An Evening with Professor Carol Anderson: Framing Inequality through Race and Policy

good evening and welcome i'm paulette patterson dilworth vice president for diversity equity and inclusion here at the university of alabama at birmingham and on behalf of the office of diversity equity and inclusion i'd like to welcome you to an evening with professor carol anderson i promise you you're in for a treat um as you can see on the um slide here um we've shown several of the works that we plan to have a discussion with her about tonight so we invite you to sit back relax and feel free to answer questions in the q a as things come to your mind i'd also like to thank our sponsors for this evening which include the office of multicultural programs and services for students university of alabama at tuscaloosa the university of alabama at huntsville and the institute for human rights also i'd like to remind you that we have future events scheduled for november our upcoming events include implicit and explicit bias in science and medicine and our featured um speaker for that event will be dr mona fiod who is a professor and in our school of medicine and executive director of the minority health disparity center um we have the social justice movie club that is an ongoing event um you can register for this club and join the club by using the qr club that's actually on the website i don't think this one is active that's on the slide and then the final entry for november is the under representation of women in leadership and the speaker for that event will be dr cynthia warwick who is the current president of stillman college in tuscaloosa i want to um begin by into giving um you some introductory remarks about our speaker i think that you come to appreciate and unders and learn who she is once we get into our discussion here but professor anderson is the charles howard candler professor and chair of african american studies at emory university she is nationally recognized as a historian educator and author her research focuses on public policy particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race justice and equality in the u.s some of her most popular work at the moment includes one person no vote how voter suppression is destroying of democracy and is was long listed for the national book award and a finalist for the pen galbraith award for non-fiction she's also the author of white rage the unspoken truth of our racial divide which was the washington post notable book for 2016 and the national book critics circle award winner her most recent work the second focuses on illuminating the history and impact of the second amendment and how it was designed and how it has consistently been constructed to keep african americans powerless and vulnerable the second is neither a pro gun nor an anti-gun book the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights for african americans from from the 18th century when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own carry or use a firearm whatsoever until today with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the african-american population the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep african-americans powerless revealing that armed or unearned blackness uh unarmed blackness it would seem is the threat that must be neutralized and punished welcome professor anderson uh thank you so much for having me sure right we're so excited to have you i want to begin by sharing with you an email that i got from one of your followers here at uab because i think it sort of helps to set this tone for one of the reasons why we were so insisted on having you join us um this semester and the author of the letter writes my my i am so excited to see dr anderson is going to speak on october 19th i only wish it had been in person my goal is to meet her face to face someday white rage definitely gave me deep insight and has changed my perspective on some things as well as how i navigate life now and she had one request but she would have loved to met you in person but if that's not possible eventually she wants you to autograph her book so i thought i would put that there but i think it does help to frame how people have come to appreciate and understand your work and um i want to open our a discussion by posing a question because it sort of also when you do a google search on carol anderson um what comes up right away is the term white rage and as i thought about your book and what it means the op-ed that you wrote about the ferguson protest you said that ferguson isn't about black rage against cops but white rage against black progress what is white rage white rage is a series of policies that come into being whenever african americans make significant progress toward their citizenship rights and we see it you know so we often think of rage as being this violent thing but what i'm talking about is the kind of bureaucratic violence the kind of of policies that cloak themselves in legitimacy that systematically undermine black americans access to their voting rights to their equal rights to their citizenship rights and we see this in these key moments like coming out of the civil war we will get the black codes and then we get a series of supreme court decisions that undermine the 13th 14th and 15th amendments and that lead us into jim crow we see this in in the great migration where you have laws banning african americans from leaving like jacksonville florida to get a better job and i imagine the the the insanity of that that you cannot leave to get a better job you cannot leave this city and so i this is what i follow through the brown decision um where you get massive resistance where you get entire school districts closing down where you get the state passing laws to provide states funded tuition for white children to go to all white private schools while there is nothing for black children that's white rage the policies that are put in place to undermine african-american advancements and as an