SPHR17: White Rage - Carol Anderson

good evening friends good evening everybody welcome to our evening keynote event I appreciate you all being here I'm glad to see so many students here thank you all for coming down to River Campus for our conference attendees I know it's been a couple long days but we're in for a treat tonight so I hope you will you'll find this worthwhile I'll make a couple quick announcements the first of which is we ask that everyone stays through the question and answer period and the second is that Professor Anderson will be signing books outside after the event my name is joel preusse I'm an assistant professor in human rights studies here at the University of Dayton I'm also the program coordinator of the moral courage project an initiative of the Human Rights Center in collaboration with proof media for social justice and NGO operating out of New York City it's my honor tonight to introduce our speaker dr. Carol Anderson Charles Howard Candler professor and chair of African American Studies at Emory University I first met professor Anderson in 2011 at a week-long workshop at Emory about human rights and globalization sponsored by Schaffer the Society for historians of American foreign policy I've been selected along with a dozen or so other doctoral students and the workshop came for me at a unique moment I was getting ready to defend my dissertation and with the end only two months away I traveled to Atlanta and during our time together we talked substance and we talked ideas but we also talked about the profession and we talked about professional life most strikingly though we were treated really nicely and as a graduate student that was a rarity and more than a rarity it was more of a unicorn and maybe there's just a reflection of my own experience and frankly my own trauma but being taken out to dinner and treated like an adult and like a peer by distinguished scholars meant a lot to me at the time and I still recall the experience with tremendous fondness that week I felt like a student of Carol's if only briefly Carol Anderson is a warm and encouraging is warm and encouraging full of vital and contagious energy as well as being a rigorous and publicly engaged scholar her writing locates the african-american struggle for racial justice within the global politics of human rights eyes off the prize published in 2003 is a remarkably researched and provocatively argued book about the engagement of the civil rights movement with international mechanisms at the dawn of the post-war Human Rights era bourgeois radicals published in 2014 details the transnational contribution of the n-double a-c-p to movements for anti colonial liberation in Asia and Africa in these two major works professor Anderson challenges us particularly in the United States to see ourselves in the global context something so often obscured by the dank residues of American exceptionalism by introducing the african-american struggle into the Canon of international human rights case studies her work insists that we as American academics and activists engage in self critique in the same breath or even prior to critiquing the records of other countries this spirit places Carolina scene comfortably at home here at the social practice of human rights conference to be sure this sensibility and this charge inspired me and the moral courage project team when we selected Ferguson Missouri as our pilot site in 2016 the interviews we conducted there and the stories we documented can now become a part of an honest accounting of our own history examine with specific attention to the struggle for dignity from below professor Anderson's most recent book begins in Ferguson and stretches back in time while also providing a prescient glimpse into the present white rage in New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award is a work ripped from the headlines as much as it is a deep storico scholarly investigation in the book we are exposed to the true costs of progress white rage chronicles a timeline of backlash by white America to the strides made by African Americans since the end of slavery there is not a coincidence following this argument that a resurgent and emboldened wave of white nationalism should sweep a rodeo clown and a con man into the White House after two terms of this country's first black president and it is one thing to throw jabs and it's another thing to snipe but it's quite another to have the goods to back it all up and tonight we have the pleasure of hearing from someone with the goods please join me in welcoming dr. Carol Anderson man oh dang usually I don't come out hardcore like that off the bat but okay Wow thank you thank you so much Thank You Joel thank you the University of Dayton Human Rights Center for inviting me here and thank you for coming down to UD River because the River Campus because I know it's Thursday let me say it again I know it's Thursday so thank you so much for being here and I want to to walk us through white rage and so I'm going to talk about how I got to white rage now not how I got to white rage but how I got to white rage and Ferguson looks like it's the beginning but it's not quite it actually began for me as a scholar in February 1999 when a black man stepped out of his apartment in New York City and he had been working all day and you know that when you've been working all day and you're just tired but you're hungry and you just got to go get some food cuz you're tired and you're hungry but you can't really go to sleep because you're hungry because you've been working all day and so you just want to go get you something to eat and that's what this young man did and he stepped out onto his porch as he's getting ready to go down the street to go get some food and for officers of the New York Police Department pulled up in their car hopped out guns drawn and began firing 41 bullets later amadou diallo went down amadou diallo was unarmed amadou diallo wasn't wanted for a dog gone thing yet here was this black man 23 years old 19 of those bullets hit him he was armed with his wallet now that's bad enough there's no piece of that that's good but then I'm watching Nightline with Ted Koppel and