From Obama to Jan. 6: America’s Third Reconstruction

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: We turn now to a fresh look at a recent American history. Our next guest is offering a new interpretation of the years between Barack Obama’s election in 2008 and last year’s attack on the Capitol. In his latest book, historian Peniel Joseph calls the period, “The Third Reconstruction”. And he argues that it amounts to a new struggle for black dignity and citizenship in America. Here he is speaking with Michel Martin.

(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Professor Peniel Joseph, thank you so much for talking with us.

PENIEL E. JOSEPH, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR, “THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION”: Thanks for having me, Michel.

MARTIN: So, walk me through it. Your book — your new book, focuses on the period between the historical election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the coup attempt on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This is a period that you called “The Third Reconstruction”, that’s the title of your book. So, I’m going to ask you, just briefly as you can to walk me through what was the first and what was the second and why is this the third?

JOSEPH: The first reconstruction is from 1865 to 1898 and it’s really a 33- year period after racial slavery where we see the reconstruction amendments 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that end racial slavery, provide birthright citizenship for all Americans. And provide black men with voting suffrage which later will be extended to white women in 1920 and black women in 1965. So, that first reconstruction sees the highs of historically black colleges and universities, black churches, black women and men as leaders. And the laws of the Klan, the laws of black codes, and convict systems and sheer cropping. So, on some levels, like W. E. B. Du Bois says, the negro has his and her moment in the sun before being relegated back to a kind of slavery by another name. The second reconstruction is from 1954 to 1968 the Brown Supreme Court desegregation decision all the way through the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And in between, we see Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, and certainly the urban rebellions of the 1960s that lead to black power. And this third reconstruction really is pivoted around four different points. One, is the rise of Barack Obama in 2007-2008. Two, is the rise of Black Lives Matter, 1.0, after the murder of Trayvon Martin. And the third is the rise of MAGA and Donald Trump, Make America Great Again, and this backlash to the politics of reconstruction. And then finally, 2020, which sees really a juxtaposition, Michel. You see enormous positives with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. More white people protesting for racial justice than ever in the history of the republic. And then we see the disparate treatment between black and whites and Latinx and AAPI because of the pandemic. We see the racial backlash when we think about the election of 2020. And then finally, we see the January 6th insurrection and a coup attempt. That’s really predicating on this notion that black people committed voter fraud. And that idea of voter fraud goes back to the first reconstruction. We’ve heard about allegation of black people committing voter fraud ever since they earned the right to vote through their participation in the civil war and as being abolitionists.

MARTIN: You know what’s fascinating about your work is that you don’t go — come right out and say this. But you basically imply, you were not at all surprised by January 6th. This kind of white ethnonationalist backlash in a way you’re saying, really could’ve been predicted. That this is kind of part of the cycle of history in this country. Tell me why. So, am I right? You really weren’t surprised? And tell me why you weren’t.

JOSEPH: Well, I think it’s because these are unhappy patterns in American history. And so, their — history does not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes. And when we think about these unhappy patterns. We always face these juxtapositions ever since the first reconstruction where we have supporters of multiracial democracy, including whites who are in solidarity with black people. And then we have advocates of white supremacy who really fashion themselves as redeeming the south. They call themselves redemptionists. And for a long time after the first reconstruction, for really almost about 70 years, the Redeemer South is the south of the Jim Crow. It’s the south of lynching. It’s the south of black women and black people being marginalized, sexually assaulted. And that being codified in public policy. Black women receive hysterectomies that are not voluntary. So, when we think about that period, there’s always this pattern of progress but also followed by backlash. The second reconstruction, we see it where there is racial progress, voting rights, civil rights, but followed by racial backlash. This third reconstruction, Obama in certain ways is not really just the beginning of a period, he’s an end of a kind of racial consensus that occurred between 1963 in 2013. And I think one of the most fascinating parts of this third reconstruction was that relationship between Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter. Where there’s, on some levels, deep admiration for each other. On another, deep wariness of each other. Because Obama believes in a very specific vision and version of American exceptionalism. That the movement for black lives led by black women challenged to the president’s face, telling him that he was too idealistic. That they were — Brittany Packnett tells him and organized it the first time she was several teargassed was in Ferguson demonstrating nonviolently. So, what’s so interesting is that Obama provides us a conception of citizenship from above. Barack, Michelle Obama, Sasha, Malia, which is really beautiful and inspiring. But BLM provides us a conception of dignity from below. And these are the people who Derek Bell called the faces of the bottom of the well. People who we often forget. Who are led by black women, by at times queer black women. People who are on the margins of society who gave Obama a different perception of what was happening in places where hope and change was not enough to affect and impact their lives.