example i want to um sort of go back to the beginning of the book i think the the um there's a section the first section you title it kindling can you talk a little bit about kindling as a metaphor and why you chose to use that part to sort of introduce the construct absolutely part of it was really drawn by what i saw happening at ferguson when i saw the media just descend on ferguson going look at them burning up the quick trip look look at that black rage and so they were so focused in on the fire so focused in on the flames that they missed the kindling they missed all of the policies that had been put in place and put down on that black community that led to that fire when all we're paying attention to is the fire we never see the policies that created that flame and i wanted that those flames are the kindling right i mean so um i also noticed that when you started the discussion in white rage you started with the reconstruction era but you didn't talk about lincoln you talked about his successor andrew johnson can you help us understand why you picked johnson to focus on in terms of introducing this whole uh discussion about white rage yeah so lincoln's lincoln um and lincoln had his issues but johnson was the one who really began to to the implementation policy after the civil war and what johnson came up with johnson's whole thing was it was about reuniting the nation this wasn't about slavery this wasn't about black people um this wasn't about oh we've got some new citizens here this was about reuniting the nation and his and he was so anti-black that his policies really really drove that home from um being fined with the black codes um from providing amnesty to confederate leaders who then reassumed their position back in the government and then were passing laws and new constitutions like the one in louisiana that said this is and has ever will forever be a government made for white men and those of african descent can never be citizens i mean so when that is the constitution after the civil war and johnson is fine with it um and the violence that was raining down on black folks and his policies that that sanctioned that violence uh that all of that his his his framing of of what this war was about and his framing of who black people are made the the the made that incredible war like it didn't even happen right right so that that to me sounds very familiar in the 21st century in in many ways the the framing of black people the ways in which uh black life has been used as political pawns in a variety of elections all over the country um why is it that this message um seems to be lost on a lot of people you think that they don't they're not as like young people like to say we need to stay woke um but it seems to me that people are sleeping on this history and the parallels that we are now living in and that's why i write these books um that's why i am a historian um because i really believe if we understand what happened then we understand how we got here um when you have these myth histories um then these things don't make sense and it just it looks like it just springs up out of nowhere when in fact there is mark twain apocryphally said history may not repeat itself but it shall do rhyme so so listening to those rhymes paying attention to those rhymes we begin to see these patterns emerging and those patterns tell us so much about american society it tells us about who we value and who we don't it tells us about the way that we frame arguments so that the unpalatable becomes acceptable it tells us about how power is wielded and how it is systematically denied and yanked from people despite how hard they have fought and it tells us about the way that we craft these narratives these narratives that create heroes and villains and these narratives that are really flattened and two-dimensional so we don't understand what it takes to really struggle and when we don't understand what it takes to really fight for our humanity yeah that's i mean and and it's consistent you mentioned in um your response to the white rage um idea what white rage is about the way in which people are referring to black rage um which ultimately sort of speaks to the way in which blacks respond to oppression and things of that nature so this question basically um i'm wanting to sort of dig deeper into understanding when we think about protests and how that has sort of evolved over time there's been this large focus on looting and rioting when black people take to the streets right rather than the conditions which led to ongoing protests against the bureaucratic violence in their communities what are some of the examples that you've seen of this where the the focus has been on what is characterized as black looting as opposed to the problems that led to black people taking to the streets it's virtually in every instance um so it was in uh watts in 64. it was watson 65 you saw it in cleveland and detroit in 67 you saw it in newark in 67 um you you saw it in la um you saw it in in minneapolis um you saw it i mean it becomes again part of this narrative script that when black folks are protesting that this is violent this is looting so and again the the the data for instance that came out on the black lives matter protest showed that over 90 of those protests were peaceful but what you get is this narrative of how violent they were and so you get this false equivalency happening saying that the violence that we saw for instance um on january 6 that insurrection at the capitol that that needed to be balanced with the violence of the black lives matter protest except that was violent at the capitol black lives matter no no not at all and and we also know that that protest that happened in minneapolis um that the shooting at the police station that happened there that black lives matter that was a white nationalist who was trying to create the aura of black people being violent and shooting at the cops i mean so this is also part of what we what doesn't get factored into