Historian Vincent Harding Foreshadowed --- in 2011 --- Social Conditions that Escalated to Impact the 2016 Election

In a 2011 interview on the radio program On Being hosted by Krista Tippett, historian Vincent Harding (1931-2014) identified among “the white community of America” a growing “uncertainty” over their place in an economy and society undergoing a dramatic transformation away from the America of their youth --- the era of their parents and grand-parents. He described “the anxiety, the fear, the anger” that was growing out of the disintegration resulting from these changes.

The uncertainty that he described in 2011 manifested itself at the ballot box in 2016 by playing an important role in the powerful rejection by a segment of American society of the current direction of the country, a reaction that went beyond voting for or against specific policies or plans. Though the results of the election should not be simplistically reduced to any single, isolated cause, Harding’s words do seem startlingly prescient, anticipating some of the principal conclusions being drawn in the flurry of analyses that the election outcome has unleashed.

His comments, which I have reproduced below, came in response to a question from Tippett about the changing face of hope in the United States. I have included Tippett’s specific question and Harding’s response to it as lead-in to give the context to his subsequent comments on the white community in America, which come toward the end, and which I have highlighted in italics.

The interview (“Vincent Harding --- Is America Possible?” can be found at the On Being website here. Tippett’s question and Harding’s reply can be found starting at the 59:13 mark of the unedited version of the interview. The transcript on the web-site is of the edited, final version of the interview; below I have added in the parts of his comments that did not make the cut into the edited version, showing them in [brackets].

MS. TIPPETT: I was listening to the BBC in recent weeks, and they’re watching us from afar. They were interviewing a journalist about this moment in American history, which seems very tumultuous and the question was, “Is it really more violent and more despairing than it’s been before or does this happen repeatedly?” And the comparison was made with the 1960s.

They said, look, there was a lot of social turmoil then. There were assassinations, right? I mean, many assassinations. But this journalist said — and I just want to know what you think — he said that he thought the difference between the 1960s and now was that even though there was incredible tumult and violence, it was at the very same time a period of intense hope, and people could see that they were moving towards goals. And that that’s missing now. What do you think about that analysis?

DR. HARDING: Hmm. Krista, I think that that is such a complicated kind of issue that I can only pick at it and tease it out and play with it in the best sense of play. I think that what I see now is the fact that all over this country, wherever I go, and, of course, where I go tends to be sort of self-selective because I am most often going into situations where people are operating out of a sense of hope and possibility, where in their local situations, whether it be Detroit, or Atlanta, or a campus someplace, or a church community in Philadelphia, that there are women and men and young people who are operating out of hope. [That they really believe in the possibilities that come to them from their own connection to the history of hope, as it were, and to the vision that they have of who they are and who they could be.]

My sense is that, in the ‘60s, there was probably a larger kind of canopy of hope that we could see, and we could identify, and that people could name and focus on. Now, we are in particular spots, locations, sometimes seemingly isolated. But I feel that there are points, focal situations, where that is still available and where people are operating from that.

So I think that it is not simply the matter of hope or no hope.

I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before. 

[Up to now, uncertainty was the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color, that that was our realm. But now, for all kinds of political, economic reasons, for all kinds of psychological reasons, that uncertainty, and unknowingness, is permeating what was the dominant, so-called, society. That breaking apart is for me more likely the source of the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the unwillingness to give in, the need to have something that they can hold on to and say, this is the way and it's got to be our way or we will all die.]

And I think that that’s the place that we are in, and that’s even more the reason why we’ve got to figure out what was King talking about when he was seeing the possibility of a beloved community and recognized that, maybe, for some of us, that cannot come until some of us realize that we must give up what we thought was only ours [in order for all of us to find new possibilities] in the building of a beloved nation. Can there be a beloved nation? Why don’t we try and see?

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W.E.B. Du Bois, author of the classic work of the black experience in the post-civil war era The Souls of Black Folk (my review here), had a similar comment on this in 1935.

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