the historical crimes against minorities?
HONOR AND MONUMENTS The earlier mentioned statement about “scrutiny” also confuses the issue of naming the landscape after people to honor them and to hold them up as examples to be emulated as opposed to judging them personally as individuals.
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In the conclusion of the essay Mason argues that “our public squares … should inspire us” to be a, “nation with liberty and justice for all.” And he states, “We should elevate and emulate those whose memory calls us to “the better angles of our nature,” quoting Lincoln. These fine sounding phrases however are shown to be without substance by the rest of Mason’s essay. How Thornton and Wilson would inspire “liberty and justice for all,” when they are notable in history precisely for being opposed to “liberty and justice for all” is not clear. As for “a memory” that would make us better, it seems that Mason’s argument is to have a “forgetting” on the basis that no one is perfect. The idea that Thornton and Wilson should be honored makes sense if in your thinking racism is just a failing to be perfect. Monuments should be to those who transcend their situation, not participation trophies. No one is asking figures in history to be perfect, just that they not have committed historical crimes against humanity. Mason is also just ending his essay with a gob of fine sounding sentiment for his essay defending honoring racist figures of the past. With the expression of these anti-racist pieties Mason hopes that he is not perceived as being racist for defending those who committed racist crimes in history. A SINISTER CONCEPT Mason’s essay has an unstated premise that racism is the ordinary state of humanity and the ordinary state of an individual and that not being racist is the achievement of a very advanced society and that of very advanced individuals in this advanced society. It is within this ideology of Mason that discussing that historical figures as not being perfect makes sense. They would be figures that didn’t live in our advanced society and weren’t advanced individuals who hence were not “perfect” or “saints.” It is within this framework that Mason excuses the racism of Wilson and Thornton writing: Wilson and Thornton were men of their times. The air they breathed stank of racism. Prevailing mores limited their vision, but they ended up reflecting them more than changing them. These racist historical figures would be members of this less advanced society in which, “The air they breathed stank of racism,” in which, “Wilson and Thornton were men of their times,” because they weren’t “saints” or “perfect.” The systems of racism in America were constructed, maintained and defended by individuals and groups acting in history as well as creating the ideologies which justified these systems of subjugation and they are done so to achieve objects of racial
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subordination and exploitation such as slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and the exploitation of African American labor. They were created to privilege white people and create racial underclasses. They didn’t just come into existences one day out of nothing and for no reason. They didn’t just fall out of the sky.2 The white supremacist world of Thornton and Wilson was constructed by the violent actions of white terrorists in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts who overthrew Reconstruction. Thornton and Wilson were certainly agents of history in the constructing, maintaining and defending systems of white supremacy, not just because they were some passive subjects being acted upon by some miasmic vapor that “stank.” Wilson as a historian with his historical writings would be a major source of these gases that “stank” of racism. Thornton in maintaining and defending white supremacy was also a source of these “vapors.” Mason’s statement about Thornton and Wilson and the “prevailing mores” is just nonsensical. Thornton and Wilson didn’t just “reflect” them, much less than attempting to change these “prevailing mores,” instead they worked to construct, maintain and defend these racist “prevailing mores,” they embraced these “prevailing mores.” The concepts of race themselves were invented and developed with the rise of Western enslavement of other races and Western imperialism. Individuals are not born racist they are taught racism. Societies are not inherently racist. There have been those who campaigned against racism through out American history. Mason thinking excuses racism in history. His excuse is very encompassing and with it you might excuse most any crime against humanity, if not all, in history, it really is the all-purpose excuse. Let’s, for purposes of illustrating the fallacy of Mason’s thinking only, use Mason’s method of moral understanding of historical events to excuse the Holocaust of Jewish peoples in Europe during the Nazi regime. A person using Mason’s rational might argue, “anti-Semitism was epidemic in Europe prior to World War II, Hitler and the Nazis were ‘… men of their times. The air they breathed stank of [anti-Semitism]. Prevailing mores limited their vision, but they ended up reflecting them more than changing them.’”
2
Our course there are systems of racism that have persisted to the present. For the purposes of this essay I am discussing the past but didn’t want to leave the wrong impression that I believe these systems to only be in the past.