because america needs the narrative of black pathology in order to justify the kinds of policies that happen and so this is also what i'm bringing out in white rage the they need the narrative of of black thugs um to justify the war on drugs although the studies are clear that african americans use drugs the least of any racial or ethnic group in the united states except for marijuana when it's equal that you need the narrative of black folks just don't care about education you know black people don't care about school their parents don't care about school their kids don't care about school to justify the the under under um resourcing of black schools so so these narratives of black pathology are used then to justify the kind of white rage policies that consistently undermine um black achievement well there is um sort of a parallel there as well um you know i just talked to her minutes ago the idea that there are jobs that or um companies are having a challenge of hiring people and what you hear people in response to that say is people just don't want to work and especially the unspoken is that black people don't want jobs anymore that they don't want to work they'd rather sit and wait for government handouts and what i think has been missing from that is the there is an underlying reason as to people are not jumping at these jobs well you know and that narrative of black folks just don't want to work was one of the narratives used to justify slavery that you had to have the whip in order to force black people to work and it wasn't that folk black folks needed to be whipped to work it was that they needed to be paid uh you know just something real basic here um and and and and andrew johnson whom we spoke about earlier he was absolutely opposed to the civil rights act of 1866 because he's like this is just going to be a government handout and the freedmen's bureau um that bill as well because this is a government handoff they'll never learn how to work they'll always be dependent upon the government for a handout they just don't want to work so this narrative has been embedded into the american psyche so this they don't want to work is what we often hear when it comes to issues of welfare for instance and again we don't take into account the societal policies that that have created that structure and it's not don't want to work it is pay me and i think one of the things that covert 19 really did was folks were like i am not going out there unless i can be adequately protected and adequately paid absolutely that's i put that in the land of folks this ain't hard right absolutely and in fact there was a i can't remember one of the news stations that i was watching and they were interviewing people who were essentially they were asking would you take a job for ten dollars and some of the people were like absolutely not why should i go work for ten dollars when they have reaped the benefit of um government handouts just like everyone else and now they want to reopen their doors and offer people 10 an hour and in fact the working conditions haven't really improved a whole lot either i mean that was one of the arguments that a lot of the people that were talking to made about this whole idea and the i the idea that people of people going to work what they're suggesting is they want something to change if that happens you know so so so much of what people are asking for is so much what my books are about is about how do we get to a much more humane place a much more humane society where people can actually live into their greatness live into their humanity where they're not consistently assaulted um and having and being devalued and debased and having these policies demean them in such ways that it is designed to destroy instead of in power right absolutely and that's a good segue into my next question uh professor anderson um last year you answered an opinion in the guardian in response to everything happening around the death of george floyd and the title of the article was in 1919 the state failed to protect black americans a century later it is still failing what was happening in 1919 that drew such a parallel to 2020 1919 was red summer and red summers when you had african americans attacked because they dared to believe in democracy you had black soldiers coming back from the war to make the world safe for democracy and the response was oh no you are not safe in this democracy this is a white man's democracy and so for you to think you're equal we're going to put you back in your place and you saw just massive state violence raining down on black folk one of the ones that really was salient for me was elaine arkansas in spain arkansas you had black sharecroppers who had basically worked from kaint to kaint from when you can't see the sun until you can't see the sun again and they were paid nothing for that labor that yearly labor nothing and so they began to organize to form a labor union join a labor union and they knew that forming a labor union one of them said the white folks find out about this they will kill us and so they had centuries at the church where they were organizing and a group of of scouts from the landowners came up to break up the meeting there was gunfire exchanged and a white man was killed and another white man was wounded word got back to the town that black folks are out to kill all of the whites in phillips county and the lynch mobs descended on that black community black folks fought back and so two more white men were killed then the governor calls in the u.s army and the army comes in with machine guns used in france in the war and begins machine gunning down black people up to 800 or so were killed in this slaughter in elaine arkansas this is state-sponsored slaughter because black people have the audacity to believe they should be paid for their labor yeah so that story i mean that's one of those narratives of of african-american history like um oklahoma with black wall street um um the town of florida where they killed a