News Release:
COLONIAL-ERA
PATERNALISM STILL HURTS BLACKS, SAYS PROFESSOR MALONE IN NEW BOOK ON
RACE AND VOTING
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Contacts:
Cara Halstead Cea, Pace University, (914)906-9680,
chalstead@pace.edu
Sarah De Vos, Senior Marketing Manager, Routledge, 212-216-7824,
sarah.devos@taylorandfrancis.com
Review copies may be requested from Sarah De Vos, above.
NEW YORK, NY October 2007 – “The mental, moral, and psychological characteristics
found in blacks [are] to be overcome only under the watchful gaze of
paternalistic whites.”
That paternalistic view may be more enlightened than thinking blacks are
“essentially different from, and thereby inherently inferior to,
whites.” But despite the Civil Rights movement, the condescending
blinders of racial paternalism have dominated “the logic of integration
… from the 1960’s right up to the present,” argues Christopher Malone, a
political scientist who is an associate professor at Pace University, in
a new book.
“Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the
Antebellum North” (Routledge, 2007) puts an x-ray to the broader topic
of the denial of basic rights by looking into the ways blacks obtained
and lost the vote in four Northern states in the years before the Civil
War.
Malone concludes that unequal treatment for blacks comes from a mix of
racial belief systems, “racial conflict as an outgrowth of rapid
economic and demographic change,” and “political actors [who] … prey on
this racial conflict by arousing poorer white working classes.” The
racial belief system still in operation, he finds, is paternalism, and
it goes back further than most Americans may realize, to the early days
of the republic.
Little-known struggles. Malone knows both North and South, having grown
up in New Orleans and earned his PhD at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. A popular Pace teacher, he also is director of
the Pforzheimer Honors College at Pace’s downtown New York campus.
His book begins with the 2006 reauthorization of the landmark Voting
Rights Act first passed in 1965. His narrative then takes the reader
back in time by connecting that legislation to the little-known
struggles for African-Americans’ right to vote in the antebellum North.
Northerners may be surprised by his evidence that paternalism, dominant
in New York State in the Revolutionary period, had receded there by the
1820s. Alexander Hamilton and his cohorts had been “willing to take a
chance that blacks possessed the mental capabilities for many of the
responsibilities of citizenship.” But at a state Constitutional
Convention of 1821, one Samuel Young exemplified a widespread
“transformation” when he bluntly said “The minds of blacks are not
competent to vote. They are too degraded to estimate the value, or
exercise with fidelity and discretion this important right.”
Joining scholars who refute the notion that expansion of the franchise
in the U.S. has been steady and “inevitable,” Malone writes: “Nothing is
ever inevitable when it comes to the basic rights in American
democracy.”
In an epilogue, Malone returns to contemporary racial politics and
argues that the unfinished quality of the “Two Reconstructions” – the
post- Civil War era and the modern civil rights movement – can be better
understood by grasping what happened for African Americans in the early
years of the Republic.
Historic blue blood on modern ideas. In a pre-publication review Leon
Wynter, author of “American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End
of White America,” notes that “The party names have evolved …. and even
rotated over 300 years, but Malone still draws a straight sociopolitical
line between the North’s original blue-blood, slave-holding
revolutionaries of 1776 and today’s race politics of paternalism, on
both sides of the ideological fence.”
Adds Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and
Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of numerous books on
social movements and voting in the United States, “Malone shows that the
basic democratic issue of who shall vote was intimately entwined with
the role of race in the economy, in partisan competition, and ultimately
in political culture.”
For 101 years Pace University has combined exceptional academics with
professional experiences and the advantages of the New York metropolitan
area. A private university, Pace has campuses in New York City and
Westchester County, New York, enrolling more than 13,500 students in
bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in its Dyson College of Arts
and Sciences, Lienhard School of Nursing, Lubin School of Business,
School of Education, School of Law, and Seidenberg School of Computer
Science and Information Systems. www.pace.edu.
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