Charles Blow: Why Black Americans Should Migrate Back South

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: “The New York Times” op-ed columnist and author, Charles Blow, has had a new book. It’s called “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” It’s a roadmap for overturning white supremacy he says. He has moved to Atlanta, Georgia after living in New York for 25 years. And he is now proposing that other black American up north do the same, to boost their political power in key southern cities. Here’s our Hari Sreenivasan talking to him about why now and how it would work in practice.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Charles Blow, thanks for joining us. Majority of the book is outlining an idea that is not a thought experiment for you, you’re living it. Explain the proposition.

CHARLES BLOW, AUTHOR, “THE DEVIL YOU KNOW: A BLACK POWER MANIFESTO”: The proposition is simply to return to the places where you were majorities or large percentages of the population to consolidate political power. Before the migration, 90 percent of all black people lived in the American south. At the end of the Civil War, three southern states were majority black. Another three were within 4 percentage point of being majority black. Every southern state had large black populations. If black people had not migrated, which is a big if, and if there was still the passage of the civil rights legislation and the voting rights legislation, another big if, it is conceivable that black people today would have control of the 14 states, it’s taking control more electoral colleges than New York State and California combined. They — if they voted over that same period of where they vote today, they would not have been a Republican president in the last 50 years. That would mean that the Supreme Court would look completely differently. And I don’t think there’s a justice on it who was appointed over 50 years ago. This is a — you know, it would have been a major shift in power and it can still be. The only thing that black people have to do, and not even all of them have to do this, but large numbers have to do what smaller numbers are already doing, which is to return to the south.

SREENIVASAN: You want people to come back to the south in order to be able to exercise their political power better than what they have in the north, right?

BLOW: Absolutely. There is no real power, political power of the black people happened in the northern states.

SREENIVASAN: How is it possible? We’ve — and this is one of the premises of the migration out of the south was, you know what, it’s going to be better in the north. How is it that they don’t have political power in New York or in California or in Minnesota?

BLOW: Because they’re all deluded. So, the black percentage of California is about 5 percent. Black percent of New York is about 15 percent, same in Illinois. So, you are not going to deliver a state. You may be (ph) added in a group when white people basically split down in the middle. But you can’t delivery a state on your own. You can’t elect a senator on your own. New York has never had a black senator. New York — black New Yorkers have never deliberately (INAUDIBLE). It’s still going to be blue whether black people are there or not. And that make — and that is what New York City having 2 million black people in it. More black people than any other city in America. And yet, they can’t produce, right? So, you — they can’t elect a black governor. There’s only been one black governor and that was because he was lieutenant governor when the (INAUDIBLE) governor got on the prostitution scandal. No black senators. The last — too many people have been seated up. We’ve only had one black mayor in the entire system in the City of New York and that was 30 years ago. And behind him came Rudy Giuliani whose tactics — who use racist tactics Michael Bloomberg who was a champion at stopping things.

SREENIVASAN: You know, at the surface when someone looks at an idea like this they’re going to say, well, this is sort of the new Garvey. Is he calling for black supremacy? Is he giving up on integration? Is this about self-segregation?

BLOW: Well, I would turn that glove inside out. For the last 90 years, every state in America except Hawaii has the majority white. No one says that that’s a problem for integration or diversity. Right now, as we speak, seven states in America are 90 plus percent white. Is that not white supremacy or white majority or overwhelming? Is that not a problem to diversity? There are 40 million black people. There are only 10 million people in the entire — if you collect all those people on 7 states together, it’s 10 million people. They’re four times as many black people in America than in those 7 states, but black people don’t — they control only Senate — black senator, two sets of seats were also — who is elected by a coalition with black people, with the majority. But how is that possible? Those people represent, what, about 3 percent of the American population but they control four senators and they are 90 plus percent white. People can’t ask me questions about whether or not this is a problem, about racial concentration and racial power until they deal with those 7 states.