whole community of black people okoye yeah yeah they're they are consistently associated with what i would characterize is power conceding nothing to nothing and ultimately the idea is that we can annihilate you before we give up our power to you i mean this is what you saw in wilmington north carolina in 1898 this is in ocoee florida in 1920 where black people had the audacity to try to vote and this is after the passage of the 19th amendment where they were trying to get black women registered to vote and the thing was what makes you think you can vote after this war to make the world safe for democracy we will kill you and what they had was an ethnic cleansing of a koi florida where they killed or ran out every black person there so that there was not a black person on the census for the next five or six decades this is the kind of state-sponsored state-sanctioned violence that happens to black people who dare to believe that they have the right to be american citizens and are wielding the rights of american citizens and so when i when i made that comparison it was looking at the way that the state was raining down violence on black people um and and and without accountability and and leaving black folks so when they said black lives matter this is what we were talking about right absolutely talking about yes absolutely minoritized communities gain the right to vote and then they are met with voter suppression which you've alluded to voter suppression tactics and laws in 2008 and 12 black people came out to vote in record numbers clearly the next election not so much and we've had the right and then we had the rise of donald trump four years later black people and other racially minoritized communities return to the polls in record numbers to elect biden unlike prior elections there is this outrage and accusation of stolen votes voting fraud led by um former president is voter fraud a real thing benjamin ginsberg who was an attorney for the republicans for four decades and who was mounting their challenges to a series of laws did an op-ed in the washington post in in 19 in 2020 where he said voter fraud is the republicans loch ness monster it's the thing that we say is there we keep hunting for it keep looking for it and we can't find it justin levitt who is a law professor out of california did a study he found from 2000 to 2014 out of 1 billion votes cast in the united states there were 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud 31 over 15 years out of 1 billion votes and so again what we have is this narrative of massive rampant voter fraud and listen where that narrative identifies the source of that fraud it's coming out of saint louis that's what they said in 2000 it's coming out of philadelphia it's coming out of atlanta it's coming out of detroit it's coming out of milwaukee so it is tying this this language of massive rampant voter fraud to cities that have sizable minority populations therefore linking criminality the theft of american democracy by these leeches who are in these cities by these minorities by these black people who are stealing our hard-earned democracy that's what we're seeing here and so it's the language that we saw that justified voter id laws it's the language that we see we're seeing now that's justifying all of these voter suppression laws that are coming across the nation after the 2020 election because black folks turned out to vote and so what this is saying is how dare you exercise your rights as american citizens how dare you act like you're american citizens with the right to vote we are going to erect these obstacles these barriers to make it even harder to put you back in your place it's the same language that we got in 1890 with the mississippi plan because mississippi saw that they had more african americans registered to vote than they had whites and they went it was like a scooby-doo moment or shaggy i mean there's something that's going to go real wrong here uh and afraid of what that black electoral power meant and so they set up in a in their constitution to get around the 15th amendment that says the state shall not abridge the right to vote on account of race color or previous condition of servitude so they wrote the guidelines for voting access to the ballot box that didn't mention we don't want black folks to vote but what they did was they used the the the legacies of slavery as the access to the ballot box and made those legacies the the iron door that was shut down access to black voters wow that's really powerful and it actually continues to to um illustrate the extent to which the powerful will go to great lengths to hold on to power include including annihilating a whole population of people a community of people um so you know one of the one of the conversations or many of the conversations that are happening sort of day-to-day with with people both you know in in public spaces and especially among i would argue african americans to the extent that this is something that they pay attention to and even conversations that i've had with friends there seems to be a level of um exhaustion associated associated with just you know the things that are happening from day to day how do you combat it what what should be our response you know what should we be doing um if anything to overcome come back fight back push back you know what should we be doing uh as a community to make sure that we don't lose the ground that we have right and that means that as tired as we are we can't be too tired um because and that's t-y-a-d i had i was tired by side uh because battle is ongoing and and if we seed c-e-d-e our power then that means that that ground will be seized uh it means that we mobilize it means that we organize it means that we talk with each other and among each other about what the real issues are that we don't get seduced by the language that that the narratives that keep flowing out there that make us think that this is hopeless the part of the way for instance voter suppression