Carpetbagger • noun • (kahr-pit-bag-er)
Definition: Brave Americans who relocate to a community and work to create racial and gender equality.
Origin: American English
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One of the most beguiling problems of American society is our propensity to demonize those who work for progress and racial equality.
As a nation that claims to celebrate freedom, America strangely does not empower those who actually champion freedom. We celebrate business leaders and companies far more often than freedom fighters and civil rights champions. America may posthumously celebrate these icons of freedom, but during their lifetime, we burden them with unnecessary obstacles and inundate them with death threats. Many of America’s civil rights leaders have been taken away from us far too soon because our ethnocidal society felt threatened enough to silence their voices.
Additionally, America’s corrupted language works to redefine these champions of freedom as “terrorists” and “criminals.” By defining a good action with a word denoting a bad action, America encourages Americans to stop good things from happening.
In the modern context, we see this dynamic when Black Americans are called “thugs” and “criminals” as they exercise their basic rights and protest peacefully. Likewise, when white Americans storm the Capitol and inflict violence to prevent equality, America is far more likely to describe them using endearing and respectable language such as “patriots” and “protesters”
This corruption of language and demonization of those who fight for racial equality is not a new development and instead has long been America’s tragic norm. The word carpetbagger is one example of this linguistic corruption.
Carpetbaggers in the 1860s
Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, many northern Republicans relocated to the South to implement Reconstruction. Northerners aspired to start businesses, run for elected office, and to help integrate Black Americans into the post-slavery South. Carpetbaggers are bold American progressives who uprooted their lives to create a more equitable America, but America, unfortunately, does not celebrate carpetbaggers. (During Reconstruction, the Republican Party were the progressives, and the Democrats were the conservatives.)
From the perspective of the defeated Confederates, carpetbaggers were anything but heroes. Southerners considered carpetbaggers to be an invading horde that wanted to remake the South and destroy their way of life. Southerners ridiculed and demonized carpetbaggers, one of which was by giving them the very name “carpetbagger.”
Many northerners carried their belongings in large carpet bags on their move to the South, and these former Confederates turned this innocuous observation into a pejorative for demonizing America’s champions of racial equality. To this day, America’s accepted definition of a carpetbagger derives from this Confederate perspective.
During Reconstruction, former Confederates formed ethnocidal white militias such as the Ku Klux Klan where one of their main objectives was to destroy the carpetbagger government. When America discusses the KKK and similar racist militias, our social discourse often overlooks their clear political agenda. The KKK terrorizes people of color in order to sustain white supremacy because political control has always been a key component of their terrorist agenda. Carpetbaggers who ran for elected office and encouraged Black people to vote were primary targets of the KKK.
During the 12 years of Reconstruction, carpetbaggers and Black Americans would come together to build schools, create jobs for Black Americans, and eventually form a powerful political alliance. Hundreds of Black Americans won elected office at the local, state, and national level, and they worked alongside carpetbaggers.
However, former Confederates also worked to undermine the progress forged by carpetbaggers and Black Americans by cultivating a narrative of carpetbagger incompetence and corruption. Southern Democrat politicians would engage in bad faith with Republican carpetbaggers and Black Americans, and then blame the Republicans for the failures of Reconstruction.
America has allowed the ethnocider to control the narrative, which creates a regressive status quo that demonizes those who champion progress. Today, a carpetbagger is mistakenly perceived as a corrupt political outsider who moves into an area to claim political power. They are portrayed as dangerous, untrustworthy outsiders rather than brave progressives who are trying to make society better.
Carpetbaggers Today
When America thinks about a modern-day carpetbagger, one name that almost comes instantly to mind is Hillary Clinton.
When Clinton decided to run for the Senate in 2000, it was common for both Democrats and Republicans to call her a carpetbagger since she had only recently taken up residency in New York state as Bill Clinton’s presidency came to a close.
Politicians from across the political divide perceived her as a corrupt politician who decided to claim New York residency to further a corrupt agenda. Clinton was defined as a carpetbagger according to the definition created by racist Confederates and domestic white terrorists.
However, this is not Clinton’s only connection to being a carpetbagger. Hillary Clinton was raised in Chicago and educated in New England; therefore she was from the North. After graduating from law school, she moved to Washington, D.C. and then to Arkansas in support of Bill’s political ambitions. When Bill won the presidency in 1992, she moved back to Washington, D.C.
In other words, Hillary Clinton was a Northerner who relocated to the South where the majority of her work as first lady of Arkansas was in support of gender and racial equality. Hillary is a modern-day carpetbagger, and after over 150 years of demonizing this iteration of American progressives, America loves to demonize Hillary Clinton.
As Hillary campaigned for the White House in 2008 and 2016, she also encountered the same obstacles of the carpetbaggers of Reconstruction. The most obvious obstacle was the relentless obstruction and bad faith from American conservatives. If a carpetbagger could win a former Confederate state then it would break the conservatives’ hold on political power. As in the 1860s, the political viability of today’s Republicans, or the past’s Democrats, depended on destroying carpetbaggers. Hillary Clinton has always been one of the Republican Party’s main targets for this very reason.
However, what is important to note is that Hillary’s and other carpetbaggers’ must also confront obstacles within their own party.
Firstly, Black voters when given the option between a Black candidate and a carpetbagger would support the Black candidate. They preferred to vote for a candidate who was already part of their community instead of one that was working to become a part of their community. Hillary encountered this obstacle in 2008 and 2016. In 2008, she lost the Black vote to Barack Obama, and in 2016, she could not convince enough Black voters to vote for her.
Secondly, northern progressives who have not relocated to the South often do not believe that carpetbaggers are progressive enough. Northern progressives have this opinion because they underestimate the scale of the South’s obstruction. As carpetbaggers attempt bipartisanship in the South in order to make any sort of progress, these compromises will often be perceived as a betrayal to progressive values. Hillary’s political decisions in the 1990s that were not controversial at the time where she found common ground with Republicans became reasons to question her progressive bona fides in 2016. This same dynamic helped end Reconstruction in the 1870s. Northern progressives complained about the alleged corruption of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, and the amount of work Reconstruction entailed. Northern Republicans wanted to focus on other issues instead of Reconstruction, so in 1877 they ended Reconstruction.
America aspires to be a beacon of hope, freedom, equality, and democracy for the world, but we will never become this place if we let racist voices shape our language. We currently have a language that demonizes progressives while also proclaiming the inevitability of progress.
In order to change this, we must reclaim the narrative, and a great way to start is by embracing the true meaning of carpetbagger. If America continues to demonize the Americans who champion equality and are willing to uproot their lives to change our society for the better, we will never be able to forge the equitable society we desperately need.
For this week, think about the potential carpetbaggers in your life, maybe someone you know personally or a public figure like Hillary, and write down some of your immediate thoughts and perceptions about this person.