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Is there any monstrous crime in history that couldn’t be excused this way? What historical figure in history couldn’t be claimed to be just a reflection in a mirror of their times. Mason’s understanding of racism excuses racism today. If some people are advanced, they are only advanced, by definition, if they are ahead of other people, a majority of the people. If not being racist is an accomplishment of those who are advanced or perfect, then for the majority of persons who aren’t advanced or perfect, racism is excusable since not being racist is beyond their abilities. It is also a self-congratulatory concept in that those who are not racist can feel it is an extraordinary accomplishment rather than meeting a basic requirement.
WHITE CITY, WHITE NATION Very revealing is Mason’s brief statement about Wilson and Thornton that, “They did good things for our country and city.” For whom did they do these good things? The racial problems and inequities of Dallas today are a text inscribed on the landscape written by the racist actions of Thornton and others like him in the Dallas racist regime. Who today in Dallas gets to enjoy the goodness of Dallas is very much defined by race. Similarly, the racial problems across America of which today our nation suffers is very much the result of the actions of people like Wilson. Across the landscape there can be seen racial economic inequality and the defacto segregation of poor minorities on our American landscape. Yet Mason proposes to use this same landscape of heinous racial inequity to keep honoring Wilson and Thornton. Mason reveals in this short sentence that he is a citizen of the white city and the white nation for this is the city and nation in which he references as “our,” the part of the city and nation and which has the “good” that Thornton and Wilson did, which white people are enjoying the benefits and minorities are largely excluded. For whom in America did Thornton and Wilson do good? Where on the landscape is that goodness found and primarily who lives where this goodness is found? Mason states that, “Wilson and Thornton were men of their times.” Did African American men generally support white supremacy in that historical period? Were African American men also affected by “the air” that “stank of racism”? We also have to ask what exactly were these “times.” Not all white men during the time of Wilson and Thornton supported white supremacy. During their times there were active movements to give African Americans civil rights supported by white people who were people that white supremacists in the South complained about. There has been active support for
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civil rights for African Americans going back to colonial times. Wilson and Thornton were not just men, but white men of their times, and these “times” weren’t what Mason’s sentence asserts, that it was a time of universal white racism even among white people. In this erasure of race and history from his short sentence Mason erases that Wilson and Thornton were protagonists for white supremacy that supported a white supremacist hierarchy which actively sought to maintain and defend itself. If the air “stank” of racism, Wilson and Thornton, chose to take deep breaths of this “stank” air, whereas African Americans apparently didn’t, where white supporters of the humanity of African Americans didn’t. Wilson and Thornton were white men who consciously chose to support a racial hierarchy, in a white supremacist society supported by racist whites, but not by non-whites, not by non-racist whites. More disturbing is that this sentence, “… were men of their times,” reveals who are the men in the flow of history for Mason, white men, and also indicates which men are the others outside of human history for Mason, non-whites. For as discussed, non-whites would not be accepting, white supremacy, and so the men of Thornton’s and Wilson’s times, “their times,” in history, are white men. The timeline of Mason’s history is defined by whiteness. What really is extraordinarily revealing of Mason’s clueless understanding of the history of race in America is the statement, “They have been honored for decades for the good they did.” First, there is the inane idea that the antiquity of an error sanctifies the error. With this idea very few Confederate monuments would ever have been removed if any. More than that, Mason doesn’t consider that under the white supremacist regime, African Americans could neither oppose Thornton and Wilson being honored on the landscape when built objects were named after them nor afterwards ask that they be removed. It wasn’t until 1991 that there was a court order for single district elections. Maybe the reason Thornton and Wilson were honored for decades is that the white supremacist regime of Dallas lasted many decades. (Not claiming that it has ended.) Mason should consider that there are no African American or Latino mayors of Dallas from the founding of Dallas to the 1990s. We don’t see their monuments or places named after them because of the systems of white supremacy existing since the founding of Dallas and remaining until the federal court order requiring single district elections in 1991, systems which precluded that it would be possible for African Americans and Latinos to be mayors of Dallas. Similarly, before 2008 there hadn’t been an African American president of the United States, even though African Americans had been in America for 300 years by 1919, who were worked horrifically as slaves building the American nation. The landscape of America until recently generally lacked African American names until recently. Persons like Woodrow Wilson, through systems of white supremacy, would preclude African Americans from having the political influence or financial success or being