works is to make you think that the system is so rigged that there is nothing you can do about it so why bother that's the key element in voter suppression that's why that 2020 turnout it was like dang they stood in line for 11 hours dang i'm like yeah um and and and so it means that we continue to mobilize because if it's a takeoff on old bobby womack song if you think you're lonely now yes right wait till tonight if you think you're tired now [Music] wait until all of the access to to resources and power that you have have been stripped away because that's the goal when you lay this thing out when you see what's happening in the voting laws when you see what is happening in our school boards um when you in in the state legislature banning divisive topics like the teaching of slavery and jim crow as if slavery and jim crow aren't facts in american history um so if you think you're tired now whoo yeah yeah so so that brings up an interesting point i participated this summer in the critical race theory academy uh um with um dr crenshaw and others and i found that to be very eye-opening to the extent that um it does help to understand why the work that you've done the stories that you've sort of uncovered that have yet to a lot of people still don't know these histories um what is it that makes our white um friends folk families afraid to make sure that the those truths are told and i think that a lot of it has to do with the again these narratives that we tell ourselves the narratives that we tell ourselves about this nation the narratives that we tell ourselves about our families and what what what interrogating those narratives mean for our own identities for the the way that we see ourselves in this society so what do i mean by that if we tell ourselves you know my grandfather came here with nothing and he pulled himself up by his bootstraps he worked hard he was a god-fearing honest hard-working man loved his family went to work every day saved and built the amer and built this up so we could live the american dream now when that becomes your family narrative then having to interrogate that in terms of well what did it mean when there was a gi bill that black veterans could not access what your grandfather could in order to go to college and move from being in in the factory to being an engineer with a degree from stanford what did that mean in terms of changing his life what did it mean when you had the fha loans that redline black folks out of accessing these low low interest really accessible loans except for black people what does that when you had with i think i forget the figure but it was less than five percent of black folks were able to get these loans um after being more than 30 years in um in operation so what does that mean in terms of the wealth creation that that mean that that happens when you're able to buy these homes that then bring up this equity that you're able to tap into that equity that can then provide the cushion that your family needs to be able to go to college to be able to buy their first home what does that mean so when you begin to interrogate that narrative and you see the role of the state and its racist policies in terms of creating this disparate impact in terms of access to resources all of a sudden grandpa did not pull himself up by his bootstraps and so i think that part of that is what that means for our own personal narratives i think the other thing is that americans do this thing of really swaddling themselves in the flag and and and this this notion of the founding fathers as being this hallowed group um that that were visionary and that were fearless and took on the british and wow founded the greatest nation ever um and and they built this democracy now when you have that narrative to then ask what does it mean when you have slaveholders who are writing we hold these truths to be self-evident how do they deal with that paradox how do they deal with the paradox of a constitution that has the three fist clause in it that has the 20-year extension of the atlantic slave trade it has the fugitive slave clause in it how do you deal with that in a freedom document and and when you begin to ask those questions then all of a sudden that that narrative requires a depth of interrogation and a kind of cognitive dissonance jarring like whoo that that that becomes unsettling but i i look at it like therapy you got to tell the truth if you want to get well absolutely and saying that how how do you begin conversations with your white people that you consider to be white elements or accomplishes or people who want to be a part of disrupting those narratives um how do you start those conversations with with those people that are interested in and working through these issues i started with the history um maybe it's because i'm a historian uh but i started with the history because it's in that history that we understand why we're looking at the massive wealth disparity in the united states why we're looking at massive disparities in terms of health care outcomes infant mortality rates maternal mortality rates um educational attainment income looking at that seeing how that history works telling those stories begins to to to be this this entree into to asking the real deep hard questions and then being willing to do the work and not getting seduced by those flattened narratives that become the the the the cliches the the the hooks that real folks in where they're like okay yeah um so that's how i do it with the histories yeah i um watch the video one of the youtube videos where you were interviewed by um one i mean there are quite a few out there and i can't remember exactly but the thing that struck me was uh one of the comments that was underneath the way and the and the person who wrote the comment said something like i like the way um [Music] the professor uh does not use racism to threaten people um and i didn't really know how to interpret that so how do you interpret that um i interpret that as um it's like when