Full text of DOI:10.1177/0090591702030005001

Political Theory
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Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA: On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery
THOMAS McCARTHY
Political Theory 2002 30: 623
DOI: 10.1177/0090591702030005001
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1MP0Oc.1LC1IaT7r7tIhC/0yA0/9LO0T5NH9T1E0HO2E2R3YP7O0/L3O0IcTtIoCbSerO2F00T2HE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
VERGANGENHEITSBEWÄLTIGUNG1 IN THE USA
On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery
THOMAS MCCARTHY
Northwestern University
The settlement of the North American continent was . . . a consequence not of any higher
claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right
which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority and thus of the right of the
white race.
—Adolf Hitler, 19322
It seems that wherever one turns these days, questions of how to deal with
difficult pasts have risen to the top of national and international agendas.3 The
general premise of this essay is that the USA has not yet adequately dealt with
the many forms of racial injustice endemic to its national past. And the expec-
tation animating it is that our thinking about this failure, its consequences,
and possible remedies for it can be sharpened by drawing upon the German
case, particularly Germany’s renewed efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to face
the painful truth of the National Socialist past of the 1930s and 1940s. In that
situation, the forum in which public memory was exercised and conscious-
ness raised was a debate among historians—a Historikerstreit—that spilled
over into public awareness. That peculiar circumstance allowed the links
between changing public memory and changing political culture and collec-
tive identity to appear in sharp relief. One key issue in that debate concerned
the role that anti-Semitism, as a racialized mode of perception and interac-
tion, played in the Holocaust. Others concerned the collective liability of
present-day Germans for state-sanctioned and state-implemented atrocities
in the past, the cultural and political costs of suppressing painful memories
and refusing to mourn, the relation of professional to popular history and of
both to public sites and rituals of commemoration, and the forms of patrio-
AUTHOR’S NOTE: For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I want to thank Derrick Darby,
Dilip Gaonkar, Robert Gooding-Williams, Jürgen Habermas, and an anonymous reviewer for
this journal.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 30 No. 5, October 2002 623-648
DOI: 10.1177/009059102237030
© 2002 Sage Publications
623
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
tism and collective identity suitable to a democratic society with an oppres-
sive past. In these and other respects, the German historians’ debate may
throw some additional light on our own tortured attempts to come to terms
with a past of racial injustice.4
I shall focus here on only one of the major constellations of racial injustice
that disfigure our past and present, the one associated with racial slavery and
its aftermath. The “logics” and “dynamics” of the constellations associated
with the near extermination of Native Americans; the forceful subjection of
the inhabitants of territories conquered from Mexico; the involuntary incor-
poration of native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Alaskan Eskimos; and the
exclusion or oppression of various groups of immigrants are sufficiently dif-
ferent to warrant separate treatments. Moreover, it is the black/white divide
that has most deeply marked the topography of American racial politics from
before the Civil War to the present day. Part I will focus on the recent debates
in Germany concerning the role that publicly working through the past can
play in reshaping national culture and identity. Part II will use insights
gleaned from that discussion to review our own failure to come to terms with
a past in black and white. I will conclude, in part III, with some thoughts on
how public memory might figure in debates about policies that address the
legacy of slavery and segregation.
I
From the close of World War II to the present, Germany has been engaged
in an ongoing effort to come to terms with its Nazi past—in shifting circum-
stances and with varying aims, approaches, and results.5 Immediately after
the war, a defeated and divided Germany had various measures relating to its
recent past imposed upon it by the victorious allies—war crimes trials, de-
Nazification procedures, reeducation processes, and the like. From 1949
through the early 1960s, however, dealing with the past was largely—though
not completely—suspended, as energies were marshaled in the service of
Wiederaufbau, or rebuilding. During that period, a general turning away from
the Nazi period was supported by the dominant view, in public life and in the
schools, that the twelve years of National Socialism were an aberration in
German history foisted upon the people by Hitler and his henchmen. Repara-
tions were made to Israel, the “economic miracle” proceeded apace under
Adenauer and Erhard, and the Nazi affiliations of major public figures were
concealed behind a wall of silence. A number of German intellectuals who
grew to young adulthood under National Socialism and came to maturity
after the war protested this curtailment of critical investigation into the past
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
625
already in the late 1950s but with limited effect until, in the second half of the
1960s, student radicalism and the accession of the Social Democrats to power
tipped the balance in favor of a determined effort to come to terms with the
past. As a result, and aided by new access to Nazi documents, in the 1970s
there began a steady stream of scholarly studies that left little room for doubt-
ing or denying the character and extent of Nazi crimes, the complicity of vari-
ous German elites, the widespread support among large segments of the pop-
ulation, or the roots of Nazism in German history and culture. But in the
1980s, after the Christian Democrats returned to power under Helmut Kohl,
conservative intellectuals were encouraged to take advantage of the new
political climate to reclaim political-cultural dominance from the left opposi-
tion. This was the setting for the well-known Historikerstreit, or historians’
debate, of the mid-1980s, which I shall be considering here.6
Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, Andreas Hillgruber, and other professional
historians undertook to reinterpret the events of the Nazi period in ways that
reduced their singularity and enormity, for instance, by comparing the Final
Solution to other mass atrocities of the twentieth century, from the massacres
of the Armenians by the Turks to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Indeed, the
Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath also served as the major explanatory
factor in their account of the recent German past: Hitler and Nazism were a
response to the threat of Bolshevism from the East. In addition to “normaliz-
ing” and “historicizing” the Holocaust in these ways, historical work from
this quarter also promoted a shift in perspective from solidarity with the vic-
tims of Nazism to solidarity with the valiant German troops fighting on the
Eastern front and with ordinary Germans suffering through the war’s grim
end. There was, of course, a political-cultural point to all of this: it was time
for Germany to leave behind its Nazi past, turn toward the future, and assume
its rightful place among the leading nations of the world. It was worse than an
intellectual error to view a proud German history solely through the distort-
ing lens of a twelve-year aberration; it was a political failing as well, for it
impeded formation of the strong national identity and confident national pur-
pose needed for effective action in rapidly changing European and global set-
tings. By that time, most of the country’s inhabitants had been born after the
war or had been too young during the Nazi period to bear any individual
responsibility for it. Dwelling on a past that was not theirs served no better
purpose than public self-flagellation and blocked the normal development of
patriotic identification with the fortunes of the nation.
With such arguments, and in concert with their political allies, the conser-
vative historians were putting revisionist history to public use in the interests
of reshaping public memory—and thus German self-understanding—and of
relieving public conscience so as to revitalize German patriotism. And it was
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
precisely to this political-cultural challenge that Jürgen Habermas, Hans
Mommson, and other German left-liberal intellectuals responded in the
Historikerstreit.7 I want now to consider briefly their responses concerning
the public use of history and to do so from the interested standpoint of our
own difficulties in coming to terms with the past.
The overriding political-cultural issue behind the historians’ dispute
might be put as follows: what should be the attitude of present-day Germans
toward a Nazi past in which most of them were not directly implicated? Often
enough the collective past is a burden on the present, and the stronger the
memories of it, the greater the burden. If the past in question involves terrible
crimes for which amends can never really be made, the problems for collec-
tive identity and collective action can be immense. With worries of this sort in
mind, many Germans felt in the mid-1980s that forty years of dealing with
the Nazi past was enough and that it was time for Germany to move on—to
reestablish continuities with the many glorious aspects of its history and tra-
ditions, to foster a more positive self-understanding, and to play a more self-
confident and self-interested role in international affairs than its postwar
pariah status had permitted. Those who argued against this—successfully in
the end—noted that the process of publicly facing the past had gotten fully
under way only in the late 1960s and was already throttled in the early 1980s
by the Tendenzwende, or change of direction, set in motion when the Chris-
tian Democrats regained power under Kohl. And the character of that
change—particularly the heavy-handed attempts to reverse the political-
cultural accomplishments of the 1970s and to renew German patriotism,
encapsulated by the infamous events at Bitburg in 1985—made it clear that
Germany had not yet effectively worked through its past but was rather in the
process of trying to repress it.8 The questionable work of the conservative his-
torians enlisted in these efforts only proved the point: professional history
was being misused to improve Germany’s weak self-image by touching up
the ugly picture of its recent past.
