Carol Anderson: White Rage - INTERVIEW!!!

well hello i'm evelyn brooks higginbotham and it's really my great pleasure to interview the author carol anderson on this amazing book carol anderson is the professor of african american studies at emory university her research focuses on public policy relating to race justice and equality and her most recent book is white rage the unspoken truth of our nation's divide which won the 2017 national book critics circle award for criticism so let's give her a hand so let's start carol okay so you know i remember from the tumultuous 60s that was my generation two black psychiatrists william greer and price cobbs wrote a book called black rage and when we think of rage we think of violent actions and outbursts and yet your discussion of white rage is quite a different perspective something much more subtle more calculated innovative and governmentally systemic and it characterizes as you tell us several periods in american history so i'd like for you to talk about this to the group thank you so much evelyn and i also want to thank george gibson who was my incredible publisher editor for white rage he he helped shepherd this book um so what let me let me just start at the beginning um first there was man and then no i think it was god right is that i'm i'm i'm i'm watching the television as ferguson is blowing up and i'm seeing the flames and the fire and i'm listening to the pundits and it didn't matter whether i was listening to msnbc or cnn or yes even fox what i was hearing was the same story regardless of what kind whether despite the ideological bit of any of those venues and that was black rage look at black folks burning up where they live can you believe they're burning up where they live did you know they were burning up where they live what kind of people burn up where they live did i tell you they were burning up where they lived and i'm just sitting up there and i'm going because part of that is i had lived in missouri for 13 years you know this would be missouri that now has the naacp travel advisory and what wasn't discussed in all of this burning up where they lived were the policies that had systematically undermined and eroded and devalued and debased african-american citizenship rights what no one was talking about and all that look at where they're burning up where they live was that the school district where michael brown um where he graduated from missouri has a an accreditation system that accredits each school system 140 points um numbers of students who graduate numbers who are in ap honors numbers who are doing this numbers who are doing that and you get points and you can get up to 140. michael brown school system had ten for 15 years it was still not accredited when he died but nobody was talking about that instead you heard these little snickers yeah they call him a college student he's going to a trade school but they weren't talking about how policy makers had systematically undermined the right to education in the united states for people who had been fighting so hard to be educated in fact what we had done as a society was to say was to punish black people for valuing education that is what we had systematically done and i mean i saw that with the right to vote where 67 percent of ferguson is african-american the voter turnout rate in 2013 was six percent the work that it takes to transform 67 percent to six that's policy and if we you know and part of this is also if we always identify rage as this violence then we miss so much the incredible damage that is done by the cool corrosive systematic policies because think about what happens to all of those children who have come through a school system that is only can only manage 10 points on 140 scale the damage is much broader much deeper much more systemic than burning across and so it was to really as i said to put to blow graphite onto a fingerprint so that we could track white rage over time and and and i've got to say that the trigger for white rage is not just the presence of black people the trigger for white rage are black people who aspire black people who achieve black people who insist upon their basic human and civil rights it is that that is the trigger for white rage that black advancement creates a massive policy backlash set out to undermine and erode that advancement so you know if you could give some examples because one of the rich characteristics of the book is your command of history and you show a long history of presumptions that black people are asking for quote special treatment and what they're really asking for our constitutional rights and uh one of the examples you you go thank you and one of the examples that that you use is literally right after reconstruction right after the civil rights act of 1875 which was shepherded by our as i say senator from massachusetts charles sumner now we um for the first time time had a law that would give us progress and by 1883 of course you know that was struck down but but share that about justice bradley and the other thing is just the way advocates for quote color blind because it's amazing to me the way the supporters of equality in the 19th century used colorblind quite differently in its connotation than today thank you and i would one of the things that struck me um you know mark twain supposedly have said history may not repeat itself but it show do rhyme and i was struck by the rhythms that i kept seeing over and over that had the same resonance the same cadence it might have a bit of a different pitch but it was the same beat and and so i the first time i saw this they're asking for special treatment i i went wow because this was an opinion of of justice bradley i think in 1883 and i'm going okay so we've just come out of slavery and reconstruction that was barely