i'm teaching my class and i say the issue is not white people the issue with white supremacy understand that we've got a coda that is operating that is corrosive that is doing damage we can make the choice not to participate in that operational piece that is is eroding democracy is eroding our self-worth and so that's i that's how i take that that this is about we have the power to envision a humane world we have the power not only to envision it but to enact it we have to take that power we have to seize that power and we have to to wield it in order to get there yeah and do you see and listen i want this question then we're going to move on to your latest book but this question do you see white rage being equally as dangerous to white people as it is to black people white rage is lethal and one of the things that i laid out in the book for instance is that the the white rage that came after brown that undercut access to quality education for all has done enormous damage to the united states so that as the u.s move from a a a manufacturing based economy to a knowledge-based economy when you have wide swaths of your population that have not had access to the education that they need in order to do this knowledge-based work the entire economy is is is quaking um that we see it in in terms of the war on drugs which is the war basically on black people as i said black folks do drugs the least except for marijuana where it's equal the us has spent a trillion dollars on the war on drugs to lock up most those who do drugs the least and you think about what that trillion could have meant in terms of infrastructure in terms of making uh high colleges affordable for all in terms of access to quality healthcare you can do a lot with a trillion dollars besides locking up folks most who do drugs the least yes yeah so let's let's um shift gears for a second um to talk about your latest book the second yes racing guns in a fatally unequal america uh that title is very very telling to me um but what encouraged you to explore the intersection of fractured citizenship and gun rights it was the killing of philando castile was the black man in minnesota where the police had pulled him over and asked to see his id a still following nra guidelines alerted the officer that he had a license to carry concealed weapon but he was reaching for his id as the police officer had asked the police officer immediately began shooting put i think five bullets into flank and again let's be clear castile wasn't brandishing the weapon he wasn't threatening the police officer he merely alerted the police officer that he had a gun so he was killed for mere possession of a of a legal licensed weapon and the nra went basically silent basically silent um after being pushed by african-american members in the nra they came out with a statement that well we believe that everyone should have the right to bear arms regardless of race uh sexual orientation religion yeah and it and again this is the same nra that went after after ruby ridge and after waco you know all federal officers jack booted government thugs um so this is an nra that has no problem in calling folk out but when a black man is killed for merely having a weapon virtual silence and pundits were asking well don't black people have second amendment rights and i thought that is a really good question because in my first book i dealt with human rights the second one decolonization and human rights and then white rage and then voting rights but i hadn't looked at these second amendment rights and so that's what i that's what got me on this pathway for this last book right so this question um sort of brings your motivation for for looking at the second amendment and gun violence to bear on um let me just read it because it's kind of long let's explore the cultural ethos and intersections between the meaning of a well-regulated militia fighting domestic tyranny and the policing of black people on one hand whites with guns are seen as patriotic and even deputized but there is an anti-blackness toward black communities owning guns help us dissect the layers of what has happened in the past starting with thomas jefferson calling slavery a moral depravity on one hand but maintaining the system while out of fear by stating i fear that god is just how do we see this framework shaking taking shape today if at all absolutely and and so with this book i actually start in the 1600s um and and look at the evolution of slave codes as showing the fear that the white community has against the enslaved that they're going to rise up that they're going to kill us that there will be retribution for what we are doing to them and so you see these laws early early on talking about uh the enslaved shall not have access to weapons they shall not be able to bear arms they shall not have guns um you see this consistently over and over and over even doing having those kinds of laws for free blacks and and this fear what i lay out in the second is that during the constitutional ratification conventions where james madison had put control of this well-regulated militia under federal control in the constitution in the draft constitution when there were the ratification conventions when he gets to virginia patrick henry and george mason are absolutely defiant they are like oh no you will not have that militia under federal control we cannot trust those folks from massachusetts and pennsylvania to send in the militia when the slaves rise up against us we will be left defenseless and we need to have that protection and so basically they were willing to play the same kind of hardball game that they played in the in the drafting of the constitution itself to say we will undermine this constitution and have a new constitutional convention unless we get a bill of rights that protects us and the second amendment is that protection and so you see this over and over so you get then um the the 1792 uniform militia act that says that um white men all white men between the