There were, of course, historiographic criticisms of that work by other his-
torians, but the line of criticism I want to focus on stressed rather the political
implications of this effort to leave the painful past behind. Jürgen Habermas,
in particular, advanced the argument that German national identity was in-
separable from its historical consciousness and that any major shifts in German
public memory would leave their mark upon German self-understanding,
with practical-political consequences. If those shifts were in the direction of
denying and repressing the past instead of confronting and dealing with it,
they would likely lead to forms of “acting out” rather than “working
through,” symptoms of which could already be discerned in German public
life, most notably in various expressions of a mounting xenophobia. For what
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
627
was at issue here was not a temporary aberration but a catastrophe with deep
roots in German history and culture. Historians of the Holocaust had, for
instance, pointed to a virulent strain of popular anti-Semitism as a contribut-
ing factor, a diagnosis later reinforced and sharpened in Daniel Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s Willing Executioners.9 Long-standing, widespread, and deeply
rooted views of German racial superiority and Jewish racial inferiority had
shaped a popular mind-set that was, Goldhagen argued, a necessary, if not
sufficient, condition for the attempted Judeocide. Even those born later, who
bore no individual moral guilt in that connection, had a continuing responsi-
bility to work up, on, and through such elements of German political culture
in an effort to break with the past. Failure to do so, Habermas argued, would
come back to haunt German public life, for allowing the motivational force of
such beliefs and attitudes to persist would only heighten the risk of repeated
outbreaks of racially imbued thinking and acting, as already evinced in the
growing conflicts over asylum and immigration. It would also amount to a
renunciation of Germany’s collective obligation to make amends for the past
and a show of disrespect for its many victims.
On this point, referring to Walter Benjamin’s idea of reversing the usual
triumphal identification with history’s winners for an anamnestic solidarity
with its victims, Habermas writes,
There is the obligation incumbent upon us in Germany . . . to keep alive, without distor-
tion, and not only in an intellectual form, the memory of the sufferings of those who were
murdered by German hands. . . . If we were to brush aside this Benjaminian legacy, our
fellow Jewish citizens and the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of all those who were
murdered would feel themselves unable to breathe in our country.10
Public remembrances and commemorations of the suffering of victims—
through artistic as well as historical representations, in public rituals and pub-
lic places, in school curricula and mass media—play crucial roles in trans-
forming traditions and in determining what will or will not be passed on to
future generations. Whether or not past evils are kept present in public con-
sciousness, whether or not their victims are still mourned, Habermas contin-
ues, are central elements of who “we” (Germans) are and who “we” want to
be. For recognizing past evil as integral to German history, as issuing “from
the very midst of our collective life”—rather than as marginal or accidental to
it—“cannot but have a powerful impact on our self-understanding . . . and
shake any naive trust in our own traditions.”11 It is, in fact, an essential ingre-
dient in any genuine effort to re-form national identity in full awareness of the
horrors that issued from its previous formation.
The unity of this “we” is, to be sure, by no means given: it is something
that has to be continually shaped and reshaped in the public sphere. For in the
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
politics of public memory, there is usually a polyphony of voices, emanating
from a diversity of “subject positions”: the voices of victims and perpetrators,
of resisters and collaborators, of those directly involved and those who were
born later, of different regions and cultures, races and classes, political ideol-
ogies and religious convictions, and so forth.12 In a democratic context, this
means that representations of the past may be publicly contested from per-
spectives that are linked to conflicting understandings of the present and ori-
entations toward the future. And in the resultant dialectic of past, present, and
future, debates over what happened and why interpenetrate with differences
of interest and concern, conviction and attitude, experience and hope among
the various participants.13 This is so in the German debates and, as we shall
see, even more so in the American—where the immense presence of the
descendants of slaves in the body politic gives the idea of solidarity with the
victims of history a different political edge than it has in Germany, and where
Southern views of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and their aftermath
managed to gain a hegemony unlike anything to be found in the defeated
Germany.
Another issue in the Historikerstreit was the extent to which historical
scholarship can and should inform the politics of memory in the public
sphere by, among other things, introducing an element of objectivity into
what might otherwise become simply a matter of power. To be sure, the ideas
of “objectivity” in question were, for the most part, “postdeconstructive”
rather than foundationalist.14 It was generally agreed that narratives and inter-
pretations are not simply dictated by facts; that their construction is always
informed by the historians’ questions, interests, standpoints, temporal posi-
tions, and the like; and that there is no absolute divide between facts and inter-
pretations, but rather a continuous spectrum. However, the latitude for rea-
sonable disagreement is palpably different at different points in the spectrum.
As one moves in the “factual” direction, the constraints imposed by the evi-
dence—documents, eyewitness reports, quantitative data, and so forth—sig-
nificantly narrow the range of reasonable disagreement. The critical use of
such sources by the community of historical scholars results in the elimina-
tion of many proposed interpretations, as the factual claims and presupposi-
tions germane to them are submitted to critical scrutiny—as happened, for
example, with the “Auschwitz lie” and the “Lost Cause” view of the Civil
War. For though historical judgment is unavoidable, it is exercised in critical
dialogue with a community of historians that can and often does achieve
something approaching unanimity with regard to how the available sources
bear upon the plausibility of this or that interpretation.15 And, as Saul
Friedlander, Carlo Ginzburg, Jürgen Habermas, and others have argued con-
cerning the historians’debate over the Holocaust, if nonfoundationalist prac-
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
629
tices of objectivity and truth were not possible, there would be no lies, and
might would make right, from which there could be no appeal to the evidence
of historical inquiry.
The question of objectivity raises moral and ethical as well as epistemic
issues; representations of the past can be faulted not only for their lies, distor-
tions, or half-truths but also for the unfairness they show and injustice they do
to the victims of history. This can be seen, for instance, in the use, misuse, or
nonuse a historian makes of the victims’ own testimonies and narratives, in
how she or he “negotiates” the relationships among the competing
“micronarratives” of perpetrators, victims, and onlookers, and between them
and her or his own “macronarrative.”16 And the results of those negotiations
have to be submitted to the scholarly community at large, where they will be
renegotiated in the light of other judgments of fairness and ethical-political
senses of solidarity. This becomes especially pressing when the descendants
of victims live among “us” and experience disrespect for past suffering as a
failure of solidarity in the present. As historical scholarship intersects with
ethical-political debates about who “we” are and want to be as a people, about
what is really in the common good and general interest, questions of doing
justice to the victims of the past interpenetrate with questions of inclusion
and exclusion in the present. Pablo De Greiff has put this point as follows:
“We have an obligation to remember what our fellow citizens cannot be
expected to forget,” in the normative sense of what we cannot reasonably
expect them to forget.17
What are we to make politically of these efforts to come to terms with the
past? It is impossible to weigh their effects on West German political culture
with any precision. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the changes have
been considerable. But how much of that is due to the external imposition of a
democratic constitutional order and international pressure on its internal
affairs, how much to the German “economic miracle” and widespread pros-
perity, how much to countless other factors not directly connected with the
Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, as Adorno called it, is difficult to say. On
the other hand, we do have two strong comparative indicators of the political-
cultural importance of publicly dealing with the Nazi past: Austria and East
Germany. In Austria, which after the war represented itself as the passive vic-
tim of German aggression, there was never more than superficial gestures in
that direction. And the results have been clear for all to see. Though it too is
democratic and prosperous, its politics is still haunted by specters of its Nazi
past. At the latest, since the end of the 1980s, when Kurt Waldheim was
elected president after it was disclosed that he had lied about his wartime
past—he had joined the German army in 1938 and later served with units that
were involved in war crimes in Yugoslavia and Greece—and in spite of the
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
anti-Semitic overtones of his campaign, the return of the repressed has been
unmistakable. Under Jörg Haider, the Austrian Freedom Party rapidly rose to
prominence in the 1990s, regularly garnering about one-quarter of the popu-
lar vote and eventually joining in a ruling coalition with the conservative
Austrian People’s Party. That it could do so on the basis of an antiforeigner
platform and accompanied by an only partly veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric elic-
ited shocks of recognition in the rest of Europe. By contrast, West Germany’s
neonationalist and xenophobic Republican Party, under Franz Schönhuber,
enjoyed a comparatively brief rise at the end of the 1980s and to only a frac-
tion of the height.
