Unknown Author - Jerzy Sobieraj. Collisions of Conflict. Studies in American History and Culture, 1820-1920 (2015).pdf

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INTERDISCIPLINARY POLITICAL AND CULTURAL JOURNAL, Vol. 17, No. 1/2015
161–165, DOI: 10.1515/ ipcj-2015-0012
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Jerzy sobieraj.
Collisions of Conflict. Studies in American
History and Culture, 1820-1920.
Peter lang, Frankfurt am
Main: 2014. pp. 149.
Jerzy Sobieraj’s newest book
Collisions of Conflict
explores the
turbulent decades of the second part of the 19
th
century and early
20
th
century, which saw an escalation of many national and social
conflicts in the USA: between the North and the South, between
the burgeoning West and the East, and between slave-owners and
Abolitionists�½ The study’s particular focus is on the Civil War and
subsequent inter-racial tensions in the South of the United States�½
The monograph shows the history of that region from the run-up to
the Civil War to the Reconstruction and segregation period�½ It looks
back at theses difficult years from the vantage point of our times
when despite Barak Obama’s first black presidency, race relations
in the US are, to say the least, difficult.
In his introduction Prof�½ Sobieraj mentions some of these dif-
ficulties, such as the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to
strike down Section Four of the Voting Rights Act, giving federal
protection to minority voters in states with a track record in dis-
crimination�½ But this is just one of many challenges that African
Americans (and other minorities) have to face today�½ These minori-
ties are not only at a greater risk of being disenfranchised by their
states as a result of declaring Section Four of VRA unconstitution-
al�½ Their voting rights are constantly being taken away from them
in many other ways�½ For example, the US is one of few democratic
states where a person’s civic rights can be taken away for a lifetime
if the person committed a crime�½ It is estimated that 8% of black
population has lost the right to vote as a result of felony conviction,
as compared to 2% on other racial groups�½
The persistent racial inequality is more clearly seen in crime
rates and prison rates�½ Blacks make up 13% of the population but
[161]
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Book Reviews
are more than half of America’s homicide victims and culprits�½ Of
2�½3 million people in American penitentiaries, 1 million are blacks�½
Every 1 in 3 black males is expected to go to prison in his lifetime,
and the policing practices make it very easy for black people to
find themselves at the receiving end of the law. One of them is
“racial profiling” – the practice of drawing suspicion from the skin
colour, which means that black teenagers and males are more of-
ten detained by the Police and searched�½ Though it is publically
denied, this practice is quite widespread�½ To cap it all, Police bru-
tality, which has, for some time now, made headlines all over the
world, makes racial profiling particularly dangerous phenomenon,
as many black individuals, not only men but also women and ado-
lescents, are killed by the Police in the aftermath of intervention�½
Another source of concern for the black community are the so-called
“stand your ground laws” that expand protections for citizens who
kill strangers because they feel threatened�½ The most famous case
when these laws were applied was when white George Zimmerman
killed the 17-year-old, unarmed black boy Trayvon Martin and was
acquitted�½ After many cases of black people being shot down by the
Police during routine patrols, Martin’s case was particularly shock-
ing because the death-dealing person was an untrained civilian
seeing danger where there was none�½
The twin sister of racism is economic deprivation, the so-called
opportunity gap and wealth gap�½ While the black middle class has
been steadily growing since the times described in Prof�½ Sobieraj’s
book, financial stability still remains out of the reach of a large sec-
tor of black population�½ Since mid-1970s the employment rate for
blacks has been roughly double the employment rate for whites�½
Also, to be wealthy and middle class means two different things
for blacks and whites�½ According to the special issue of
Time
pub-
lished in the 50
th
anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington,
the median wealth of black families in which the head of house-
hold graduated from a college is less than median wealth of a white
family, in which the head of the household is a college drop-out�½
In consequence 85% of black and Latino households have a net
worth that fall below the median wealth for white households�½
Time
concludes: “closing that gap would require black and Latino house-
holds to save 100% of their incomes for 3 consecutive years�½” The
minorities were the hardest struck by the economic crisis that co-
incided with the beginning of Obama’s presidency�½ From 2007 to
2010, as the Urban Institute reported, black families’ wealth fell by
31% whereas white families wealth fell by 11%�½ The unemployment
Book Reviews
163
rates also grew twice as fast for blacks than for whites�½ This led
Eddie Glaude Jr�½ the chair of center for African American Studies at
Princeton University to comment wryly that the crisis was “a black
great Depression�½”
Prof�½ Sobieraj’s study also disputes the view that Barak Obama’s
presidency is the “realization of colour blind America” and “the ful-
fillment of the dream of equality for all people, irrespective of their
race�½” In his contrary view, this presidency did not put an end to
the civil-rights battles or racial conflicts. These conflicts, as he ar-
gues, cannot be properly understood without dissecting the history
of the Civil War, Reconstruction and segregation�½
Chapter I of Prof�½ Sobieraj’s study: “The Seeds of War: from
Missouri Compromise to Secession” presents divergent views on
the true reason of the conflict. It focuses, among other things,
