They would be governor: Race-baiting and CRT in Nebraska
Nebraska state Capitol. Photo credit: Kietryn Zychal NOISE
By Randy Essex
Randy Essex grew up in Beatrice, Nebraska, graduating from high school there and earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He’s a journalist whose career of more than 40 years has spanned every U.S. time zone. He was executive editor of the Omaha World-Herald from January 2020 until February 2022.
If we believe TV ads in the Nebraska governor’s race, the need to suppress critical race theory (CRT) is just about the most important issue facing the state.
Two years ago, very few Nebraskans — and hardly any Americans — had even heard of CRT, which lived in rarified academic circles. Candidates might have focused on property taxes, our costly worst-in-the-nation prison crowding, maybe meatpacking concentration and ranchers’ low share of high retail beef prices.
But instead, Chuck Herbster and Jim Pillen today are working from the latest edition of the Republican playbook that brought us George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads. This is race-baiting, defined by Britannica as “the unfair use of statements about race to try to influence the actions or attitudes of a particular group of people.”
It works on a population with either little exposure or hostility to diversity, manufacturing outrage about something that’s poorly understood and can be made to sound scary.
I’m not suggesting that Nebraskans as a group are racist. In overwhelmingly white areas of the state — most of it, including where I grew up — people don’t think much about racial issues. That’s part of why race politics works: It is a human trait to be wary of things with which we aren’t familiar, and fear can motivate voters.
I’m reminded of the joke from some years ago about a made-up TV show called “Texas Survivor.” Teams would cross the state in Toyotas with bumper stickers reading, “I’m queer and Ann Richards sent me to take your guns.” True or not, it would get folks riled up.
The noise about CRT is like that, but not funny.
Many Nebraskans tend to believe that racism has somehow been eradicated — or maybe never really existed in our state — where many of us grew up with the myth that Nebraska has always been apart from that nastiness of the cities and the South.
We generally don’t know that interracial marriage was illegal here until 1963. We don’t know that slaves were brought to Nebraska, held here and pursued if they fled. We may know that the Omaha Public Schools wouldn’t hire baseball Hall of Famer Bob Gibson’s brother, a World War II veteran and college graduate, or that black people were barred from home ownership in many areas of the city or that the federal government drew lines around poor and diverse neighborhoods that blocked home loans and investment that would enable families to build wealth.
The argument against critical race theory is an argument that this history has no influence on opportunity today. That with such overt elements of civic discrimination legally banned for the last 50 or 60 years, the decades of squelched opportunity preceding have no remaining effect. That more subtly discriminatory policies and practices do not still exist in our statutes, regulations or collective psyche. And that we should not even examine the implications.
Yet one need look no further than the Omaha World-Herald’s excellent report March 6 on racial prison incarceration rates to see proof points of CRT right here, right now. When a state has areas with a higher black male incarceration rate than South Central Los Angeles or Detroit, it does not mean Omaha has the nation’s baddest black men. It speaks, instead, to the rules we have made and how they are applied. Even today.
Definitions are important here.
Critical race theory says that racism is not merely a character flaw of some individuals, but is embedded in our present laws, policies and social assumptions, harmful residue of an unenlightened past. That’s the actual, academic definition, which also notes that race is a social construct, not a real biological marker. While people of all shades have genetic variations, under our skin we are the same stuff. Our race is human.
Some conservatives, Gov. Pete Ricketts, Herbster and Pillen among them, peddle a squishy definition made up in the past couple of years to push back against anti-racism efforts that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd. This seeks to make CRT an umbrella term for anything suggesting we might benefit as a society by being more sensitized and working harder to root out even subtle discrimination lingering in our assumptions, institutions and laws. They cry that it is Marxism, that its advocates want white people to feel ashamed, that it calls for seeing skin color.
This pushback is a repeating element of American history. Horrible things happen to people of color, causing them to rise up and inspiring white people to take up their cause, at least temporarily.