Yet closer to home, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the hasty unifi-
cation of East and West Germany in 1990 provide another comparative per-
spective. For unlike the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Demo-
cratic Republic dealt only superficially with its Nazi past. The official
legitimation of the postwar communist regime as the triumph and rule of anti-
fascist forces made that unnecessary. And after unification, it was the Stalin-
ist and post-Stalinist past that occupied public attention. But here, too, the
return of the repressed was unmistakable. The antiforeigner violence that
exploded in the early 1990s and the generally xenophobic character of East
German political culture made it clear that they had never worked through
their Nazi past. It is, of course, true that after 1990 the process of reshaping an
enlarged national identity for Germany as a whole was accompanied by vari-
ous symptoms of political-cultural backsliding, including surges of neo-
nationalism and xenophobia, and troubling appearances of anti-Semitism.
But the worst of that came in the early 1990s, when the Christian Democrats
exploited the conflict potential generated by the vastly altered and deeply
asymmetrical political situation to put the issues of asylum, immigration, and
“guest workers” at the top of the public agenda; even then, it was much worse
in the East than the West. In the West, the spontaneous popular protests
against antiforeigner violence, the rising opposition to nativist politics, and
the continuing hold on the public mind of a civic nationalism defined by the
liberal and democratic principles of the Basic Law made clear how great the
discontinuities with the past had become. This is not to say that Germany has
fully “mastered” its Nazi past; there is ample indication that this is certainly
not the case. It is only to say that the politics of memory practiced there since
the 1960s has had a profound effect upon its political culture and national
identity.
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
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II
Using Vergangenheitsbewältigung in postwar Germany to gain perspec-
tive on the politics of the memory of slavery in the USA might seem, on the
face of it, to be a stretch. After all, it has been nearly a century and a half since
the end of slavery, and there have already been several rounds of intense pub-
lic debate concerning it, in varying political circumstances, from post–Civil
War Reconstruction to the post–World War II Civil Rights movement. And
yet, as historians of professional and public history have made clear, the poli-
tics of memory on this subject went badly from the time that four million,
mostly penniless, propertyless, jobless, and illiterate, former slaves were set
adrift in the post–Civil War South. After a brief, fiercely contested period of
Reconstructionending in 1877, the price paid for reunion was the reestablish-
ment of white supremacy in the states of the former Confederacy.18 As it has
sometimes been put, the South lost the war but won the peace. And part of
winning the peace was a reversal of the usual rule that victors in war get to
write history: the professional and public history of slavery, the Civil War,
and Reconstruction were dominated by pro-Southern, antiblack perspectives
until after World War II. Only since the rise of the postwar Civil Rights move-
ment has that hegemony been overturned among professional historians, and
the matter is still unresolved in public historical consciousness.
One might suppose that with the founding of the American Historical
Association in 1884, racist historiography would have waned as professional
historians began to replace their amateur predecessors. But prior to World
War I, the “scientific” history of race in America was largely based on “scien-
tific”—biological, anthropological—racism, and historiographic “impartial-
ity” took the form of avoiding “partiality” against the antebellum South in the
interest of sectional reconciliation.19 Especially after the generation of histo-
rians who had living memories of the war and Reconstruction was displaced
by generations who did not, the aim of building a national community of pro-
fessional historians, free of sectional conflict, motivated the negotiation of a
consensual version of slavery and its aftermath. And abetted by the pervasive
racism of the period—in the North and West as well as in the South and across
the boundaries of social class and political party—professional historians did
in fact manage to achieve a high degree of historiographic agreement along
racist and nationalist lines. This included a romanticized version of antebel-
lum plantation life with softened images of slavery, a depiction of abolition-
ists and Radical Republicans as extremist agitators, and an account of the out-
rages of Reconstruction, replete with Southern white “scalawags,” grasping
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
Northern “carpetbaggers,” and impudent black freedmen, that is, just the
sorts of views that were disseminated to the nation at large in Thomas
Dixon’s fictional The Clansman (1907); D. W. Griffith’s film version of it,
The Birth of a Nation (1915); Claude G. Bowers’s popular history of Recon-
struction, The Tragic Era (1928); and countless other widely received
portrayals.
In this process of historiographic convergence, “there was considerably
more give on the Northern side, more take on the southern.” One reason for
this was “the near unanimous racism of northern historians” in this period,
fostered by the rise not only of “scientific” racism and Social Darwinism but
also of American expansionism, Anglo-Saxonism, and consciousness of the
white man’s “civilizing mission.”20 Another was the large number of South-
ern historians working in the North and the virtual absence of Northern histo-
rians employed in the South.21 Thus, there were “no southern centers of pro-
Northern historiography to compare with [William A.] Dunning’s Recon-
struction seminar at Columbia, which attracted scores of southern students,
who under Dunning’s direction turned out a stream of studies” that domi-
nated Reconstruction historiography for decades.22 And Southern historians
employed in the South worked under very strong constraints to hold to the
receivedversionofslavery and its aftermath. Black historiansdissented, to be
sure, but their work was marginalized in the profession by the white main-
stream—John Hope Franklin was the first black historian to receive a regular
appointment at a white institution, in 1956—and was consigned to
nonmainstream venues, particularly the Journal of Negro History founded in
1916.23
In the interwar period, especially in the 1930s, this ruling consensus,
while remaining dominant, came under increasingly sharp attacks from dif-
ferent corners of the rapidly expanding ideological spectrum—not only from
racial egalitarians, black and white, but also from Northern and Southern lib-
erals and from Marxists and other left intellectuals.24 There were a number of
influences at work here: the new antiracist anthropology that challenged sci-
entific racism, the repellent harshness of Southern racism as epitomized in
the numerous lynchings, the critical interpretive frameworks provided by left
political and social thought, and the rise of a new generation of dissident his-
torians, North and South. But despite this breakdown in consensus, no alter-
native synthesis appeared until after World War II. Thus, the overtly racist
views of slavery propounded in the extremely influential work of Ulrich B.
Phillips had no effective competitors and was still being incorporated into
best-selling textbooks such as that coauthored by Samuel Eliot Morison and
Henry Steel Commager in 1930, with numerous subsequent editions.25 Simi-
larly, the dominant view of Reconstruction propounded by Dunning and his
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
633
students—who represented it as a regime of humiliation imposed on the pros-
tate South by vindictive radicals and valiantly resisted by the knights of the
Ku Klux Klan—came under attack but was not displaced and entered into
public consciousness through incorporation into popular fiction, film, and
history. And again, the views of black historians, some of whom were now
Harvard-trained professionals, were disregarded by most orthodox historians
of the South—including the views advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois in his mon-
umental Black Reconstruction in America (1935).26 Despite the continuing
dominance of the racist orthodoxy, however, the underlying consensus
among historians gave way in the interwar years to a conflict of
interpretations.