reconstructed we are now in this really kind of netherland where the supreme court is beginning to pull back and erode all of the laws that the radical republican congress and i know didn't it feel good to say radical republican had put in place um that dealt with for instance that uh to get rid of the ku klux klan saying that kind of domestic terrorism has no place on american soil wow um to to say that african-american men had the right to vote wow uh to say that there would be equal protection under the law and due process wow this is like landmark but you know we're dealing with um a system that had been put in place since 1619 so we're dealing with centuries of massive human rights violations on a scale that is virtually unimaginable to then have and after the civil war we had such political backlash i mean the south rose up almost immediately with the black codes and so it's taking this this isn't like flipping a switch and it's over this is continued resistance so to then have the judge say i am so sick and tired of all of these black people coming to the court trying to get their little special privileges when are they just going to accept that they're american citizens and just quit begging the courts for something special and i thought special they were asking to have the 15th amendment enforced so that they would have the right to vote they were asking to have the 14th amendment enforced so that they would have equal protection under the law they were asking to have the 13th amendment enforced so that they would not have to deal with the badges of servitude but instead to ask to have the constitution enforced meant that they were asking for special privileges and so let me then carry this forward to bakke because we you know we're in the affirmative action mode again still with baki the bakke case so we know that the civil rights movement 1950s 1960s um by 70 you get the affirmative action that says okay we realize that we're gonna have to do something a little bit different if we're gonna open up the society because even after the civil war we didn't open up this society by 1977 so we've got basically seven years the supreme court rules that one that quotas are bad you can't use quotas but they also rule that affirmative action cannot be used to deal with the to to ameliorate the past discrimination that this entity had caused so you look at a university of texas that didn't open up it's it's in admissions until it i mean dragon kicking and screaming until like the late 1960s early 1970s you're looking at alabama the same thing uga with charlotte you know you know these places are fighting hard seven years it's like no and this is why you get the language of diversity instead uh that was an amen church over there i knew this was sunday morning yes but but get the cage right so so that you know so that you get the language of diversity where they're trying to then make the rationale for what has been hundreds of years of exclusion racial exclusion now at the same time you don't have that argument about legacies now if what you have done is to systematically close off your university it's like the grandfather clause it's oh thank you it is the grandfather clause if you have closed off your university to black people and then you still have this large number of students that you let in because they are the children of alums then what you have said is that you have automatically built in an all-white whites only only will be white chunk of your admissions based on racial exclusion we don't argue about legacies what we know for the ivy leagues for instance is that there are more legacies admitted than there are black students but the focus has been on black students because they're asking for something special i mean and so we get that language over and over again and what it require requires is historical erasure it requires that we don't understand how this nation was built how its policies were formed what was driving it and what the consequences were and so in white rage i set out to to to make that history visible i don't know if the people in the audience know that carol is a scholar also of international history and she um has written two wonderful books on african-american efforts to fight against colonialism in africa and to fight against the apartheid regime this would have been in the earlier part of the 20th century and i i'm just wondering with that internationalist perspective did were there any lessons about america did you find any relevance to that oh it it you know my first book was called eyes off the prize of the united nations and the african-american struggle for human rights and what i saw there were that one african americans we often write the history of black people as a very um myopic um shuttered history that you know they focused only in on this thing that they were dealing with right there in mississippi and in their county in mississippi and that appears to be it and that they have no vision of the broader world that wasn't the case at all um their vision was so broad because what they said was that oppression is global and we have to fight global oppression um i i liken it to um extermination you know when you when a place is infested with roaches you can't just fix what's happening in that one apartment you have to exterminate it throughout the building and that kind of global oppression they were saying had to be wiped out globally because fixing it in say ghana was not going to solve the problem in georgia fixing it in georgia wasn't going to solve the problem in ghana and they worked in coalitions with freedom fighters in those other lands they went to the united nations articulating their vision and so part of what i saw in all of this was an incredible sense of awareness and an incredible sense of mobilization of