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successful real estate developers where they could have standing in society to name the landscape or have society place their names on the landscape. Ye those who worked to make sure that no African American and Latino names would be on the landscape are those who get to have their names on the landscape. What dreams some African Americans and Latinos in history might have had of being leaders in Dallas are lost to oblivion. Monuments to Apartheid leaders in South African came down after, not before, the fall of Apartheid. If the names of our landscape still read like a white supremacist text, still teaching that Dallas is a white metropolis, has the white supremacist regime of Dallas fallen or has it just made some accommodations? WHITE PANIC Early in his essay, Mason brings in the idea that there is a “cancel culture” using that term with quotes and rejecting that it can be applied to the Confederate monuments recently removed from Dallas, stating that these Confederate monuments “rewrite history” and were “maintaining white supremacy.” In rejecting that removing the Confederate monuments isn’t “cancel culture” Mason implies that the removal of others might be, for if in some cases it isn’t, surely that means that in other cases it might be or there would be no need to state that there some cases that aren’t. What follows in Mason’s essay does not specifically call the request to rename Woodrow Wilson H.S. and R.L. Thornton Highway “cancel culture.” It is nevertheless indirectly asserted by Mason to be “cancel culture,” since Mason is arguing that the renaming of Woodrow Wilson H.S. and R.L. Thornton is not like removing Confederate monuments which in turn isn’t cancel culture. That is not being not cancel culture it is. In discussing that Confederate monument removal in Dallas wasn’t “cancel culture,” Mason releases this “cancel culture” bogeyman into the essay and into the issue of renaming the white landscape. Mason also doesn’t want his argument to be seen as against Confederate monument removal by just stating that it isn’t against these removals even though Mason’s arguments would apply to Confederate monument retention as well. Mason doesn’t want his defense of Wilson and Thornton names to collide with the popularity of the removal of Confederate monuments. Mason also doesn’t consider that other monuments and other names, besides Confederate ones, also “rewrite history” and are “maintaining white supremacy.” Why would one be “cancel culture” and the other not makes no sense. Woodrow Wilson H.S.
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and R.L. Thornton Freeway proclaim that these two individuals were heroes without qualification. After releasing the bogeyman of “cancel culture,” Mason leads the next paragraph with “Now Woodrow Wilson High School and R.L. Thornton Freeway are in the queue for review.” Later in the essay after he lists the racist damage done to African American lives by Thornton and Wilson he asks, “Can any historical figure, then, stand the scrutiny of our time?” How the historical record of Thornton and Wilson, who did serious damage to African American lives, could be seen as setting a standard of historical scrutiny that would even remotely challenge most monuments let alone all of them makes no sense. They didn’t have slight flaws; they were significant racist actors in history committing significant serious humanitarian crimes against minorities. Rejecting Wilson and Thornton hardly sets a standard for near perfection or even much above appalling. But Mason then goes on to discuss Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and their records on race and Mason states, “These men were not perfect.” Mason writes to communicate a panic, that this “cancel culture” will bring down all the statues of white people, rename all the streets, schools, lakes named after white people. “Where will it all end?” he wants you to think, today Thornton and Wilson, tomorrow maybe Jefferson and Lincoln, and then what? Mason is arguing that if we do the right thing in taking down one monument or rename one building it might be that we will have to do the right thing again, and again, and even do the right thing again after that. Does Mason really see that those items on the built landscape named after African American and Latino civil rights leaders being seriously or even remotely threaten to be renamed? I very much doubt it. He is panicked about losing the white landscape, not Martin Luther King streets or high schools or Cesar Chavez streets or high schools. What Mason fears is that the landscape and its naming and its marking won’t be under the domination and control of white people. With the loss of the white landscape, our nation will no longer be literally a ‘white man’s country.’