The new antiracist synthesis toward which dissident historians had begun
pointing in the 1930s finally took shape and achieved dominance after World
War II. The horrors perpetrated by the Nazis under the banner of racial supe-
riority and inferiority, the decline of scientific racism and Social Darwinism,
the worldwide breakup of colonial empires, the exigencies of international
competition during the cold war, and the rise of the Civil Rights movement
gave wind to the writings of younger, heterodox historians who were formed
in the interwar years.27 Works by historians of that generation, North and
South, who were committed to racial equality began to appear in the 1950s
and by the close of the 1960s had completely transformed the historiography
of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction.
The politics of the public memory of slavery and its aftermath gained
momentum in the 1880s and 1890s, driven by many of the same forces that
drove historical scholarship and in much the same direction. The memory of
the Civil War was particularly contested, for the meaning conferred on this
great conflict in the nation’s past was perceived to be closely connected to
competing visions of the nation’s future. In the end, “race” lost out to
“reunion.”28 The demands of sectional reconciliation were met by figuring
the war as a fight between valorous brothers, while leaving the slavery and
emancipation that were its cause and outcome in the shadows. This configu-
ration also presented fewer obstacles to the reestablishment of white suprem-
acy in the South, which generally met with less and less resistance as racism
intensified in all regions of the country and the Republicans, in order to hold
on to their Northern white constituency, increasingly distanced themselves
from the politics of racial equality. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of
the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, the central public commemoration could be
staged as a “Great Reunion” among thousands of white veterans from both
armies, with scarcely a mention of the Emancipation Proclamation, whose
fiftieth anniversary also fell in that year. As the Baltimore Afro-American
Ledger summed up the situation at that time:
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
Today the South is in the saddle, and with the single exception of slavery, everything it
fought for during the days of the Civil War, it has gained by repression of the Negro
within its borders. And the North has quietly allowed it to have its own way.29
The last line proved to be an underestimation of the situation. That same
year, the newly inaugurated Woodrow Wilson, in collaboration with the
newly elected, Southern Democrat–dominated House and Senate, initiated a
policy of racial segregation in federal government agencies, a policy that
eventually expanded, especially under the New Deal, to include most feder-
ally sponsored programs in employment, training, and housing, among oth-
ers, as well as in federal prisons and, as previously, in the armed services.30
That is to say, from that point until the 1950s or 1960s, federal agencies were
not only a prime locus of racial segregation but also enforcers of the “separate
but equal” dispensation and propagators of it throughout the land. And, as
W. E. B. Du Bois noted in 1935, a segregated society required a segregated
historical memory: there was a “searing of the memory” in America by white
supremacist historiography and a public consciousness that had “obliterated”
the black experience and the meaning of emancipation.31
Given the enormous shifts in the historiography of slavery and its after-
math since the 1960s, one might suppose, especially in the wake of the Civil
Rights movement, the same to be true of public memory. And there have, to
be sure, alsobeenimportant changes in the latter, but those who study popular
uses of history have repeatedly noted a significant gap between academic and
public historical consciousness of these matters. “Generally Americans
believe that slavery was a Southern phenomenon, date it from the antebellum
period, and do not think of it as central to the American story.” They are gen-
erally ignorant of the fact that “by the time of the Revolution it had become a
significant economic and social institution in every one of the thirteen colo-
nies and would remain so in every region of the new nation well into the nine-
teenth century.”32 Moreover, many think of legally institutionalized racial
oppression as ending with emancipation and know rather little about racial
relations in the post-Reconstruction South, and most are quite ignorant of
institutionalized racism in the rest of the country, for instance, of the roles it
played in the formation of the American working class in the nineteenth cen-
tury, in structuring immigration policy and citizenship law throughout our
history, and in the policies and programs of the federal government in the
twentieth century.33 With the German discussions in mind, one might be
tempted to say that though our Historikerstreit concerning slavery and its
aftermath effectively ended, at least in regard to fundamentals, in the 1960s
and 1970s, the process of public Vergangenheitsbewältigung has only just
begun.34
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
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A number of different reasons are offered for the lag in public historical
consciousness. To begin with, there is a clear popular preference for history
that confirms rather than confronts positive portrayals of the nation’s past.
Thus, in public memory, what Nathan Irwin Huggins called the “master nar-
rative” of American history remains largely unshaken: “a national history
teleologically bound to the Founders’ ideals rather than their reality,” an
“inexorable development of free institutions and the expansion of political
liberty,” in which racial slavery and oppression are treated as regional “aber-
rations—historical accidents to be corrected in the progressive upward reach
of the nation’s destiny.”35 And then there is the appalling state of history
instruction in the schools:
Much of the best and latest scholarship never reaches high-school students because most
high-school history courses are taught by teachers with inadequate training in history. . . .
In Louisiana, 88 percent of the students who take history in high school are taught by
teachers who have not even a college minor in history. In Minnesota, the proportion is 83
percent, in West Virginia 82 percent, in Oklahoma 81 percent, in Pennsylvania, 73 per-
cent, in Kansas 72 percent.
Similarly, in Maryland, Arizona, South Dakota, and Mississippi, the percent-
ages are 70 percent or greater.36 Nor is this failure generally remedied at the
postsecondary level: U.S. history courses are not required, even for liberal
arts degrees, in more than four-fifths of our colleges and universities. But the
most frequently mentioned reason for the gap is the continuing volatility of
race relations: talk about racial injustice in the past is typically experienced,
by both blacks and whites, as being also about the present, and reacted to
accordingly. This is not only the case in the South, though the heightened
activism of Southern heritage groups has exacerbated the difficulties there;37
it holds for whites across the country, and for blacks as well.38 In short, rela-
tions to the passions and interests of the present are integral to the politics of
the memory of racial injustice and have to be addressed as such.
Like Germany and so many other countries, we too have a past that is still
present, that refuses to pass away. And it is just the haunting presence of the
past that the politics of public memory seeks to address. This type of cultural
politics is, of course, not new. It is practiced every day by public historians,
museum curators, artists, writers, journalists, and others in mass communica-
tion; it is a familiar element of local and national politics; and it has histori-
cally resulted in various forms of institutionalized memory. I am attempting
here only to delineate more sharply and underline more emphatically its irre-
placeable role in our society. Until legal, institutional, normal, everyday rac-
ism is publicly and widely understood to have been integral to our history and
identity as a nation, we will, I am suggesting, continue to encounter major
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
obstacles to developing the degree of transracial political solidarity required
for democratic solutions to the forms of racial injustice that are its continuing
legacy. Without a developed awareness of the sources and causes of our
racialized practices and attitudes, we will, I suspect, continue to find it
extremely difficult even to carry on reasonable public discussions of racially
inflected problems, let alone arrive at just and feasible solutions to them. As
Nathan Irwin Huggins has put it, whites and blacks are “joined at the hip,”
they have a “common story” and “share the same fate”; that is, they belong to
the “same community” and cannot work out their futures independently of
one another.39
But ours is a community of fate that has also historically been a land of
immigration, and that complicates the politics of memory considerably. The
diversity of subject positions in our society is marked not only by the differ-
ences of class, age, gender, and so forth found in any society but also by
black/white racial differences and North/South sectional differences. It also
includes positions connected with the conquest, settlement, and expansion of
America and the policies and practices of U.S. immigration. What does the
politics of memory mean, for instance, to the large numbers of recent immi-
grants whose cultural memories take them back to other worlds? I cannot
even begin to sort out these immense complications here, but I do want to
argue that the responsibility to come to terms with the past of slavery and seg-
regation is borne by the political community as a whole, regardless of ances-
try. This is so not only because the horrors perpetrated were generally state
sanctioned and frequently state implemented, that is to say, were corporate
evils for which there is corporate responsibility, nor only because naturalized
citizens who expect to share in the inherited benefits of a continuing enter-
prise must also share in its inherited liabilities. It is also because immigrant
groups, whatever their prior background, unavoidably become “joined at the
hip” to blacks and whites, become members of the same community of fate to
which all our futures are tied. The black/white polarity has fixed the geogra-
phy of the color-coded world to which successive waves of immigrants have
had to adapt; there is no comprehending the bizarre ethnoracial categories
into which Americans have been and still are forced apart from that polariza-
tion and its effective history. This is not at all to deny that Americans of
diverse origins have their own histories to relate and their own politics of
memory to pursue. It is merely to point out that the history of slavery and its
aftermath have formed a template for those histories, that they have been
shaped by it, and that their fates have been inextricably entangled in the
racialized politics that is its legacy.