ages of 18 and 45 must join the militia and must own a gun so you you see in federal law one of the first acts of congress is to identify the militia as white and gun owning as the protection of american society and and coming out of that you also have the haitian revolution which scares and i'm going to use the scholarly term begivers of the founding fathers um you you see their letters to each other and they're talking about how the enslaved in haiti are just slaughtering their masters how they are you know they've got these crazy ideas that they can be free that they that that the words of the revolution of equality and liberty and democracy apply to black people that is the wrong idea in the wrong hands um and we've got to stop this i mean thomas jefferson is like this is an evil that is coming upon us we've got to stop it and you see this consistently coming through from from that early period um into the dred scott decision where in 1857 where uh chief justice roger tani says no black people are not citizens they weren't citizens at the founding if they were citizens they'd be able to cross state lines easily and they would be able to carry weapons whenever and wherever they wanted to a black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect yeah then after the civil war we get the black codes that have disarmament in there we must disarm black people and then you you keep going you keep going till we get to the mulford act in 1967 that is about stripping the black panthers of their ability to police the police and the 1968 gun control act which one of its critics had called the negro control act um and so this fear of black people so even the stand your ground laws that are in place right now you look at these stand your ground laws what they say is that it expands the castle doctrine the castle doctrine says that when you're in your house and somebody comes into your house who's unwanted you have the right to defend yourself the stand your ground says wherever you have a right to be and if you perceive a threat you have the right to use lethal force well when black is the default threat in american society that perception of threat basically puts black people in the crosshairs so this is why um in stand your ground uh whites who kill black people under stand your ground are 10 times more likely to walk under justifiable homicide blacks who kill whites i was smiling because uh you made me remember something we had this running joke when i was in graduate school um there were there was a cohort of us who studied together worked together and sometimes we would question certain things and one of the people in the group would always say you guys need to remember now the move the rules were made for us not them and that was a running joke with our group but as you were sort of listing and you know um explaining all of those rules policies things that have evolved that's kind of the flashback moment that i was having you know right and so to think of the the second amendment it was crafted as a means to control black people um that well-regulated militia was the well-regulated militia that patrick henry and george mason who were who were had had hundreds of enslaved people um that that was what they demanded in order to not scuttle the united states of america sure so um in another guardian article that you wrote um it was focusing on the pandemics of mass shooting and anti-blackness right um but it's been a message where the nra is loud about gun control and black indigenous people of color communities in those communities but they were silent about mass shootings the mccloskey couple who waved their guns at the black lives matter protesters passing by kyle written house and citizens invading the capital this is where the nra tends to go silent why hasn't this been called out in national conversations and how do we find common ground if any to ensure equal protections at the same time militarize extremism from individual citizens and within the police forces this is where again we mobilize we organize we keep having the conversations we keep saying what we're seeing and we keep being really vocal about it um this is where we do the heavy lifting where we know what those narratives are the histories of them so that we make these connections and so in that then that guardian op-ed one of the things i was saying was that we have this this this pandemic of mass shootings and this pandemic of anti-blackness and and and the anti-blackness in america is preventing us from having real gun safety laws because you get this this this thing of the fear of black people keeps short-circuiting the conversation about uh gun safety so you get we will be left defenseless they will take our guns and we will be left defenseless and so i think of this book by jonathan metzel called dying of whiteness where yes where he talks about being in missouri um with um whites who have had gun violence in their family and so he's in a kind of self-help group and they start talking about gun safety laws and and and this group says absolutely not you will not take my gun because those folks from saint louis will come down here and take everything that we have so those folks from saint louis becomes dog whistle language for black folk in saint louis will come and take everything that whites in this community have if they don't have their guns to protect themselves we've had some um activity in the q a um and i do want to get to just about out of time but i do want to get to a couple of these questions um one in particular um and i'll just read it often policies discriminating and targeting black war on peop or voter suppression disguised as anti-fraud policy thereby normalizing systemic racism and giving policymakers and their supporters an opportunity to prevent to pervert that the policies are not about race how do we address this issue and how do we make it clear that these policies are in fact about racial discrimination lord that's what i've been trying to do [Laughter] um