activism of presence of self and i also saw how there was a light motif in terms of oppression so for instance um in south africa they had what they called bantu education which was the education that was deemed um the best for africans and basically it was to create workers nothing more and you saw massive disparities in funding i saw the same kind of numbers then when i'm looking at the funding of education for black students in the united states where you're for instance you're getting massive areas that don't have high schools you're getting massive areas where you've got disparities that are sometimes 10 20 times differential between the funding for white schools and the funding for black schools but yet we will look at those black schools and say you know all you got to do is if you really valued education is just work hard and you know funding really doesn't make a difference in the quality of education i know you know um i my late husband leon higginbotham um was a judge for many years and uh he he used to write about south africa as well as uh united states and and he has written that the south african laws of apartheid um they actually learned some of their what they created in those laws from our segregation laws which also brings me to this question of the long periods of time of the ability to just execute unjust policies and that somehow gets accepted i mean on the one hand it is inspiring aw inspiring to think of black perseverance but on the other hand it is really i think troubling to know that you have a supreme court let's say plessy versus ferguson in 1896 that would say separate but equal rule it is the law of the land there was one lone dissenting justice john harlan and this is what he said the thin disguise of equal accommodations will not mislead anyone nor atone for the wrong done this day it was really clear to him as it became clear to all of us but you give so many great examples of fundamental rights like the right of movement freedom of the press like you know what happens when uh the supreme court finally does decide in favor of integrated schools and then places in virginia just close their whole schools down talk about this so you know the the freedom of movement i'll start there great migration you know we have as part of our foundational narrative in america is that this is the land of opportunity and where there's opportunity that's where you go in the great migration you had one and a half million african americans leaving the south that's about 10 of the population that is huge that is seismic well the south looked up and this is right uh during the starts off during the first world war because they're incredible opportunities the war has started europeans are going back over to fight in the great war world war one and so these the manufacturing is gearing up for war material and they need labor and they look around and they're like you know what there's some black folks in the south who knew and so and so they start sending labor agents in the south to recruit african americans to come north come to chicago come to pittsburgh and the movement starts the south looks up and goes no and then starts putting in place yes you'll have the lynching but what they're putting in place are the laws the laws one of the things that they did was they banned the chicago defender the chicago defender was the prominent black newspaper in the united states and the chicago defender had been absolutely essential to the great migration it had in their listings of jobs listings of opportunities listings of housing listings of where you could go coming in say from mississippi coming in from alabama stop here this is the place where then we can get you set up once the uh the south began to figure out that the chicago defender was one of the conduits it was like um uh voices of america right voice of america one of the conduits of information about freedom they said oh no banned it now i know that there's this thing called the first amendment that has something called freedom of the press and it's kind of freedom of the press but here what we saw was that the cell said no you do not have this freedom and there was no human crime pushed back from the federal government in the banning of the chicago defender but black folks resisted my my mother talked about my granddaddy and um oklahoma and oklahoma is the south let's be real clear it is the south they had slaves yes it is the south and she talked about how granddaddy would take that chicago defender fold it put it under his arm and then get his walk on come on yeah i got my fender right it was it was a badge of courage it was a badge of strength it was a badge of resilience one of the other things that the south did particularly in mississippi now remember we're in the middle of a war you got war material that has to be moved you got troops that need to be moved mississippi stop the trains just stopped the trains black people were getting on those trains to go north mississippi said now we'll just stop the trains it took a federal marshal to say what are you doing you can't do this and the sheriff's were like well yeah we can and the feds were like we're getting ready to arrest you we are in the middle of a war now it took a middle of a war and finally they were like okay we'll release the trains but then they started arresting black people who had tickets who had tickets and calling them vagrants and with vagrancy then you could lock them up then have them bailed out by whites to then work on plantations i mean so this is we're fighting a war to make the world safe for democracy and this is what is going on and and so part of what makes this so is that it's so legalistic that you don't see the violence and this is a nation that is drawn to the spectacular and so when you get these little