This broad and deep diversity of subject positions is sure to be reflected in
the democratic politics of public memory—in rival narratives, conflicts of
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
637
interpretation, and other forms of cultural-political contestation. There is no
need for unanimity here, for one substantive version of the American past to
which all parties subscribe, but if there is to be public communication across
differences, citizens do have to see themselves as members of the same politi-
cal project, defined in large part by overlapping interpretations of constitu-
tional rights, principles, and values. This is not a matter of returning to pure
origins or foundations; there can be no reasonable doubt that our foundations
were fractured from the start. But it is also not a matter of simply condemning
them, or burying them forever under heaps of criticism. It was, after all, the
same motley of religious and philosophical ideas that was used to justify both
slavery and abolition, both segregation and its dismantling. The politics of
memory has to identify those deep tensions and ambivalence in our political-
cultural heritage and trace the ways in which ideas implicated in injustice
could, upon critical reinterpretation, serve as resources for attacking it. It has
to comprehend how black Americans struggling for freedom and equality
were able to invoke putatively universal rights and principles and argue that
they were being betrayed—how, in Judith Butler’s formulation, they could
“seize the language of the universal and set into motion a ‘performative con-
tradiction,’ claiming to be covered by it and thereby exposing the contradic-
tory character” of hegemonic formulations.40
Successive waves of immigrants have also been able to tap into that
political-cultural heritage to gain a place for themselves in American society,
but owing to the polarized force field of racial relations pervading it, they did
so not only by tapping into the critical potential of universalistic ideals but
also by making strategic use of their dominant, exclusionary interpretations.41
An inclusionary politics of memory would today have to be conceived as a
multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural dialogue aiming not at unanimity but
at mutual comprehension, mutual recognition, and mutual respect. Anglo-
assimilationism is in its death throes; the idea of a mosaic of self-enclosed
subcultures is a nonstarter; what is left to us, it seems, are versions of an inter-
active and accommodative diversity of forms of life, with an overarching
democratic political culture that leaves room for ongoing contestation, cri-
tique, and reinterpretation of its basic principles and values.42 What has never
been the case but must be the case, if we are ever to get beyond the racialized
politics of our public sphere, is that blacks participate as equal partners in
public life and public discourse. It is obvious that no one can speak for them
in a public dialogue of this sort. But if they are to be included as equals, much
will have to change in the massively unequal conditions of life and politics
that have historically muted their voices.43 So we seem to be caught again in a
familiar circle.
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
In the final part, I want to take a brief look at one way a politics of public
memory might help us to break out of it. Consistent with the focus of this
essay, I shall be stressing the importance of historical enlightenment. To fore-
stall possible misunderstandings: I am not claiming that the politics of mem-
ory exhausts the politics of race. The furthest thing from my mind is to deny
the importance of social-structural factors such as the protection of group
interests in the maintenance of social dominance. Nor do I harbor the slight-
est doubt that psychodynamic and socio-psychological factors are especially
virulent in this domain. Nor, as I hope my discussions of the dialectic of past,
present, and future in Parts I and II make clear, do I think that the past can be
separated off, either in theory or in practice, from the present and future. As I
trust will become clearer in the course of Part III, my selective focus here on
historical consciousness is for analytical purposes only.44 Whether the results
repay the narrowing is for the reader to judge.
III
Politics in America has been racialized from the start, and even after the
successes of the Civil Rights movement, race remains “our nation’s most dif-
ficult subject.”45 On one hand, there has been an extensive liberalization of
white attitudes toward racial equality since the 1950s. The great majority of
whites are now opposed in principle to segregation and discrimination
against blacks and in favor of integration, equal opportunity, and freedom of
choice in employment, schooling, housing, and the like. On the other hand,
when it comes to government policies and programs meant to implement
these principles, agreement breaks down. So, to begin with, we have to try to
grasp the nature and sources of this discrepancy. There is substantial empiri-
cal evidence indicating that among the most important sources of disagree-
ment on such matters is the degree of “racial resentment”: the greater the
resentment whites feel toward blacks, the greater the likelihood they will be
opposed to racially inflected remedial measures, and inversely for greater
solidarity.46 Since the 1950s biological racism seems to have increasingly
given way to a kind of ethical racism expressed in psychological and cultural
stereotypes.47 The view that blacks suffer disproportionately from character
defects of various sorts seems to be quite widespread among whites.48 And
this fits with the equally widespread view that black socioeconomic disad-
vantages are largely the result of their possessing too little of the crucial
economic-individualistic virtues—motivation, self-discipline, hard work,
and the like—that enabled Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and other minori-
ties to overcome prejudice and work their ways up. On this view, too many
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
639
blacks prefer to depend on government handouts rather than trying to make it
on their own, thus adding to the list of missing virtues “independence” and
“self-reliance.” There is, of course, a great deal of variation in opinion among
whites on these matters, with a significant proportion rejecting this line of
reasoning and the stereotypes on which it depends altogether. And even
within the majority that accepts them, there are wide variations in the strength
with which they are held and, presumably, their susceptibility to influence by
evidence, argument, and experience. But there is no doubt that, overall, what
George M. Frederickson called “the black image in the white mind” is still a
major determinant of views on racial policies.
Two other important variables are whether discrimination is believed to be
a thing of the past and whether the history of slavery and segregation is taken
to be a major cause of the inequalities African Americans suffer under at
present. Most blacks answer no to the first and yes to the second and in fact
prominently cite these factors in justifying policies aimed at remedying racial
inequalities, whereas most, though by no means all, whites do the opposite.49
And that difference is consequential: the beliefs that racial discrimination has
been eliminated, that “the playing field is now level,” but blacks, owing to
weaknesses of character, persist in seeking handouts, and that they thereby
claim and receive unfair advantages over whites, are further ingredients in the
racial resentment syndrome that is the best single predictor of views on racial
policies. There are other elements, some so improbable that one hesitates to
mention them, but at the same time so often noted that one cannot simply
ignore them. Orlando Patterson reports them as “misperceptions”:
Only 31 percent of Euro-Americans believe that Afro-Americans have less opportunity
to live a middle-class life than they do, compared with 71 percent of Afro-Americans
[who believe this]. Most extraordinary of all, 58 percent of Euro-Americans think that
the average Afro-American is as well off or better off than Euro-Americans in their
income and housing condition.50
Even these sketchy remarks may be sufficient to locate one important con-
tribution a politics of the memory of slavery and segregation might make to
the larger politics of race in our society. Persistent racial injustices cannot be
addressed by government action without significant support from whites.