SREENIVASAN: Well, let’s talk a little bit about sort of, let’s say, brass tacks, right. So, let’s say, ok, all right. I’m signing up. Now, I’m thinking to myself, what sort of incentives are there? What sort of economic opportunity is in the south? I mean, do we have — have we kind of frozen our idea of what the south is because one of the hesitations of people have is, I don’t want to go to the south. Well, it’s more racist there. There’s less jobs there, et cetera. You’ve been diving into the data for all your research. What did you find?

BLOW: Well, Forbes has a list, I think, every year. You know, I think it was 2018 (INAUDIBLE) book. Places where the black middleclass is thriving (ph), half of that list are cities in the south when researchers looked look at where black owned businesses are most concentrated. The number one region for that is the southeast. When you look at real gains in medium family income, the south ranks the top of that list on and on and on. The black middle class is actually thriving in the south. The other thing is about racism. Well, I ask people at the project implicit which studies implicit bias, there’s probably (ph) been like hundreds of thousands online. Hence, I’ve asked them to cut their data, just show me racial bias, what they track is empty black pro white biases. Show me those biases by region and by race, very simple request. So, it was surprising even then. There was no difference in the amount of racial bias among white people from the south and those in the north and those in the Midwest, none.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there’s a quote your book that says, the supposed egalitarianism of northern cities is more veneer than core doctrine. It is flimsy disguise for racism and white supremacy that divergence from its southern counterparts only in style, not substance. Explained that.

BLOW: Well, when I look at the militarizing of the police, that is a northern and western city phenomenon, the supposedly liberal cities, right. That you got the swat team from California because they were responding in part to the Black Panthers. That was the first swat team. If I look at stop and frisk, that didn’t start in Greensboro or Birmingham or Jackson, Mississippi or Little Rock, Arkansas, that starts at New York, that’s order (ph) to California and Los Angeles and Chicago. If I look at every police department right now that is under a consent decree with the Department of Justice because they have misbehaved and have violated people’s civil rights, only two of those are in the south. All the rest are in northern and western cities. The data — I don’t understand why people don’t actually look at the data. When I look — you know, people look at incarceration rate, massacres was a huge issue for a lot of African-Americans. They always point to the south and say they incarcerate a lot of people. Yes, but they also incarcerate a lot of white people. What you have to do is look at it and say, of the number of black people that you have, what percentage of those do you incarcerate? And when you do it per capita, the summon (ph) states rarely even rank. Vermont is at the top of that list for black men.

SREENIVASAN: You brought up Vermont, that’s interesting. In the book, you point out that Vermont is the result today of a rather drastic and short migration that began there. Not dissimilar to what you’re talking about, really, from an article in Playboy.

BLOW: Absolutely. And that was part of my inspiration for this book because it worked so well. During the Vietnam War, early 70’s, young hippies were liberals. I wouldn’t call every — all of hippie but a lot of them were. That was not a derogatory term. Were protesting against the war, protesting against the way Nixon was executing work. But he was not budging. He was actually — he was — he continued to execute it the way he wanted to do. Two young Yale law students wrote an article in the Yale Review that said, you know, you can — (INAUDIBLE) this way you can have a kind of arm rest of revolution but you can do the same we call radical federalism, which is to basically go — move to a small state and take it over. One to smaller states, Vermont, it doesn’t take as many people, move. And it’s kind of languish (ph). Therefore, a few months until a writer picked it up and wrote an article in Playboy. And yes, people used to replete with the articles because there were a lot of great writers writing in Playboy. And he wrote an article under the title, “Taking Over Vermont.” And that, thousands — tens of thousands of young white hippies grabbed their things and moved to Vermont. And some of the (INAUDIBLE) had places, they slept in a field, they created communes. But they transformed Vermont from one of the most — more conservative states in the union to now it is the most — one of the most liberal states in America. It is where you get a Bernie Sanders. It is where Barack Obama gets his highest percentage of the white vote in 2008. They basically changed Vermont from New Hampshire into Vermont. And that is the power of migration.

SREENIVASAN: We are not in the era of Jim Crow. We’ve repealed many of those rules. Why do we need now this influx of black Americans to move to these places and what impact will that have? Isn’t the system working?