civil codes and and and and state laws that and that are then just carried out by officials it doesn't have that same but it is devastating and you're bringing me to today because i'd like for you to talk about president obama's election as a catalyst for voter suppression we hear all this conversation about voter fraud when in fact we have much more voter suppression okay yes [Music] the in white rage i go through these these moments of where african americans have achieved some semblance of their citizenship rights and then look at the massive backlash in terms of policy the election of barack obama to the presidency was a huge huge victory for black america well except not all of america because there were large segments of america who thought they were looking at the apocalypse who saw a black man in the white house and thought the world as they knew it was over particularly the republicans and let me explain why barack obama's organizing ability brought in over 15 million new voters into american democracy this is something we should be applauding the republicans looked at this and had a scooby-doo moment oh shaggy because what they saw in there two million new african-american voters two million new hispanic voters six hundred thousand new asian voters and the growth in voters who made fifteen thousand dollars a year or less was almost exponential those are the folks you say you want invested in democracy because when people are invested in the nation they become part of the solution they help build they make the nation stronger they bring that kind of diversity of ideas and commitments to to the fore instead what happened were that the republicans looked at this and they had been working on the language of voter fraud for a while because they had to figure out how do we shut this thing down because the party had moved so far to the right so far to the right and i'm saying it's because they brought the toxin of the southern strategy they brought that racism into the party they wounded into the party in 1968 and the more they brought it in the more right wing that party became till you you don't even as i said lord i miss my republicans so they couldn't develop policies that then spoke to the poor two hispanics two african americans two asian americans they couldn't speak to the broader group of americans they spoke to a strata of overwhelmingly it's like 92 percent of the republican party is white so they spoke to a strata of america and so what they did is they began to figure out how to shut it down but they couldn't just go boom because that would violate the 15th amendment and the voting rights act and so what they did was to say we need to ensure the integrity of the ballot box rage works beautifully because it cloaks its devious methods in the language of democracy it swaddles it in the flag it swaddles it in common sense language so you get voter ids we need to ensure the integrity of the ballot box so we need to make sure that you are who you are when you vote that sounds like well yeah you know i need a i need a id to get a book out of a library how hard can that be i can see that but then it's how they implement it let's take alabama so alabama first says okay so you need a voter id and then what alabama does in the black belt counties and those are the counties that have a large you know there is either equal or more african americans in that county than there are whites they shut down the department of motor vehicles in all of the black belt counties and what they said and it sounded for for fiscal responsibility you know with these the keeping these places open all the time is just draining the treasury and we have to be fiscally responsible now those were now i've got to say there were two areas where they didn't shut them down at selma and montgomery right but they figured they could shut them down and all of the other ones and nobody would notice so and these were the counties in alabama that voted overwhelmingly for barack obama we have voter id laws now there wasn't let me back up there was a huge human cry afterwards and so what governor bentley did was he said fine i'll open them and people are like okay great but now they're open one day a month so begin to think about what your access looks like to your right to vote so the pattern is you create an obstacle and then you create an obstacle to the obstacle we had millions millions of american citizens who were denied their right to vote in the 2016 election based on voter suppression the backlash to the presidency of barack obama i have one last question before we go to you and i bet this is a question that many of you have so your book came out before the election yeah what are you thinking now [Laughter] now we when you look at the new york times today in the op-ed section you will see she has a a great article uh the policies of white resentment but just say a few words and then we'd love to hear from you and what i set out to what i what i think now is that it is white rage that put donald trump in the white house between the voter suppression that in fact when you're looking at what happened in wisconsin and when you're looking at felony disfranchisement in florida that wipes out about 25 percent of all black voters in florida and those two states have the electoral college votes that put him over the top when you think about you had a a field of 16 republican candidates governors senators who had experienced and the electorate went for the man who was the most un obama you know remember jeffrey holders the uncooler right you know the most anti-obama because of his birtherism that birtherism gave him a badge a stamp that no other republican could match that's what put him over and when you think about what uh an unholy mess this regime has been and just one debacle after the next