Opponents of such action are able to tap into, and simultaneously add to, a
large reservoir of racial resentment by representing proposed policies as vio-
lations of the basic principles and values of American individualism and
thus as promoting undeserved and unfair advantages for blacks at the
expense of whites. Inthegiveandtakeofademocraticpublicsphere, itistyp-
ically the case that complex issues can and will be interpreted, contextualized,
framed—or “spun”— in different and competing ways. And there is a lot at
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
stake in which frame predominates in public discourse, for that deter-
mines the definition of the problem, decides what is central and marginal
to it, and circumscribes its justified and feasible resolutions. In the case at
hand, effectively recontextualizing the racial issues of today as the latest
chapter in the continuing story of slavery and its aftermath is, I want to
suggest, an important means of countering attempts to tap into the reser-
voir of racial resentment and of diminishing that reservoir itself. The
greater the public familiarity with and knowledge of that history, the greater
are the chances of effectively interpreting current problems as belonging to
its accumulated effects and thus of publicly framing them as moral issues or
issues of justice.51
Consider only one example: the yawning wealth gap between white and
black households, usually estimated to be about ten to one.52 I am suggesting
that it could well have a significant effect on the public’s understanding of
that gap to know that much of it is due to differences in the respective rates of
home ownership, which is the major form of savings in the working middle
class, and that government housing programs from the 1930s to the 1950s
overtly and almost totally excluded blacks from participation.53 Until 1948,
the Federal Housing Association’s (FHA’s) Underwriting Manual explicitly
identified blacks as unreliable and undesirable buyers. And it also included a
model racial covenant, that is, a contractual clause preventing resale to
blacks!Ofthe nearly three million housing units that received FHAinsurance
from 1935 to 1950, less than 1 percent—about twenty-five thousand units—
were for Negro occupancy. More generally, of nine million new private
dwelling units constructed in that period, less than 1 percent were open to
purchase by nonwhite Americans. And that was a crucial period in the mas-
sive migration of blacks from country to city and South to North:
In 1940, 77 percent of black Americans still lived in the South—49 percent in the rural
South. . . . Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from
the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the
mechanization of cotton farming. In 1970, when the migration ended, black America
was only half Southern, and less than a quarter rural: “urban” had become a euphemism
for “black.”54
A major result of government policies during this period—in conjunction, of
course, with the discriminatory practices of mortgage loan departments, real
estate agencies, neighborhood “improvement” associations, among others,
as well as with the massive white flight to suburbia—was a pattern of urban-
ization that left black Americans the most residentially segregated minority
in the country, a condition that has persisted, along with many of its causes,
down to the present day.55 And residential segregation is, of course, a major
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
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factor in reproducing other inequalities, as it has a direct impact upon
employment opportunities, the quality of education and other public ser-
vices, the availability of home and business loans, and electoral power,
among other things.
Understanding the black/white wealth gap in this way, as a cumulative
effect of the history of racial injustice—and one could tell similar stories
about the origins of other existing inequalities—is likely to make a differ-
ence, I am suggesting, in the judgments of many whites as to whether pro-
posed measures are “deserved compensations” for discrimination or “unfair
advantages.” For a politics of memory to be politically successful, it is not
necessary to convince everyone. It is surely the case that in some segments of
the population, racial resentment is rooted in deep-seated prejudices that are
largely impervious to rays of light from the cultural-political public sphere.56
But this is by no means true of all segments, particularly not of those strongly
committed to the idea of racial equality. However, even the latter normally
have to be convinced that any particular racial policy is in truth a fair and pro-
portionate remedy for the effects of clear and persistent discrimination. And
it is often difficult to see how that could happen without a serious upgrading
of public memory to provide the necessary background for public justifica-
tions of a historical sort. From this perspective, then, there is a political need
for historical enlightenment.57
In the absence of widespread public familiarity with the causal back-
ground to contemporary racial problems, the political-cultural resources for
resisting racist reframings of them are seriously impoverished. The thinness,
spottiness, and frequent incorrectness of public historical consciousness of
the story of race in America make the cultural-political struggle to
contextualize such issues historically always an uphill struggle, and often an
impossibly steep one. But even if this diagnosis is correct and part of the cure
lies in broadening and deepening the public memory of slavery and segrega-
tion, how could that possibly be accomplished? The answer I am proposing,
in its most abstract formulation, is through a politics of memory. Even in that
abstract form, it has the virtue of directing attention to some underdiscussed
political-cultural issues and underdeveloped cultural-political strategies.
Moreover, as we can learn from our own history and from efforts to come to
terms with the past in other parts of the world, there is already a plethora of
tested models for filling in that formula and no obvious limits to imagining
others. Given the peculiar gap between academic historical scholarship and
public historical consciousness that marks our own situation, the politics of
education has to be an important part of the politics of public memory in this
country.58 In too many areas, conservative groups with racist ideologies have
been much more active and effective in local school politics than their
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
antiracist counterparts, all the more so as the very high degree of segregation
in the schools effectively excludes or diminishes the voices of blacks in pre-
dominantly white districts. Unless antiracist whites in such districts take it
upon themselves to organize and struggle for curriculum reform, not much is
likely to change at that level. And at the state level, the disgraceful
minimization of degree requirements for high school history teachers—not
to mention the common practice of farming out history courses to athletic
coaches—is likely to be changed only by organized political pressure for
strengthening state certification requirements. Beyond school politics, there
is the larger field of public education centered on museums, exhibitions, per-
formances, historical sites, holidays, celebrations, commemorations, and
other public rituals. Social actors pursuing a politics of memory could cer-
tainly make a big difference there, for instance, by organizing a national cam-
paign for a national museum of slavery. Broad social movements, and the vol-
untary associations that subtend and spring up from them, also typically
generate flows of aesthetic activities that give multiform expression to their
memories, perceptions, and concerns.59 In the mass-mediated society that we
inhabit, this dimension of cultural politics is particularly important. To be
sure, black Americans have long engaged in these forms of the politics of
memory but usually without the requisite level of support among whites.
Much of this may go without saying, and I have no intention of trying to
list here all the forms of cultural politics peculiar to the field on which the pol-
itics of public memory is contested. But in closing, I would like only to men-
tion another possible vehicle of public memory: reparations claims. In my
view, one of the strongest arguments in favor of going ahead with the class-
action lawsuits now being prepared is that, in present circumstances, this
could prove to be the most effective means of igniting a “national conversa-
tion on race.” On the other hand, there are a number of weighty arguments
against taking this path—including the hostile reaction it is likely to elicit in
broad segments of the population—that also have to be seriously considered.
But I shall not attempt that here.60
Among white Americans, the political will to deal with the catastrophic
situation of the urban “underclass,” particularly the millions of “truly disad-
vantaged” blacks living in inner-city ghettos, is evidently too weak to resist
the politics of racial resentment waged so effectively in recent decades.61 To
strengthen that will, it seems, we have to diminish the reservoir of racial
resentment and make it more difficult to draw upon it in framing issues of
racial policy. I have tried to argue that a politics of the public memory of slav-
ery and segregation could be one way of doing so. In present circumstances, it
enjoys the advantage of having academic historical scholarship on its side. It
suffers the disadvantage of having our political-cultural elites largely
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McCarthy / ON THE POLITICS OF THE MEMORY OF SLAVERY
643
opposed to it, or at best insufficiently interested in it. But that has been the
starting point of most social movements. If enough people were to think it
important enough, it could become a significant force for change. In any case,
as with Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany, it may well be the only way
that the descendants of the victims will be able to breathe freely in our
country.
NOTES
1. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is the usual German term for efforts to deal publicly with the
Nazi past.
2. Cited in Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1997), 106. Mills draws comparisons between the Nazi extermination of the Jews, the “Ameri-
can Holocaust” visited upon indigenous populations, and the “slow-motion Holocaust” of Afri-
can slavery, in respect of the millions who died horrific deaths in each, the systematic nature of
the violence visited upon them, and the racist ideologies that served to justify it. I shall be using
“race,” without quotes, to designate concatenations of social meanings, practices, identities,
institutions, and the like that are internally connected with racial categorizations. It goes without
saying that they are no less real for not corresponding to biologically fixed natures.
3. See Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths (London: Routledge, 2000); Martha Minow, Between
Vengeance andForgiveness (Boston: Beacon, 1998); and Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
4. There is another feature of German efforts to come to terms with the past that is relevant
to our situation: the reparations paid to Jews since the end of the war and, more recently, to forced
and slave laborers of diverse ethnic backgrounds. There has been a recent resurgence of interest
here in the question of reparations for slavery and segregation; a Reparations Coordinating Com-
mittee, led by Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School, is preparing class-action lawsuits for
that purpose. But I shall have to leave the discussion of reparations to another time. This defer-
ment should not be taken to imply that the politics of memory could in practice be disconnected
from issues of redistribution. Public acknowledgment of past injustice and public responsibility
for material redress are closely linked. Reparations could be one path toward the latter; in Part
III, Ishall considercertainfeatures ofa more familiarpath: race-targetedgovernment programs.
