The Devil You Know

September 1, 2020

In the face of ongoing violence and discrimination, New York Times Op-Ed columnist Blow (Fire Shut Up in My Bones) sets Black people a challenge: "The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves."

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January 1, 2021
The distinguished New York Times columnist offers a daring but utterly sensible plan to advance Black civil rights. The devil that Black Americans know all too well is racism, and, as Blow notes from the outset, it is not confined to the South: "Black people fled the horrors of the racist South for so-called liberal cities of the North and West, trading the devil they knew for the devil they didn't, only to come to the painful realization that the devil is the devil." Though George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis police was roundly protested--and with Whites often outnumbering Blacks at demonstrations around the country--soon after, Jacob Blake suffered the same fate, in Milwaukee, by bullets rather than asphyxiation, but with "no similar outpouring of outrage." What Blow calls "white liberal grievance" is useless in the face of a racist system that will not change. Or will it? Given that Georgia is at the crux of the 2020 presidential election and that Stacey Abrams' get-out-the-vote campaign brought in hundreds of thousands of voters to turn the state blue, Blow considers the state "proof of concept" that Black voters can indeed sway elections. He adds that the entire South could follow suit if only Blacks would reverse the path of the Great Migration to the North during Jim Crow and remake the electoral map by forming a solid majority. As he writes, if just half of Black residents elsewhere moved South, it would establish that majority from Louisiana all the way across the Southern heartland to South Carolina, "a contiguous band of Black power that would upend America's political calculus and exponentially increase Black political influence." It would also end White supremacy in that intransigent region. "The South now beckons as the North once did," he urges in his resounding conclusion. "The promise of real power is made manifest. Seize it. Migrate. Move." Valuable as a thought experiment alone but also an "actual plan" for effecting lasting political change.

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January 11, 2021
New York Times columnist Blow (Fire Shut Up in My Bones) proposes a radical path toward Black empowerment in this impassioned call for “as many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible” to return to the South “with moral and political intentionality.” This mass resettlement, Blow argues, would allow African Americans to “colonize and control the states they would have controlled if they had not fled them.” He paints a devastating picture of how white liberals have failed to match rhetorical support for Blacks with action, and buttresses his political arguments with painful personal experiences of racism, including the time a cop pulled a gun on his son, a student at Yale. But Blow doesn’t discuss potential challenges to his plan, including the likelihood of increased gerrymandering and voter suppression by Republican lawmakers to blunt the impact of such a demographic shift, nor does he offer much support for his belief that the Republican Party would be forced “to court not the Negrophobe, but the Negro” in order to win the presidency or control the Senate. Though Blow’s provocative call for action contains much food for thought, readers will wish for a more realistic way forward.