Michael Stancliff
Arizona State University
Michael Stancliff teaches literature, rhetoric, and composition in the New College of Arizona State University. He is the author of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State.
There was something unsettling about the bi-partisan outrage over the white supremacist rally this August in Charlottesville, Virginia. Superlative denunciations came quickly from many quarters—if not from the White House—as even politicians whose policies structurally disadvantage people of color found accessible moral high ground speaking out against “hate” and appealing to the ostensibly American values of equality and diversity—witness Jeff Sessions decrying “racism and bigotry.” The Nazi-Klan hard edge provided an occasion, as it long has, for the differentiation of white racial innocence. To be sure, while the efficacy of civil rights enforcement leaves a sobering historical record, the symbolic force of civil-rights law as a structure of national-exceptionalist feeling redoubles along appalling if now familiar trajectories. Murdered and brutalized black bodies have thus borne a heavy political and symbolic burden as the enabling condition of white natural virtue.
This paper takes a diachronic approach to understanding these elements of our current racial climate, arguing that from emancipation to the present, as the subject of civil rights investigations and as the spectacular focus of a range of comment on the progress of the “American experiment” of multiracial democracy, anti-black violence has proven central to the production of white liberal identity. Pursuing this argument, I read the uncanny familiarity of the 1866 Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which sought to establish the facts of white Southern rage, the local “state of feeling,” the “attitude and condition of the country,” “displays of passion,” the “inclination of the masses,” the “temper, spirit, disposition” and ‘animus of the people.” These stormy, newly criminal white passions, formed the inventive counterpoint for white racial differentiation and of lasting and of damaging racial notions, among those I consider: racism-as-anomaly in the story of American progress; racism-as-irrational-element amidst rational governance; black-suffering-as-patriotic-prophecy; and racial-violence-as-prehistory-of-national-destiny.