and it is um analyzing these policies understanding the motivations behind them and making clear that we are looking at dog whistles making clear that what we're looking at is the fig leaf that covers these discriminatory policies one of the things that i lay out in white rage in how to roll back the civil rights movement those gains from the civil rights movement there have been several um linguistic tricks um that hide the the the ongoing efforts to undermine black advancement and it has been lee atwater who was reagan's uh chief strategist in the southern strategy and he said you know in 1954 you could say the n word inward inward inward it didn't hurt you by 68 you say it it backfires and so you start getting really abstract and you start talking about these abstract things like taxes and states rights and force busing and all of that is designed so that blacks get hurt worse than whites yes so strategy then you know how to go after these policies and dissect them and then get the word out about what's really going on thank you um valerie i'm going to call you out she's one of your biggest fans here and uh valerie jones wants to know does professor anderson think the u.s will recover from the setback in the next 100 years she says i feel my children have a harder fight now than i had this is why we're fighting right now this is why we're fighting right now um america is on the the precipice and we're getting ready to figure out what kind of nation we're going to be um and and and you see one wave the majority of the wave is moving towards a much more inclusive multi-racial vibrant democracy then on the other hand you have the move toward authoritarianism and a tightly knit oligarchy that wants to control all of these resources one of the things that i talked about in one person no vote in the updated edition was that what what hillary talked about in the 2016 election was this stronger together that there were enough resources in the united states where we could all benefit what trump laid out was a neo-apartheid state so that you had this vast rightless labor pool where all of the resources that they were generating would come up to this small strata of whites but that they would depict this that all whites would benefit from this this system that they were putting in place this is where we are right now this is why the voting rights act is so important um those those measures that are before congress the freedom to vote act in the john lewis voting rights advancement act that's why they are so important um that's why call your senator um and and get them to understand what's at stake sure yeah so there are some more questions and i've tried to read them but i think what they all uh focus on and this can be your um parting comments give us something to be hopeful or a reason why we should continue you've talked about it a bit but for some of the people who raised these questions around um white people deputizing themselves um the idea of dying of of of whiteness how is that different from dying of blackness so what is it that we really should be focusing on that would give us some hope and and to me where the hope is is has been the consistent resistance to oppression the consistent fight against oppression that has happened in this nation um the consistent organizing the consistent mobilization the consistent theorizing about what freedom really looks like what equality and equity really look like and then working hard to implement that vision what we can't do is give in to despair because the moment we give into despair it's over it is over it is in that fight where the hope is um i think about wow i think about so much i think about the ways that um the the battle at christiana that's a perfect way to end this the battle at christiana happened in 1851 and it was in response to the fugitive slave act of 1850 that gave um plantation owners the right to go anywhere to track down their enslaved people who had fled and it required the north to it to be a full participant in the slave catching enterprise and so this slave owner edward gorsuch comes up from maryland into pennsylvania and he's got a u.s marshal with him he's got his son and he's got his nephew and he goes to christiana to get his property and the the man who answers the door is a man named william parker who himself is a fugitive slave but he's he's like what you want old man he said i come to get my property and he said you see that chair it's not yours you see that it's not yours there's nothing in this house that belongs to you and if i know my property's here and i'm going upstairs to get it and parker says i'ma tell you what old man you may go up those stairs but you're not coming down cause once you're up there you're mine [Laughter] and that kind of strength yes that strength is where the hope is in seeing the injustice and not tolerating it not tolerating it in fact envisioning what freedom really looks like and you think about it this man who is talking smack i mean he is talking full blown back to a slave owner and i'ma tell you what old man you come up those stairs your mind yeah yeah yeah that is a good note to end on i want to thank you for spending time with us this afternoon we actually could have gone on much longer um but we realized that um this has been uh very very enlightening and i would encourage the uh folk listening in if you haven't read the books fight rage um professor anderson's most recent book the second i encourage you to get them and read them i think you'll be um enlightened by a lot and perhaps at some point um as we journey on we'll cross paths again and perhaps we will see you in person eventually that would be great yeah but take good care and stay safe thank you you too all right good night good night good night

Channel: UAB Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Views: 6,603

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Id: G4CkCxFzFEE

Length: 62min 2sec (3722 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021