MARTIN: It’s fascinating you say that Obama — the election of Barack Obama wasn’t the beginning of an era because that is really the way it was understood and described, especially by — I would say, the traditional legacy media. What you’re saying this was actually the end of something. Why do you say that?

JOSEPH: The and — you know, Barack Obama is a very interesting figure. When we look at the period of 1963 to 2013, Michel, we can see that as a 50-year interregnum of racial justice consensus in the United States. And the specific dates are June 11, 1963, which is John F. Kennedy’s racial justice speech. All the way to June 25, 2013, which is the Shelby V. Holder decision where the Supreme Court really takes back Section V, the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act which really provided the teeth and muscle of the Voting Rights Act. And that 50-year interregnum really provides the context, but not just the rise of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. But really the rise of people of color and women in politics, in business, in society. We’ve never seen as much people of color and women have as much wealth and power and access to elite institutions than during that period of time. What’s so fascinating about Barack Obama is that people think his election in 2008 means an unfettered expansion of that period. When in fact, his election really, in certain ways, hastens its demise because people are so upset. Including Supreme Court justices. The entire Republican Party. But grassroots racial terrorists are so upset because what Obama finally does is really show that the idea of the dehumanization of black people had always been an illusion. The idea that black people weren’t ready for power, ready for leadership. Michelle Obama is very important here too. Michelle Obama defies all stereotypes about black women. Black women’s worth, their dignity, their beauty, and their exceptional abilities.

MARTIN: It’s interesting. You said that she’s almost as triggering to racists as — or even perhaps, more so, triggering to the racists than President Obama is. Why is that?

JOSEPH: Historically, we’ve really dehumanized black women. We’ve set up a world where black women legally could not be sexually assaulted. They could be raped. They could not sit on juries. They were not valued in the same way as their white counterparts. And so, Michelle Obama’s really defiant brilliance becomes this implicit and explicit repudiation. Before we had Justice Ketanji Jackson, we had Michelle Obama as the first lady of the United States. She becomes the face of women all over the world. And in that way, she really repudiates this redemptionist vision of black women as mommy’s (ph), as stereotypes, as Jezebels. The way in which black women were portrayed, for example, in “Gone with the Wind”. She repudiates all of that. And that could — that is going to paradoxically both inspire, really billions of people around the world, but in our country, produced a backlash for people who want to, again, go back to the past. The lost cause. This ideology. And this narrative, really a story about ourselves that says reconstruction was a bad thing. That the Klan were heroes who were trying to save virtuous white womanhood. This is all a lie but it really has informed public policy. It’s informed the way in which we do policing in this country. It’s informed segregation in public schools and in neighborhoods. So, Michelle and Barack Obama really pushed back against that. And so, even though we thought we were getting a new beginning during this third reconstruction, alongside of the Supreme Court Shelby V. Holder decision, we see the end of a kind of racial justice consensus that had really been hard-fought. Had been fought during the first reconstruction. Culminates during the second reconstruction. But paradoxically, that era is closed during the third reconstruction. A politics of backlash that it’s not inspired by Donald Trump, but Donald Trump becomes the main mobilizer of a backlash politics that is really over 150 years old in this country.