on the contemporary debates on whether slavery was indeed the
root cause of the war�½ It also sheds light of the growth of Southern
separatism sometimes also described as Southern nationalism�½ It
touches upon well known facts, such as Missouri Compromise, the
Fugitive Slave Law, the Nebraska Bill and the “bleeding Kansas”
episode, all of which were milestones irrevocably leading to the out-
break of the Civil War�½
Chapter II – “Fighting Slavery: Various Shades of Abolitionism”
– discusses the slave economy as a form of early capitalist enter-
prise, and presents the development of the Abolitionists movement,
which alerted many Americans to the evil of this “peculiar institu-
tion�½” This chapter deals mostly with white Abolitionists, radicals
and gradualists, and various journals they brought out�½ Only one
paragraph mentions black activists such as Frederic Douglass, an
advisor to President Lincoln on black matters�½ Chapter III, “Lincoln
and the Civil War,” narrates the history of the conflict and Lincoln’s
leadership, which was crucial in bringing the war to conclusion�½
This part of the history of the United States is rather well know,
therefore I think that the remaining chapters dealing with the ad-
verse consequences of the war, are far more engaging�½ Chapter V
– “The Invisible Empire: the Short Career of the First Ku Klux Klan
and its Rebirth,” and Chapter VI – “Years of Shame: Lynching in
the United States from 1880s to the Great War,” describe the most
tragic and shameful events in the history of racial relations in the
South�½ The early history of the Klan, initially set up as a organiza-
tion for white entertainment at the expense of superstitious black
population, is not so well-known and therefore quite gripping�½ The
same is true about Prof�½ Sobieraj’s discussion about gendered
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Book Reviews
character of Southern nationalism and racism, which put white
women on the pedestal, exaggerated the sexual prowess of black
men and often justified acts of lynching and terror committed on
black men with the perpetrators’ desire to “protect the honour” of
their wives and sisters�½ The following chapter presents in detail
horrendous impact of this pernicious ideology on the KKK terrorist
campaign�½ It also describes the anti-lynching crusade�½ This chapter
contains also some interesting information on the American eugen-
ics movement and its political implementation by Southern politi-
cians, who used it as a justification for limiting the rights of the
newly freed black population�½
The final chapter of the study titled “‘Wounded in the House of
Friends’: Segregation and in the Republic” continues the theme of
pseudo-sciences and scientific racism as instrumental in introduc-
ing segregation, which as the author contends, was nothing less
than “neo-slavery�½” He discusses segregationist laws and social
practices and uses examples from Southern fiction of that period
(Thomas Dixon) to illustrate attitudes of the Southern whites�½ He
shows southern commitment to the idea of white supremacy and
the fear of africanization through giving the same civic rights to
freedmen, miscegenation (sexual relations between people from dif-
ferent races) and interracial marriage�½ This chapter contains a won-
derfully revealing comment of a black woman who explained what
Jim Crow laws meant for black people in the South: “Jim Crow
was a terrible thing�½ It was a man making people work to build up
a country and saying: ‘Don’t you dare touch what you’ve built!”
This well written book would be even more interesting if it con-
tained more black insights to these “collisions of conflict.” The au-
thor very rarely mentions black contributions to military and social
struggles�½ There were many black activists, Abolitionist, and in-
tellectuals who deserve to be remembered in any narration about
this most calamitous war in the American history, the horrific ex-
perience of the repression and continual violence in the Jim Crow
era�½ Black people did not go gently into that good night and their
resistance, in my opinion, is particularly worth chronicling, as,
more often than not, it has been lost to the modern memory�½ As
the black oppression fades from the view in this study, the reader
gets the impression that black people were only passive recipients
of violence wreaked by or help provided by the white population�½
Thus the study seems to bear out the truth encapsulated in one
of its mottos (borrowed form J�½ Toynbee) – “history is something
unpleasant that happens to other people�½” Since black agency and
Book Reviews
165
struggles have been sidelined in this book, one may feel that the
Civil War, Reconstruction and segregation were exclusively “un-
pleasant” things that “happened to” African Americans�½
Another minor shortcoming of the book is its Postscriptum,
which contains war biographies of canonical authors (again mostly
white) and an overview of the fiction on the topic of the Civil War.
While I appreciated earlier passages about fictional rendering of the
war that illustrated the prevalent mood in the South and provided
a more personal outlook on the war, Reconstruction and segrega-
tion than the official history, this final section of the study does
not seem to be equally effective�½ The interesting thing about it is
the synthesis of the recurrent character types and tropes in the
war and post-war fiction. What does not really work well is the
catalogue of biographies, which seem to be a bit irrelevant�½ This
really compelling historical narrative would benefit greatly, I think,
if Prof. Sobieraj finished it with a discussion of how these pain-
ful chapters have born upon the civil-rights struggles of the 20
th
century and on the contemporary situation of African Americans�½
We can only hope, that Prof�½ Sobieraj, who has excellent narrative
skills, will address some of these issues in his next monograph,
which as this study announces is under way�½

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