BLOW: It’s not working. We have not repealed those rules. We’ve forced the people who want the same rules to reinvent them in a more elegant form. We still have massive voter suppression, it’s just in a different form. It’s not a poll tatt or it’s not a literacy test, but it is, you know, all of the things that is happening right now in Georgia in response to the fact that black people, majority of that coalition to deliver to state for Democrats. And now, they’re introducing a bill at the bill in the state legislature here in Georgia trying to say, get rid of no reason, early voting or require true forms of variety. Anything that they can do to make it more difficult for people to cast a ballot is exactly what they’re going to do. And they know and I know and you know that that disproportionately affects black people, brown people, college students and the elderly who are poor. It is not that these things have gone away. And as long as you have state legislatures that are hostile to you, and that exist some — in many ways across the country, hostile to, you’ll never be free.

SREENIVASAN: Charles, you’re also making, right now, in your last answer, the case against moving to Atlanta or to Georgia saying, hey, just — even if we have more black people here, it doesn’t mean racism stops, that doesn’t mean attempts to disenfranchise may stop.

BLOW: I don’t think that’s an argument against that at all. If — I’m not promising anybody utopia. If racial majorities and control of state power guaranteed utopias, every white person in America would be prospering because for the last 90 years they have controlled the majority of the states like Hawaii. But they’re not all prospering. There’s still crime. There’s still poverty. There’s still income inequality. There’s still food insecurity. Those seven states that I mentioned to you, 90-plus percent white, surely all those white people are prospering. No, they’re not. They’re human beings. They have problems that are competent to human condition. If you go to the south and by chance have a black majority, you will also still have the problems that a competent human condition. There’s no such thing as human — as a utopia when human beings are involved. It is just that in the aggregate, people who don’t have to live under white supremacy are going to do better than those who do. And this is the only way for you to not have a space in this country, legally, constitutionally, where you do not have to live under a system of white supremacy.

SREENIVASAN: Look, are you assuming that all black people will vote the same way? I mean, look, look at the elections in the last two cycles. I mean, you had large numbers of Hispanics, Asians, black Americans vote for Trump.

BLOW: I am not assuming that at all. And what I am very careful in saying and want to be very clear about in all of my interviews is black power is not a political party power. I am not advocating black power for Democrats or so that Democrats will have more of an advantage or a black (INAUDIBLE) Republicans can get it for the vote. Black power is for black people to not live under white supremacy whatever form that takes. You know, 100 years ago, if you talked into any room in America, majority of the black people in that room would have been Republicans. Democrats were the party of the races, clear and simple, no doubt about it, the Klan and everything else. But the Democratic Party reformed itself, change itself. And black people, over the course of a century, forgave the fact that they were the party of the Klan. You could have a future in which the Republican Party no longer sees a viable path to national election and then starts to court black people the same way that the Democratic Party started to do. I don’t know what the future holds on the political party strip threat. Right now, the Republican Party, my opinion, courts the races, which is a nonstarter for black people. They just can’t get with it. But I don’t know if that would be the future. But black power to exist separately from a total alignment with any particular party.

SREENIVASAN: So, lay out the distinctions between your proposal which you say is based on anti-racism, pro blackness. How is that distinct from black supremacy? How is the entire idea not racist on its face?

BLOW: Again, I go back to this idea, like how is it that no one is saying that we — this is white supremacy that you have every single state, except Hawaii that’s majority white right now. And that is not a fluke, that is by design. People will run out of those states where they were from by white terror. They had majorities there. There was — there were times when Native Americans were majorities of what would become states and they were chased west. There was a time when some of the western states had must larger percentages of Hispanic people, that was kind of their territory. So, the idea that we, the American people, by design chased people using white terror into spaces where now none of them have — or majority of the spaces where they would have been majorities anyway, that seems to be not a problem. But allocating that black people might one day be one percentage point over 50 percent in a state, not 90-plus percent like those seven white states (INAUDIBLE). Just 1 percent of a 50, that freaks people out. We have to interrogate why that sounds like a problem to people.

SREENIVASAN: Charles Blow, book is called “The Devil You Know,” thanks so much for joining us.

BLOW: Thank you. I really appreciate it.