Brevity Sinks A Good Thesis

Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents by Margaret Kimberley is an important book that is just far too short for such an important topic.  

Kimberley’s basic thesis is that no president, not a single one, has been good for the advancement of African-Americans.  Certainly, the presidents up to the civil war are low handing fruit: slave holders, northern men who compromised with slaveholders to hold the union together.  This is a shameful history; and with the exception of stealing land from Mexicans, Indians, and staving off British influence in North America – no topic was as important as slavery was to the United States  before the Civil  War. 

But Kimberley’s brevity opens her to charges of cherry picking.  She picks two or three openly racists policies, actions or utterances from a president, and rarely, one positive policy, action or utterance of a president, related to Africa Americans, and moves on.  

This technique is damaging.  People who would rather not admit that the United States is a white supremacist state can just dismiss this book as too narrowly focused.  Kimberley’s brevity also eliminates the chance of even  nuance.  Take Lincoln.  Kimberley uses the example of his support of a scheme to settle blacks on an island off Haiti to show he had no intention of keeping Africans in America.  She believes this shows his inherent racism.  But does it?  He may just as well be trying to mollify conservative  northerners who feared large numbers of freed slaves in their cities and towns.  This scheme was advanced at the same time as the  Emancipation Proclamation.  Whether Lincoln supported the Haiti scheme, or merely used it as a political tool, is not debated by Kimberley.  For her it is a proven fact.  But the topic is debated by scholars  and has been for years.   It is far from a settled matter.

Presidential motivation is the authors fixation.  Kimberley cites, again and again, that presidents only courted black votes for reasons of expediency, and not through moral zeal.  This is most likely true, but could this not be said of every president on nearly every issue?  What president continues to pursue policies that he or she knows are not popular, and will hurt his  political future?  Did FDR, a wealthy white man, want to enact the New Deal, and its socialist-type initiatives, from conviction, or was he forced to do so by a clambering, unemployed electorate and a fear of communism?  This is yet another criticism that someone who does not wish to view America as a white supremacist state can deploy.  How do we know the real motivations for a president’s policy decisions?  When policy a true of racist motivation or a political ploy?

Sadly, Kimberley provides too little agency to Africans in American.  She renders them a kind of naive blank slate, hoping that a president they  just voted into office will keep his promises and better their conditions, which never happens.  They just hope things will get better by uncritically listening to white men seeking power.  This is unfair.  People of African descent in America have always had some form of power, and used it shrewdly for their benefit.  They were real people and not simply victims.

But perhaps the most harmful element of this book is the ‘is it good for black people question’ she returns to again and again.  This is similar to the question that my fellow Jews ask, half in jest, is it  good for the Jews?  But the question, when raised about an entire group of people, has little value.  Some Israeli Jews, especially in the current government, see Trump as good for the Jews.  He supports settlement, annexation and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  Many Jews in American, especially progressives, view Trump as bad for the Jews.  He supports white supremacists who are brazenly and violently anti-Semitic.  So, is he good for the Jews?  This depends on who you ask.

The same applies to African-Americans, who are not homogeneous, and  have varying opinions of what is good or bad for them, depending on when, where, and how they live or lived, their gender identity, and their income.  So her yardstick in measuring presidential value via African Americans is too blunt.  Kimberly’s book once more suffers from its compression; rather than expanding her notions to tackle these complex issues, she has gone for brevity. The work, therefore, suffers. This could have been a large, important book about the intersection of race and the executive branch in its many manifestations – instead it reads like a poorly reasoned polemical booklet.