The Third Reconstruction

July 15, 2022
A noted scholar of political history offers a hopeful vision of a future in which Black Americans take their places as full, equal citizens of the U.S. Joseph, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas, provocatively links the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to the anti-Black violence of the Reconstruction era, a time of entrenched Jim Crow policies, which, he reminds readers, was not confined to the South. That first Reconstruction period was followed by a second, in his reckoning, which expanded from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The third, which began with the election of Barack Obama, is "the most volatile yet." By Joseph's account, the White nationalism espoused by Donald Trump and those rioters hinges on two lies: "The first is that Black people are not human beings. The second is that the first lie never happened." One need not be a far right-winger to embrace "redemptionist" rhetoric that imposes school segregation in the name of "parental choice" and voter suppression in the name of election security. Of course, the Trumpian backlash against the Obama years was grounded in "white nostalgia over the nation's regime of racial slavery and grievance over that system's demise." Each era of reconstruction has brought renewed violence by those who insist on White supremacy, most recently as exemplified by the police murder of George Floyd and countless other Black Americans. Through joint actions with feminists, gay rights activists, other oppressed minorities, and allies, Black people have been able to assert their rights anew with the Black Lives Matter movement, bringing new vigor to the dismantling of redemptionist racism and resistance against "racial segregation, exploitation, and death"--a cause that, the author argues, can reach its goals within our lifetime. Joseph successfully links episodes in the struggle for civil rights to form a continuum of injustice and resolution.

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August 5, 2022

Historian Joseph (Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, LBJ Sch. of Public Affairs at Univ. of Texas at Austin; The Sword and the Shield) argues that the years between President Obama's 2008 election and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests constitute a period of progress toward racial equity, comparable to the Reconstruction after the Civil War . He theorizes that since the end of the Civil War, the United States has been involved in a struggle of reconstruction versus redemption policies. Advocates of reconstruction fight for a true multiracial democracy, while redemption adherents uphold white supremacy. The author illustrates this dichotomy by analyzing events during the Obama administration and comparing them to similar episodes during what he calls "the first Reconstruction" (the post-Civil War period from 1865 to 1877) and "the second Reconstruction" (the civil rights movement, from 1954 to 1968). These events encompass themes of citizenship, dignity, and leadership in the Black community, as well as the backlash to racial equity progress with the election of President Trump. VERDICT Joseph centers the work of Black women and activists, while demonstrating that the current backlash to racial equity progress has deep roots in history. A compelling analysis of current events.--Rebekah Kati

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Starred review from August 22, 2022
University of Texas historian Joseph (The Sword and the Shield) tracks in this impassioned and immersive chronicle America’s “unhappy pattern” of racial progress sparking political backlash from the 1860s to the present day. Contending that the post–Civil War Reconstruction era constituted the country’s “second founding,” Joseph examines how the “moral failure” of Jim Crow set the stage for two more recent periods of intense fighting over racial equality: the Second Reconstruction, comprised of the decades between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and the Third Reconstruction, which was set in motion by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. According to Joseph, the distance between Obama’s “racial optimism” and the “melancholy reality of Black life” gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and its vision of “radical Black dignity” influenced by Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and others. Amid the incisive historical analysis of battles between “reconstructionists” pushing for a true multiracial democracy and “redemptionists” seeking to “reinscribe slavery’s power relations,” Joseph interweaves moving reflections on his experiences growing up in Jamaica, Queens in the 1980s. The result is an essential reframing of America’s past and present. Photos.