5. See Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow (New York: Pantheon, 1989), for a sketch of
these shifts and a good account of the historians’debate of the 1980s. I shall be concerned here
with the West German story; the East German story was quite distinct, until their separate trajec-
tories began to merge after reunification.
6. Many of the relevant documents, in English translation, are collected in James Knowlton
and Truett Cates, trans., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1993), and Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
7. In addition to the collections mentioned in the preceding note, see the helpful discussions
by Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow, and Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988). A number of Habermas’s contributions to the debate have
appeared in English translation in a collection of his essays, The New Conservatism, trans.
S. Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
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POLITICAL THEORY / October 2002
8. The Bitburg incident involved a Kohl-staged memorial ceremony at a German military
cemetery, during which then-president Reagan laid a wreath to honor the dead, among whom
were a number of Waffen-SS troops. See Geoffrey Hartmann, ed., Bitburg in Moral andPolitical
Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Not long thereafter, Kohl appeared
at a congress of German expelees from Silesia (in present-day Poland) and voiced his support for
the German state boundaries of 1937, which included about one-third of Poland.
9. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
See also Habermas’s speech upon the occasion of the awarding of the German Democracy Prize
to Goldhagen in 1997, “On the Public Use of History,” in Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational
Constellation, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 26-37.
10. This passage appears in an earlier (1987) article with the same English title as
Habermas’s address at the award ceremony for Goldhagen (see n. 8), “On the Public Use of His-
tory,” in The New Conservatism, 229-240, at 233. It hardly needs mentioning that with the appro-
priate substitutions of “American” for “German” and “African American” for “Jewish,” this sen-
timent might be directed toward our situation as well but with at least three very important
differences: (1) Today, German-Jews number in the tens of thousands, while African Americans
number in the tens of millions; thus, shaping an American “we” inclusive of the descendants of
the previously excluded is a task of a significantly different order than forming an inclusive Ger-
man “we.” (2) Like most Europeans, Germans tend to think of themselves as belonging to an
ethnocultural nation, whereas the American people—at least since the decline of Anglo-
Saxonism—generally understand themselves to be multiethnic and, increasingly, multicultural.
(3) The USA fought a civil war over slavery.
11. Jürgen Habermas, “On the Public Use of History,” in The Postnational Constellation, 45-
46.
12. On the notion of a “subject position,” see Dominick LaCapra, “Representing the Holo-
caust: Reflections on the Historians Debate,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul
Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1992), 108-27.
13. Carlos Thiebault elaborates this dialectic in the democratic politics of memory in an
unpublished essay, “Naming Evil.”
14. LaCapra uses this term in “Representing the Holocaust,” 111.
15. This is a point argued by Martin Jay in “Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments,” in Probing
the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1992), 97-107.
16. This is the terminology of Martin Jay in the essay cited in the previous note.
17. See Pablo De Greiff’s interesting, unpublished essay “The Duty to Remember.” I cannot
discuss here the complex question of the nature and source of such an obligation. De Greiff takes
it to be a moral duty. My own inclination would be to regard it as an ethical-political “ought” with
a moral-political basis. The latter is located in the normative foundations of democratic theory,
that is, in the very idea of a form of political association based upon the self-governance of free
and equal persons. Unpacking the dimensions of equal respect, consideration, and treatment and
elaborating their connection to the effective exercise of basic liberties could, I think, give us a
handle on the moral-political significance of publicly respecting the forms of life integral to indi-
vidual and collective identities. But going beyond this general and abstract “ought” requires, I
think, taking the particular histories and circumstances of particular polities into account. Thus,
the ethical-political question of whether the political community as a whole “ought” publicly to
recognize the past sufferings of a particular group within it will depend on how “we” understand
ourselves as a nation and on what kind of life “we” want for ourselves, on who “we” are and want
to be. For some ideas relevant to this line of thought, see Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recog-
nition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” trans. S. Weber Nicholsen, in Multiculturalism:
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Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 107-48.
18. See Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1990);
David W. Blight, Race andReunion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
19. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1988), chap. 3, “Consensus and Legitimation.” The remarks on historiography that follow draw
heavily on Novick’s account.
20. Novick, That Noble Dream, 76.
21. Novick lists some of the former on 77-78, including Woodrow Wilson, who was born in
Virginia in 1856 and grew to adulthood during Reconstruction.
22. Novick, That Noble Dream, 78.
23. One exception to this rule was W. E. B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and Its Benefits,”
American Historical Review 15 (1910): 781-99.
24. See Novick, That Noble Dream, chap. 8, “Divergence and Dissent.”
25. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steel Commager, The Growth of the American Repub-
lic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930). Novick cites the following passage: “Sambo,
whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears . . . suffered less than any other class in
the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ . . . There was much to be said for slavery as a transitional
status between barbarism and civilization” (p. 229). He reports that in the 1950s, “protests by
Negro students and others at the City College of New York were ultimately successful in ending
the use of[thistext]in classes because ofits racist characterizations ofNegroes” (p. 350, n. 46).
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; reprint, with an
introduction by David Levering Lewis, New York: Atheneum, 1992). In the concluding chapter
of that work, “The Propaganda of History,” Du Bois provided an impassioned overview of post-
Reconstruction historiography, including then-current textbooks: “This chapter, therefore,
which in logic should be a survey of books and sources, becomes of sheer necessity an arraign-
ment of American historians and an indictment of their ideals” (p. 725). The story of slavery, the
Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction they present “may be inspiring, but it is cer-
tainly not the truth. And beyond that it is dangerous” (p. 723).
27. See Novick, That Noble Dream, 348-60.
28. See Blight, Race andReunion.
29. Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, July 5, 1913. Cited in David Blight, “Quarrel For-
gotten or a Revolution Remembered?” in Union andEmancipation, ed. David Blight and Brooks
Simpson (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1997), 175.
30. See Desmond King, Separate andUnequal: Black Americans andthe US Federal Gov -
ernment (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995).
31. The phrases in quotes come from the last chapter of Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in
America, 725, 723.
32. James Oliver Horton, “Presenting Slavery: The Perils of Telling America’s Racial Story,”
The Public Historian 21 (1999): 21. He refers, for instance, to the fitting out of slave ships in New
England and the financing of the slave trade by New York and Pennsylvania merchants.
33. See, for instance, David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race andthe Making of
the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a
Different Color: European Immigrants andthe Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1998); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S.
History (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1997); Desmond King, Separate andUnequal.
34. This is not to deny the continuing disagreements among professional historians of race,
which Novick recounts in That Noble Dream, 469-91; it is only to say that the white-supremacist
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historiography that was hegemonic from the end of Reconstruction through World War II is no
longer a viable option.
35. Nathan Irwin Huggins, Black Odyssey (New York: Vintage, 1990), introduction to the
1990 edition, xii.
36. Horton, “Presenting Slavery,” 23. Jonathan Zimmerman summed up the situation in an
op-ed piece for the New York Times, July 11, 2001: “Across the country, about 54 percent of his-
tory students in grades 7 to 12 are taught by teachers who have neither a major nor a minor in his-
tory” (p. A21).
37. The ongoing controversies about the public use of the Confederate flag are obvious indi-
cations of this. There are many others. Horton relates that when John Latschar, park superinten-
dent at Gettysburg National Battlefield, suggested in a public lecture that the Civil War may have
been fought over slavery, “the Southern Heritage Coalition condemned his words, and 1,100
postcards calling for his immediate removal flooded the Office of the Secretary of the Interior.”
