Adam Serwer

You know, I think the voting rights act thing is one of the most depressing and demoralizing developments in American politics.

I think, you know, watching things like Tennessee elections

redistrict its only black district out of existence, you know, days essentially after the ruling, you know, it's very hard to think about all the people who live through, you know, the 1960s and the civil rights movement who are now seeing all that work, all that sacrifice being undone by a court that is equal parts naive and malicious.

Well, Coe Patrick's an interesting figure because, you know, he starts off as a hardcore segregationist, as a guy who is opposed to Brown v. Board, opposed to the Civil Rights Act, opposed to the Voting Rights Act, makes an affirmative case that, you know, racial discrimination is one of the central liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and that American society falls apart without it.

And then, you know, he becomes a much more mainstream figure.

He becomes a newspaper columnist for Newsday and he starts abandoning sort of the overt segregation.

And, you know, people have a lot of his personal correspondence.

So his rationalizations about this are fairly mercenary and clear.

At one point, this didn't make it into the article, but at one point, he wants to publish a piece arguing that Black people are biologically and permanently inferior.

And then the 15th Street Baptist Church bombing happens.

And so he's like, well, this might not be a good time to publish this.

So he doesn't publish it.

And then the editor comes back later, and he's like, do you want to publish this now that everything's sort of blown over?

Yeah.

And he says, well, I can't really afford to be associated with those you use right now.

Because his career is going well, and so he doesn't want to be an open Klansman anymore.

And in some of his correspondence, he says, I'm now a big convert to colorblindness.

I'm like the Catholic who's more Catholic than the Pope.

And the reason he becomes a convert to colorblindness is not that his views have fundamentally changed.

It's just that he realizes through this expression of sort of reactionary colorblindness, the idea that there's an equivalence between attempts to remedy racism and racism itself.