The backlash to progress

America is currently in a backlash to the Black Lives Matters protests of last summer, according to Charles Blow, journalist and author of “The Devil You Know.” Blow said like how the rise of mass incarcerations followed the Civil Rights movement, the current Law and Order agendas of liberal politicians and anti-critical race theory movements are a response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The depressing part of this is that we see that we are trapped in a cycle where the particular grievances of Black people never fully get addressed,” Blow said. “Eventually, as in the time of Reconstruction, white liberal got tired and white conservative never gave in.”

Blow spoke to University of Idaho students at the first Africana Studies Distinguished Speaker talk via Zoom on Wednesday night.

At the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction, amendments were passed giving Black men the right to vote, Blow said. Black people made up the majority or close to a majority in Southern states like Mississippi and South Carolina. Then, after World War I, they started to move to Northern and Midwestern states and cities.

“And one thing that it did, however, was that it diluted blackness and all of a sudden there was no state in which Black people were the majority or were close to it,” Blow said.

But recently, Blow said there is a small movement of Black people back to the South — a reverse migration. The reverse migration is a trickle, unlike the first migration out of the South, which Blow calls a flood. The oppression Black Americans have faced did not get left in the South either, Blow said, but has continued to follow them.

“Most of the high-profile killings of young Black men and women — the high profile ones were not in the South,” Blow said.

The deaths of Black Americans like Eric Garner in New York and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Blow said, hit the national conscience in ways other killings haven’t. He also says many disproportionately identify the South with oppression, which is explained through history, but the income inequality in Northern and Midwestern states along with policies like stop and frisk now argue the oppression of Black people is not just in the South.

“There is no equivalent to stop and frisk — it doesn’t exist in Jackson, Miss. It doesn’t exist in New Orleans, it doesn’t in Atlanta. It was born in New York and it was exported to Los Angeles and Chicago,” Blow said.

He said that Black Americans have been trying to appease white supremacy since the Civil War through the acts like those of Isaiah Montgomery. Montgomery was the only Black delegate at the Mississippi Constitutional Convention in 1890, and argued for Black disenfranchisement.

Blow said he wants to see a state that is majority Black or on its way to being so in the United States. Then real change can occur.

“The difference between what I’m proposing and what many Black nationalists are proposing is that they want separation from the country. And what I’m advocating is to be strong within the country,” Blow said.

Nelson can be reached at knelson@dnews.com.