Horton, “Presenting Slavery,” 26.
38. Horton notes the numerous reports from interpreters at historical sites of negative reac-
tions by white visitors to presentations of slavery—even at plantation sites. Horton, “Presenting
Slavery,” 27-28. He also notes negative reactions by blacks to such presentations, which they
often experience as painful and disturbing (pp. 29-30). The wisdom of preserving the memory of
slavery has long been debated among black intellectuals, by Alexander Crummell and Frederick
Douglass, for instance, as by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
39. Nathan Irwin Huggins, Black Odyssey, xliv. In using the terms “solidarity” and “commu-
nity,” I am not signaling a communitarian line on political integration. Rather, I am referring
broadly to the “political imaginary” that defines individuals’and groups’sense of belonging to a
larger political community, and I am arguing that only insofar as whites and blacks imagine
themselves to be integral parts of the same political community will the task of taking collective
action on common goals related to the legacyofslaverybe amenable to democratic resolutions.
40. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89. See also Patricia J.
Williams, “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,” in Critical
Race Theory, ed. R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 80-
90.
41. As Dilip Gaonkar has remarked in conversation, this tension presents peculiar problems
for those contemporary “model minorities” who, unlike earlier European immigrants, get
reracialized not as white but as “Asian-American,” thus marking another dimension of the Amer-
ican racial topography. The price of their higher standing in some spheres (e.g., education,
employment) is their marginalization in others (e.g., politics, culture). For such minorities,
understanding America’s racialized past would seem to be particularly important to compre-
hending and transforming their own situation. See, for instance, Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit:
The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2000).
42. See Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition”; Robert Gooding-Williams, “Race, Multi-
culturalism, and Democracy,” Constellations 5 (1998): 18-41.
43. On the nature and sources of “deliberative inequalities,” see James Bohman, Public
Deliberation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), chap. 3; James Bohman, “Deliberative
Democracy and Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources, and Opportunities,” in
Deliberative Democracy, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 321-
48.
44. Cf. notes 46, 49, and 57 below.
45. Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1996), 11. I draw on empirical material provided by Kinder and Sanders in the analy-
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sis of racial politics that follows. For a broader survey of views on the role of race in American
politics, see D. O. Sears, J. Sidanius, and L. Bobo, eds., RacializedPolitics: The Debate about
Racism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
46. As stated by Kinder and Sanders in Divided by Color,
On equal opportunity in employment, school desegregation, federal assistance, affirma-
tive action at work, and quotas in college admissions, racially resentful whites line up on
one side of the issue, and racially sympathetic whites line up on the other. Racial resent-
ment is not the only thing that matters, but by a fair margin racial resentment is the most
important. (P. 124)
For an alternative view that places perceived group positions and interests at the center of the pol-
itics of race, see Lawrence Bobo, “Racial Beliefs about Affirmative Action: Assessing the
Effects of Interests, Group Threat, Ideology, and Racism,” in RacializedPolitics: The Debate
about Racism in America, ed. D. O. Sears, J. Sidanius, and L. Bobo (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2000), 137-64. For another version of the social-structural approach that stresses the
role of race in social stratification hierarchies, see Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Domi-
nance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy andOppression (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999). Admittedly, to the extent that the politics of race is driven by the protection
of group interests or the maintenance of social dominance, it would be less susceptible to amelio-
ration by a politics of memory; beliefs in racial superiority/inferiority would be secondary fac-
tors—ideological justifications for existing inequalities in the distribution of material and sym-
bolic resources—whereas the line I pursue gives some independent force to such beliefs. It
seems probable that all of these factors, and more, are at work in our racialized politics and that
effective political action in this domain will have to deal with all of them. How much weight
should be given to each, and in which circumstances, is not likely an issue capable of definitive
empirical resolution. At any event, in the present context I am content to leave indeterminate the
extent to which our racialized politics can be improved by a politics of memory, though the argu-
ment would lose its point if that extent were not considerable. My characterization of these
opposing positions is indebted to Derrick Darby’s discussion in “Can Rights Combat Racial
Oppression?” (unpublished).
47. Not completely, of course, as the hubbub around The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein
and Charles Murphy (New York: Free Press, 1994) indicates. Kinder and Sanders report a study
in which about 75 percent of whites rejected the proposition that blacks come from a biologically
inferior race, against about 10 percent who agreed with it. Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color,
326, n. 60. To be sure, biological racism also typically includes psychological and cultural ste-
reotypes, but unlike ethical racism, it takes them to be biologically rooted and thus largely
unalterable.
48. See Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color, chap. 5, and the survey results summed up in
the table on 107.
49. Ibid. A similar divide is reported by Sears, Sidanius, and Bobo in RacializedPolitics, 9-
16, drawing upon the extensive survey analyses of Howard Schuman et al. in Racial Attitudes in
America: Trends and Interpretations, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1997). As I shall explain below, the view that discrimination has been largely overcome and that
persistent inequalities are due not to white racism but to black culture and character figures
importantly in the lower level of white support for government programs meant to address them.
This means, of course, that the politics of memory, however necessary it may be to gaining
enduring majority support for race-targeted reforms, is by no means sufficient. Politically con-
tested interpretations of the present and of its relation to the past are very important factors in the
politics of race, and a more complete discussion would have to take them into account; here I
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address the latter only briefly and the former not at all. So I do not claim to be offering a complete
picture, nor do I suppose that past and present can be kept apart either in theory or in practice. I
am merely focusing analytically on the past so that I can develop the neglected dimension of pub-
lic memory. I am grateful to Derrick Darby for pressing this point.
50. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1997), 57.
51. The importance of preexisting cultural beliefs in enabling and constraining the definition
of problems, their causes, and their solutions is stressed by social mobilization theorists who use
a frame approach. See, for instance, David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame
Resonance, and Participant mobilization,” International Social Movement Research 1 (1988):
197-217.
52. See, for instance, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth
(New York: Routledge, 1995).
53. King, Separate andUnequal, chap. 6.
54. Nicholas Lehmann, The PromisedLand(New York: Vintage, 1992), 6.
55. See Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
56. The social-psychological approach to racial resentment of Kinder and Sanders does in
fact stress its affective as well as its cognitive side, and it does recognize the at times considerable
independence of affects from beliefs. In particular, negative feelings toward blacks sometimes
operate covertly in relation to stated beliefs and sometimes even unconsciously in relation to
conscious awareness of prejudice.
57. Robert Gooding-Williams has objected in conversation that in focusing on ignorance and
false belief, my argument gives too much weight to the cognitive dimensions of racism. That is
indeed my admittedly one-sided emphasis here—though the politics of memory, as I understand
it, does include public rites, representations, and activities of many different sorts, all of which
have their emotional sides. But my choice of argumentative emphasis should not be construed as
theoretically calling into question the importance either of perceived interests or of deeply
entrenched prejudices and other less “cognitive” factors. I want only to argue that historical con-
sciousnessandhistorical enlightenment alsohave animportant role to playin the politics ofrace.
58. In “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” Robert Gooding-Williams stresses the
importance of “race-conscious multicultural education” in fostering the capacity for democratic
deliberation in a society like ours.
59. See, for instance, the discussion of the “tools of memory making” in South Africa in
S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past (Cape Town, South Africa: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998).
60. See Roy L. Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and
Reparations for Human Injustice (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
61. This has led a number of theorists and activists to advocate class-based rather than race-
based policies to deal with urban poverty. But public support for such policies is also affected by
their racial subtext and the willingness of political opponents to exploit it. So it is difficult to see
how an effective political response to urban poverty could be mounted and sustained while
ignoring the operations of racial resentment. Reparations payments to fund a “Marshall Plan” for
urban ghettos are increasingly mentioned as another possible line of attack.
Thomas McCarthy is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is cur-
rently working on a book titled Difference and Development: Philosophical Reflections
on Race and Empire.
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