THE WHITE SUPREMACIST TEXTS OF THE LANDSCAPE AND LANDSCAPE REPARATIONS The City of Dallas was governed by a white supremacist regime, and racism in Dallas wasn’t just that of a few bad apples or fringe extremists, but by the leadership of Dallas supported generally by white voters. It was a regime which named and marked the landscape inscribing upon it a white supremacist text.
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The machinery of white supremacy needs to be lubricated and points of friction eliminated. It needs management and adjustment to continue to operate. It needs to be sustained and supported. The construction of systems of white supremacy, their maintenance, and defense in history has largely been done by mainstream leadership of society, which was the case in Dallas. The mainstream leadership often understands that the fringe extremist group is a threat to the maintenance of white supremacy. The White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 60s, which was a major organization supporting white supremacy then strenuously condemned the Ku Klux Klan stating that they undermined white supremacy by causing sympathy for the civil rights movement and discredited the advocates of white supremacy. However, the public’s historical gaze has been and is largely directed towards the sensational fringe group with their outlandish actions, their inflammatory comments, their crimes and away from the everyday mundane workings of the white supremacist regime. All those who ran the apparatus of white supremacy, even though they weren’t sensational in their racism, policies, and actions, shouldn’t be honored on the landscape. Thornton was part of the leadership running the day to day system of white supremacy in Dallas in addition to those racist actions specifically attributable to him. Even if he wasn’t known for being a member of the KKK or specific racist actions such as redlining, as mayor he ran the white supremacist regime and should not be honored on the landscape. Breaking from this white supremacist regime includes re-writing the text of the landscape and removing its present white supremacist text by excluding those who ran the white supremacist regime from being honored on the landscape. Mason has no intention of re-writing the white supremacist text of the landscape. In his essay in reference to Thornton and Wilson he states, “That there is a reckoning now for being flawed human beings, like the rest of us, is just.” What this “reckoning” might be Mason doesn’t say. If Thornton and Wilson are still honored on the landscape is there really any “reckoning?” This undefined “reckoning” is supposed to “clarify” their “legacy.” How this might be done is unspecified. The naming of places on the landscape says, again inherently occurs without qualification, proclaims that they were great persons in history, which clearly isn’t the case. Unless the reckoning is that the landscape will no longer be named after them to honor them there is no clarification, but instead the opposite because of the misleading instructions given by the visible names seen on the landscape will be saying that they are to be honored without qualification. When their names are removed from
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the landscape a person will then learn about them through reading history where there will be a clear historical picture of who they are. Mason may conclude his essay with the statement, “Our public squares, therefore, should inspire us to be, as our Pledge of Allegiance declares: “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” but he actually has no real plan to address the white supremacist text of the landscape except to preserve the status quo by inspiring fear of its loss. This concluding statement is to just provide a pious cover for his advocacy for the preservation of the white supremacist text of the landscape. How seriously can we morally condemn racism in the future when we are giving it a free pass in the past? From South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Heritage Day 2020 Speech, Sept. 24, 2020 is the following: We come from a history of prejudice and exclusion, and since democracy we have worked to transform the heritage landscape of our country. The naming and renaming of towns and cities forms part of this, as well as the erection of new statues and monuments. Monuments glorifying our divisive past should be repositioned and relocated. This has generated controversy, with some saying we are trying to erase our history. Building a truly non-racial society means being sensitive to the lived experiences of all this country’s people. We make no apologies for this because our objective is to build a united nation. Any symbol, monument or activity that glorifies racism, that represents our ugly past, has no place in democratic South Africa. The struggle against apartheid was first and foremost aimed at ensuring that all our people should reclaim their dignity, black and white. Restoring their dignity is the preoccupation of this administration. [ https://www.gov.za/speeches/address-president-cyril-ramaphosa-heritage-day-202024-sep-2020-0000] And this has been South African public policy since the fall of the Apartheid regime and many names have been changed.