as you watch the standing of the u.s just plummet as you have diplomats just laughing at the u.s as you have um our inability to follow through on our commitments uh just when you're yeah please read the article yes we're trying to get our blood pressure down so we have a few minutes and you'll tell me when to stop so if you have questions i know somebody has a question so as an educator i'm often appalled at the lack of knowledge of american history among our students or even our teachers and it seems this past election there seems to be a lot of really uneducated voters and so i've read a lot about the scandinavian education system which is by no means perfect but their policies really changed when they focused on equity um and having everyone have an equal chance to get into the system do you how does the united states move to that and what do we do to promote that to me the the thing that has to happen in the united states where we can move to equity where we can see that when we when we all are doing well the nation is doing well is that whites have to have the conversation about what real american history looks like around their dinner table they have to have that conversation with their brothers their sisters their uncles i can't tell you how many times i heard during 2016 where someone would talk about what was happening around their dinner table and they were like yeah go trump and it didn't matter and that they were spewing things that you know well whites built this nation and by god we're going to keep it when you have that kind of history then it makes it very difficult to even talk about equity because you honestly believe that whites built this nation all by themselves and that and and it stops right there so having a historical factual historical understanding and whites engaging in the work of equity building this cannot just be what black folks do or what latinos do whites have got to be fully engaged in this conversation our nation is at risk i mean we we see this my question goes to is a question i wanted you to answer the other day but you didn't get a chance but my question goes to the fact that at the heart of this is really i think and you can react to it the fact that we were chattel and not slaves but chattel slaves which is a big difference between slaves and chattel slaves and that we've been seeking to be human in the eyes of of the majority population since that time so the struggle seems to be that we were chattel and so the attitude is that we're chatted still and so when you look at michael brown and you look at the school systems you look at the policies these are policies against people who were considered were were not considered they were chattel and so now it seems like the struggle has been trying to be for all these years for these since the 1600s trying to prove that we're human you want to react to that it has been the struggle um the struggle of recognizing our humanity of having this system recognize that humanity i mean and and we see it over and over again i i teach a civil rights movement class and i talk about the politics of respectability for instance and the politics of respectability is that thing where if you you know you you you go to school you don't drink you have that kind of middle class visage then boom you too can access the american dream if you are respectable and so you get this kind of this is why rosa parks are not claudette colvin okay but what that strategy was about was about identifying and forcing the broader society to recognize the humanity of african americans by saying when you're looking at a mrs amelia boynton down in selma who is about as middle class she's a school teacher she's got on her her stockings and her kitten heels and you have sheriff jim clark just snatching her as she's trying to register to vote you can't point to a narrative that says oh well you know she's a thug and that's why the cops were going after you know instead this is a respectable woman who is being beaten by the sheriff because she's trying to register to vote so that element of respectability used in the civil rights movement was about trying to get this society to recognize that black people were people ibrahim kindy who wrote stamp from the beginning what he talks about there um is that what black people are really looking for is not this special treatment that keeps eddying through and all this but it is the ability to soar when you can soar it is the ability to fail when you can fail and that it's not seen as somehow your failure is representative of the race your failure is just because you failed but that's not what happens here in this incredible battle to to pull from being enslaved lord have mercy to say i am human that is where we are right now it is what allows uh philando castile to be gunned down in his car and you don't hear a mumbling word from the nra because they did not see a human being there gunned down instead you had all of this narrative about well you know maybe he uh he uh he smoked weed really that's what i mean i think on that note which uh is an emotional climax to many interesting and and provocative points that carol brought up is a good way time to stop we thank carol very much you

Channel: Martha's Vineyard Productions

Views: 25,729

Rating: 4.616725 out of 5

Keywords: Carol Anderson: White Rage, Carol Anderson, author, lecture, talk, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, race, racism, african american, black history, america, INTERVIEW, trump, black lives matter, obama, white america, rage, good boys, white rage

Id: hzoSVLopZGY

Length: 39min 58sec (2398 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/GnosticInitiate]

This is what the U.S.A. really is as a country. Stop fooling yourselves with their propaganda and "land of opportunity" bull.