Vol. 14 No. 6 (June 2004), pp.393-395

THE POLITICAL USE OF RACIAL NARRATIVES:  SCHOOL DESEGREGATION IN MOBILE, ALABAMA, 1954-97, by Richard A. Pride.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.  320 pp.  Cloth $39.95.  ISBN: 0-252-02766-3. 

Reviewed by Keith J. Bybee, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.  Email: kjbybee@maxwell.syr.edu

It often seems that the politics of race in the United States has not produced a great deal of mutual understanding.  Opposing activists frequently argue right past one another, drawing sharply contradictory lessons from the same set of political and social conditions.  Among the welter of competing claims, there appears to be little common ground.

In his new book, Richard A. Pride takes the welter of racial narratives as his topic.  His argument is empirically focused.  Although he touches on the broader civil rights movement and the rise of neoconservatism, Pride for the most part concentrates his attention on school board politics in Mobile, Alabama.  His argument is also theoretically ambitious.  Pride presents his historical chronicle of the school board as evidence for the proposition that politics is, at its core, a contest over meaning rather than a clash between interests.

The historical study of school board politics comprises the bulk of Pride’s book.  His argument begins in the mid-1950s and relies on a mix of newspaper articles, public documents, and personal interviews.  Reviewing school board debates (and the many lawsuits to which these debates led), Pride carefully outlines the narratives used to rationalize the various tactics of white resistance.  Pride presents the stories of white conservatives who battled desegregation as paternalistic stewards of the existing social order as well as the stories of white radicals who premised their opposition on claims of black inferiority.  Pride also documents the stories of black and white liberals, who countered conservative and radical arguments by decrying the injustice of Jim Crow segregation and insisting on the benefits that integration held for all races. 

As Pride’s study moves into the 1970s and 1980s, he focuses his attention on Dan Alexander, a charismatic school board member (and, later, a convicted felon) who re-framed school board debates in terms of individual merit and hard work.  Unlike the white radicals and white conservatives who preceded him, Alexander did not speak in terms of racial superiority or of paternalism.  Instead, he spoke of the need to provide students with a quality education that would prepare them to compete in the marketplace.  Competency – of students and of teachers – was the critical factor for Alexander, regardless of the racial composition in any given school.  According to Pride, Alexander used the trope of individual effort (drawn from America’s foundational myths of self-reliance and open opportunity) not only to supercede the earlier tales of [*394] conservatives and radicals, but also to outflank the dwindling number of liberals who remained committed to racial integration.  Indeed, Pride argues that Alexander’s narrative resonated with large portions of the black community who were dissatisfied with the costs of desegregation and simply wished to preserve their own neighborhood schools.  Pride finds that Alexander’s narrative legacy continued to inform school board politics through the 1990s.

Pride’s blow-by-blow account of school board politics provides a good historical perspective on the development of political stories about race.  In particular, Pride’s study is useful for demonstrating how many of the current narratives are actually quite old.  Some of these narratives fall out of favor because they make factual predictions that prove to be untrue (white radicals, for example, predicted sustained resistance to desegregation and turned out to be wrong).   But, as Pride argues, all the narratives of race remain available for use.  In today’s Mobile, Alexander’s story, blaming racial disparities on the failure of individual effort, is ascendant, but “[o]ther explanations can emerge and become dominant over time because storytellers are always shifting their rhetoric for tactical advantage” (p.257).

Pride’s historical study does have its weaknesses.  Overall Pride devotes little space to the assessment of racial narratives, in part because he wishes to invite readers to participate in the process of meaning-making and “to judge for themselves which story has more power” (p.19).  The result is that Pride’s reading of each racial narrative can be quite thin.  Pride does provide a broader perspective on racial narratives in a concluding chapter featuring results from several public opinion polls.  Although the poll data confirm some of Pride’s claims about the development of racial narratives, they also raise questions about Pride’s historical story.  For example, the poll data show a significant, persistent gap between white and back opinion, a gap that is underplayed in Pride’s historical portrayal of broad convergence around Alexander’s views.  The end result is that the public opinion chapter feels tacked onto the rest of the book.

As I mentioned at the outset, Pride’s objectives are not solely historical.  Pride also wants to argue that politics in general is largely a matter of competing narrative frameworks.  The “prevailing behavioral approach in political science” misses the significance of stories and storytellers because of  its “narrow foci” on “rational decision making, formal institutions, and legal arenas, using supposedly scientific methods and discourse” (p.11).   Pride argues that politics is more a matter of interpretation.  It is the meaning assigned to interests by storytellers, and not interests in themselves, that drives politics.  “Empirical reality does discipline narrative accounts,” Pride writes, “but all too often the real world is ambiguous, and that is the situation in which interpretation matters the most” (p.19).  Drawing on the work of John Gaventa (Gaventa 1980), Pride argues that the ultimate power of stories is not only to change policy outcomes and to set the policy agenda, but also to capture the minds of individuals to the degree that particular actions become unthinkable. [*395]

Pride’s call for a story-based understanding of politics is forcefully stated, but, to my mind, his theoretical ambitions are not fully realized.  Pride suggests that public policy changes as a result of shifting racial narratives (pp.19, 230).   Yet Pride does not systematically demonstrate the linkage between narrative frame and policy result.  Indeed, Pride argues that Alexander’s neoconservative narrative was highly influential, even though Alexander lost virtually every policy battle he fought on the school board (p.214).  It is unclear how Pride can advocate the political power of stories and, at the same time, decouple policy outcomes from one of the most powerful stories he encounters.   It seems to me that if one accepts Pride’s specific claim that other storytellers “could not, with any force, impeach the values that [Alexander] espoused or counter the stories that he told” (p.148), then Alexander’s string of policy defeats casts doubt on the political power of narrative.  By contrast, if one wishes to assert the power of narrative in the face of Alexander’s failures, then one would have to ascribe greater influence to the stories told by Alexander’s adversaries than Pride does.

REFERENCES:

Gaventa, John. 1980.  POWER AND POWERLESSNESS:  QUIESCENCE AND REBELLION IN AN APPALACHIAN VALLEY.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Copyright 2004 by the author, Keith J. Bybee.