Slavery tore our nation apart and led to constitutional amendments meant to ban discrimination. As power returned to the states, the backlash to Reconstruction spurred Jim Crow. Segregation remained, including in many ways in much of the North.
1960s urban rioting led to the Kerner Commission report of 1968 warning that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” It added, “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
Again, America made some progress, but the backlash came in things like Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, articulated by his strategist Kevin Phillips in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
After the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King beating, backlash to the subsequent rioting came this way from Vice President Dan Quayle: “I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw is directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society.” (Definitely not from anger over the police beating of King.) And from Ron Paul: “Order was only restored in LA when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began.”
After Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis cop in May 2020, business and civic leaders around the country promised real change, this time for sure. That led, in part, to some workplace antiracism training, some of which was hurried and poorly executed. And today, we have a concerted campaign against what reactionaries call CRT — a politically calculated response to sloppy training and excesses of the overwoke left’s cries such as “defund the police.”
These CRT critics pervert Martin Luther King Jr.’s aspirational dream for a time when “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” (By the way, King did not say he dreamed that we would not see skin color, but that it would not matter.)
While we have made progress through the decades, we are not there.
The World-Herald look at Nebraska’s incarceration rates is but one case in point:
· Nebraska is the only state to increase its black incarceration rate since 2006.
· Seven North Omaha census tracts have higher rates of incarceration among men born 1978–83 than any in south-central Los Angeles. Four of those Omaha areas had rates in the top four-tenths of 1% among 73,000 census tracts nationally.
· Nebraska’s Black prison incarceration rate was nearly 50% higher than the U.S. Black rate. Overall, the rate is 10th highest among the states.
· It also is seventh highest for Natives, 11th for Hispanics and 15th for Asians.
· Nebraska’s Black incarceration rate is 9.5 times its rate for white people, the nation’s sixth-widest disparity.
· Black people arrested in Omaha are far more likely to go to prison than white people arrested, according to a University of Nebraska at Omaha study.
· And this: “Like poverty, North Omaha incarceration has become intergenerational. It’s not uncommon to see two or even three generations of a family imprisoned.”
And here we find ourselves at the open pages of academic CRT.
1937 Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) Map of Omaha
If we overlay Omaha maps showing incarceration rates with federal redlining maps in effect from the 1930s to 1969, we see that these areas where U.S. policy stifled investment correlate strongly to today’s areas of high incarceration rates.
As the Kerner Commission said, “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Still today.
In the Nebraska Legislature, a half-billion-dollar plan to build a recreational lake that will enrich developers is more likely to pass than a proposal to make transformational investment in North Omaha.
What do you think the chances are that Nebraska’s legislators will hear the Omaha police chief telling them he supports the North Omaha investments?
“I’d rather have 1,000 jobs strategically placed in the right part of our city to affect poverty,” Todd Schmaderer said in testimony. “That would reduce violent crime far more than 1,000 more police officers.”
Discrimination is not cured. Studies around the country today show that Black people still face it in home lending and assessments after they break through and own homes.
“I’d rather have 1,000 jobs strategically placed in the right part of our city to affect poverty. That would reduce violent crime far more than 1,000 more police officers.”
CRT would argue that current lending discrimination flows from redlining which flowed from Jim Crow which flowed from slavery. It sets up poverty and incarceration across generations, blocking not just opportunity and wealth accumulation, but undermining family structure.
Does that mean any Nebraskan today is responsible for that history? Does that mean, as CRT critics complain, that white people should be ashamed because of the past? It does not. But we are responsible for our conduct in the present and how we go forward. Shame might be appropriate if we disingenuously seek to block continued steps toward a a truly equal society.
We should strengthen families, root out discrimination in laws, provide education and opportunity. And we have tried, though are too easily discouraged and distracted.
Suppressing discussion of these issues, refusing to believe that they even exist, will not make them go away. That will not make them better. It will not help us move beyond judging children based on the color their skin so they may seize opportunity based on the content of their character.
It will not help us fulfill our state motto: Equality before the law. And in our hearts.