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The place names of the landscape are a larger issue than merely judging historical figures. There is the issue of landscape reparations. There is the fact that African American aren’t visible on the landscape, but white supremacists are widely visible. That African Americans were historically oppressed and prevented from activities which might lead to them being named on the landscape. What does such a landscape say about who belongs and who is an alien in the nation? Who would we expect to experience alienation from such a landscape? Who would be expect to be poisoned with racism and feel they are privileged by such a landscape? The success of Dallas starts with war profiteering supplying the Confederate armies with food, supplies and war materials in their fight to preserve slavery by exploiting cheap refugee slave labor. Yet, the descendants of the slaves are left out of that prosperity. John H. Cochran in his history, “Dallas County,” a history published in 1928 and widely accepted by Dallas residents, in his chapter on the Civil War describes how Dallas flourished and enriched itself from selling supplies to the Confederacy during the Civil War exploiting the slave labor brought by refugee slaveholders. During the Civil War slaveholders sent their slaves to Texas to prevent their emancipation by the American army and their slaves fleeing to the American army lines. Dallas had an abundance of cheap slave labor to exploit. Cochran states that the prosperity of the Civil War era is what gave Dallas its boost and subsequent success. These are key extracts from the book. But Dallas County, from 1859 to 1861, had made such rapid and successful progress in the production of wheat, corn, forage meat and other necessary supplies of food, she was recognized as the center of the food-producing counties of Texas, so much that the Confederate Government established and maintained a general quartermasters and commissary headquarters at Dallas for the collection of food and supplies for the army of the Trans-Mississippi Department. Also, established a transportation and recruiting department there and a manufacturing department at Lancaster, where arms were repaired and pistols manufactured. Dallas was general headquarters for all these departments, so the officers and their families and all necessary details made Dallas their temporary home during the war, thus supplying the places of the enlisted soldiers. As to how Dallas County was able to produce so much food and support the supply of war materials to the Confederate army Cochrane explains: Besides, large numbers of negroes were brought into Dallas County for food and for protection during the war, and were gladly hired to the citizens for their food and clothes. Nearly every family, which had no negroes of their own, hired one or more of these negroes and were thus enabled to cultivate all of their land in
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wheat, corn and oats, so Dallas County continued to be the great food producing center of Texas. Its reputation in this respect became so great that many desirable citizens were attracted by its prosperity and permanently settled in the county and contributed much to its future development.3 Again, the success of Dallas starts with war profiteering supplying the Confederate armies with food, supplies and war materials in their fight to preserve slavery by exploiting cheap refugee slave labor. Yet, the descendants of the slaves are left out of that prosperity. For those who marvel at the wealth of Dallas looking at the great buildings of downtown Dallas and northward, they should also go visit the Greens, Pinks, Whites, and Browns,4 on Highland Village Dr. to see where and how some of the descendants of the exploited slaves live. They should read about shingle mountain in a downtrodden African American neighborhood to understand the contempt of the City of Dallas administration for the lives of African Americans, to see the results of the policies of generations of white supremacist regimes run by people like Thornton. If “Black Lives Matters” is a real value which we believe in, then we are not going to give glib or concocted excuses for those who have crushed Black lives in the past. We will want to communicate to our society that we have a severe view of those who disregarded the humanity of those who were not white. We don’t want a landscape that says over and over, “he or she was racist, but…”, repeatedly emphasizing that racism is a trivial failing in which a historical person didn’t achieve perfection. The naming of the landscape needs repair, there needs to be landscape reparations. We need to see minority lives referred to on the landscape through naming. (See essays on this topic at http://templeofdemocracy.com/landscape-reparations.html) Starting in the 15th century the Europeans with their technology started to descend upon the world like Assyrians with waves of conquest, murder, mayhem, genocide, enslavement and other crimes against humanity. These systems of world-wide Western imperialism and neo-Colonialism are dying out. We are more and more living in a multipolar world. We will need to successfully live in that world and when we read the white supremacist text of the landscape and are so instructed by the landscape in the lessons of white supremacy, it will be harmful to our ability to properly live and think in this new world. 3
The extracts are from a special double edition published by The Aldrege Book Store in Dallas in 1966. This volume has, “History of Dallas County, Texas,” by John Henry Brown, and “Dallas County: A Record of its Pioneers and Progress,” by John H. Cochran. As the front-page states, “The Two Major Chronicles of Early Dallas County Now Republished Together,” with a foreword by Sam Acheson. Cochrane’s book was originally published in 1928 and printed by Direct Advertising and Printing Co., Dallas, Texas. The volume has the original pages and the quotes are on pages 87-88. 4 These colors are the popular names of four housing complexes, some which suffer neglect by the City of Dallas.