MARTIN: You’ve made a point several times of take — being very specific about highlighting the roles of African-American women in these movements, in these black power movements, both historically and in the current moment. And in fact, you’ve dedicated the book to your mother. And I’m just wondering why is this so important to you. You’ve been very adamant about that in our conversation as well as in your book. Tell me why that’s so important to you at this moment to highlight the contributions of women?

JOSEPH: You know, I have been in the black feminist space since even before starting formal school because of my mother, Germaine Joseph. And I’d write about being on picket lines and being influenced by her. She was my first teacher and historian. She taught me about Haitian history and black women in Haiti and what they did and how, at times, they written of the story. People focused on men like Toussaint L’Ouverture that focused on Dessalines. And I always took that to heart. And by the time I went to graduate school I was fortunate enough to be able to study under Sonia Sanchez, the brilliant iconic poet in human rights activist. And I studied black feminism there. And I was blown away by really studying the works of black women, Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Frances Harper. And the way in which black women’s theorizing has expanded notions of democracy, notions of citizenship and dignity. And too often, by not placing their story as central and as co-architects of these movements for black liberation, we really lose one half of the story, and we get caught up in patriarchal swashbuckling notions of liberation and freedom and citizenship and dignity. I think the reason why Barack Obama became president is that he told us one story about us. It’s a beautiful story in 2004 and 2008 when it wasn’t a complete story. I think black women tell us this story about ourselves that includes black men, that includes white and AAPI, indigenous and queer people. But I think it’s a story that’s very expansive that allows us to come closer to a unifying vision of American democracy. James Baldwin said, we could achieve our country when we finally stop lying about the past. And that dehumanization of black people in the past. Really no other group has been as dehumanized in a way as black women. And if we stop lying about that past and we allow the way in which they tell their stories and their narratives to inform how we think about the present and future, I think we’re going to be in a much better place to think about achieving our country and building that beloved community that Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin, and all of us are aspiring towards.

MARTIN: So, Professor Joseph, what I think I hear you describing in this book is a struggle over what story about ourselves do Americans believe, right? Which is the narrative that Americans actually embrace about our history and ourselves, right? And interesting because you start the book with one narrative. You start the book talking about the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. And you say that, publicly, his passing irrevocably shattered myths of racial progress in a country that had elected its first black president less than a dozen years earlier. Which is a pretty sour message. But then you conclude the book a couple hundred pages later by saying that, I believe that the struggle for black dignity and citizenship can be achieved in our lifetime. So, why do you say that? What convinces you of that?

JOSEPH: Well, it’s the work of the reconstructionists and the black activists, black women and men, and queer folks, who really transformed and galvanized this country, not just in 2020, but over the last 150 years. We need to tell the truth about the country, of the beautiful and the ugly parts too. The tragic and the glorious parts of that history. And if we tell that story, we can actually find much more common ground because we’re able to empathize with each other’s highs and lows. And we’re able to actually, in that sense, from a more honest perspective try to fix what is wrong and the shortcomings in the country. So really, the story that I believe is the story that we haven’t yet fully embraced yet. The story that 1619 Project contributes to. That Angela Davis, when she’s writing about black women during slavery from a jail cell in 1971 contributes to. And that’s a story about us that is a much more complicated version than we ever have learned in K through 12 than we’re ever honest and open enough to discuss which these other. Because these eras of reconstruction are the areas where culturally we come and we determine a history, a narrative, a story about ourselves that leads the kind of rough consensus where we say, OK, we believe this and we are going to institutionalize this. The last time we did this during the second reconstruction, we came to a 50-year consensus that actually produced not just Michelle and Barack Obama, that’s how we have all the successful black and brown, and AAPI folks, and women in the country. Because we told ourselves a different story about democracy. A story that all those people who have been excluded could be in this new story. They could go to Harvard University. They could become news anchors and business people. They could become president of the United States. We’ve lost that over this last decade.

MARTIN: Professor Peniel Joseph, thank you so much for talking with us today.

JOSEPH: Thank you, Michelle. I enjoyed it.