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We are a multiracial society and increasingly one where political power will need to be shared among all peoples without conflict. A nation that is multiracial but is divided faces the danger of serious civil conflict. Our current national political situation in 2020 should make that clear. Yugoslavia is another instructive example. Nations that are racially or ethnically divided can be shattered. A nation divided is an easy prey for hostile foreign powers who will seek to inflame existing divisions and to support one group against another to bring civil disorder and conflict to that nation. In considering the defense of our nation racism is entirely intolerable, it is treason. The security of our nation as well as the needs of a truly just society without racism requires that we seriously address the issues of racism in the history of our nation. The idea that our nation has serious racial problems and is a repressive racial regime and that this regime needs to end is no longer only the assertion of radical left groups. It is no longer exclusive to protestors on the streets of Dallas. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) in an article in the “Policy Forum,” section, in their magazine Science, Sept. 4, 2020, “Racial authoritarianism in U.S. Democracy,” argues that the United States of America is a racial authoritarian regime.5 It is primarily focused on police violence and repression of minority groups. In the conclusion of the article states: The United States is now and has historically been characterized by high levels of state control of and violence toward racially subjugated groups alongside formal political freedom. Just as racial slavery defined U.S. democracy historically, racial authoritarianism continues to define the practices of our democracy. (The pdf of the article can be read online at this link. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1176/tab-pdf) This contrasts with Mason’s rosy view of the present expressed by his remark about the “lingering legacy of racism.” A person reading this in Mason’s essay might wonder where has he been, at some remote location without newspaper, internet or broadcast media since 2008 when Obama was elected? Does he not know that Donald Trump was elected president and that there is now a movement of Trumpism? Does he not know that talk about a post-racial America has long since ceased?
5
Weaver, Vesla M., Prowse, Gwen, “Racial authoritarianism in U.S. Democracy,” Science, Vol. 369 Issue 6508, pp. 1176-1178, Sept. 4, 2020, DOI: 10.1126/science.abd7669. The abstract is online at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6508/1176.
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In contrast the AAAS and the authors are not looking at the history of our nation with hazy nostalgia or a patriotic brass band playing in their minds. They are not believing the happy fables of our American history textbooks. The AAAS is not some radical group, but is very much a part of the American establishment, embedded in the establishment. This one example, the AAAS considering America’s racism, is chosen to show that there is a serious, far-reaching and wide spread critical evaluation of racism which extends even into significant establishment institutions, even ones that don’t have civil rights as their primary focus like the AAAS. There is a recognition that if the United States does not address the issues of racism that it hurtles towards disaster with Birtherism and the election of Donald Trump being the harbingers of worse to come. There will be the need for real change in our society regarding racism and not just the gush of syrupy sentiment or token gestures or slogans. Anti-racism needs to be more than white people fooling around to feel good about themselves. There needs to be recognized that the systems of racial hierarchy are maintained not just by those whose racism is fairly apparent and sensational, but by others like Rev. George Mason who not only provide rationalizations for the elements that form one of the underlying basis for the racial problems in our society, such as the white landscape, but more seriously a person who represents not being racist as some extraordinary accomplishment rather than what should be ordinarily expected. Dallas needs to be a leader, not a follower, keeping pace with the national agenda regarding taking action in regards to the problems of racism in America. One part of that change, and of course it is not the only part, will be to have the Dallas landscape no longer be a white supremacist text, which is read by Dallas residents and which instructs Dallas citizens in ideologies of white supremacy. Since we don’t consciously realize that the Dallas white supremacist landscape is a text, we read it and absorb it without being aware of it. What agendas and directions of society, what polices of government, what institutions we support is shaped by our cultural ideas which is shaped by among other things, the instructions of the white landscape. The symbolic works its way into the concrete issues and shapes what is done about those issues. It is important. It shapes who we are and hence what we will do. Mason needs to publicly repudiate his essay.