he's interviewing mayor Mayor Rudy Giuliani thank you I said I got an 8 min corner over there I hear it I hear the cadence and you know in Ted Koppel is not some softball pitching interviewer Ted Koppel comes at you hardcore and Ted Koppel's looking at Rudy Giuliani and he's going a module a module a module and Rudy is looking at him going my policies are working New York City is safer than it has been in years crime is down New Yorkers are feeling safe and secure and the policy that he talked about as he had as flip charts showing crime decreasing the policies that he talked about was broken windows policing and what broken windows policing does is it says that you hyper police an area so that if somebody throws a piece of trash down on the ground you pull them over if somebody is riding a bicycle on the sidewalk if somebody if they jaywalk hyper policing was a way to basically criminalize the black and brown communities in New York City to terrorize them for all intents and purposes now as I sat here listening to him talk about how his policies were working but amadou diallo is dead in a hail of bullets I'm thinking amadou diallo is not feeling safe and Rudy Giuliani said but my police force is the most restrained and the best behaved in the United States of America my policies are working and I'm sitting up there going uh-uh because most behaved and best restrained don't put 41 bullets at an unarmed man but I didn't know what to call this thing so as a scholar I kept working I kept reading I kept writing I kept researching I kept reading and writing and researching and thinking and writing and researching and then August 2014 I've got the TV on and Ferguson is on fire it is ablaze and and I'm flipping from the different stations and it didn't matter which station I was listening to it didn't matter if it was MSNBC it's my left hand MSNBC seeing in because each and every one of them we're saying the same thing look at black folks burning up where they live can you believe that black people are burning up where they live oh look at those black folk burning up where they lived can you believe it for now did you know black people were burning up where they live did you see those black people burning up where they live I mean and you know it it was I'm flipping from station to station it was the same thing and I found myself shaking my head to the point where I could see my shoulders you know there's an in there's because what I was listening to was an a historical account an a historical account that was treading in the same path of the narrative of black pathology that happens in the United States there is something fundamentally wrong with black people because now they're burning up where they live the problem was as I looked at this I said as a nation we are so focused in on the flames that we've missed the kindling we have missed the policies that have created this so as the pundits are talking about black rage I said no this is white rage there's no white rage oh my gosh this is white rage because I had lived in Missouri for 13 years and I saw the way that the policies worked to undermine african-americans access to their citizenship rights let's talk about the kindling briefly the right to vote Ferguson is 67% black in the 2013 municipal election the black voter turnout rate was 6% what does it take to turn 67% into 6% this is almost looking like Alabama 1950 policies and you begin to think about what a disfranchise to people feel like 6% or let's talk about schools and education Michael Browns school district the ferguson school district missouri has an accreditation system where it provides 140 points per for each school district that you can get up to 140 points on your accreditation scale graduation rates standardized test scores matriculation raise daddy daddy data data that the data gives you up to 140 what do you think Michael Browns School District God give me guess 50/50 another guess lower lower 13 exactly 10 out of 140 points for 15 years begin to think about what that looks like when we are willing as policy makers and as a society to put an entire generation of children through a school system that can garner no more than 10 points on a hundred and forty point scale and we're not done yet because we're getting ready to send another generation of black students through that same school system kindling then let's talk about the police because we know that the spark for all of this kindling was the killing of Michael Brown the narrative we have in America is that the police are here to protect and serve how many have heard that you know you know because there are these mantras that we just kind of know in Ferguson the police force was there to look at that black community as revenue generators driving 26 into 25 you didn't put your blinker on when you change lanes that didn't look like a full stop is that a busted taillight the kinds of fines and fees and court cost extracted from that working class black community accounted for 25 percent of the city's operating revenues and just to be clear this isn't just as being blind when the police what would happen to stop somebody white they're like oops sorry or if the officer would happen to write the ticket when that white person went to the courthouse to pay it's like how did you get this oh you don't have to pay so you have disparate policing disparate criminal justice system happening in Ferguson Missouri kindling these policies have power and we have to recognize that power and as I then started thinking through how these policies work it helped me understand how white rage worked and why it's so difficult for us to identify it and it's because white rage doesn't require visible violence white rage works very silently methodically corrosive ly through the legislature through the school boards through the White House through Congress it wreaks havoc subtly imperceptibly and so I set out to make white rage visible by blowing graphite on its fingerprints so I could track its movements historically over time and one of the first things that I began to figure out because this is a process as you know you're working through this thing one of the things that I began to figure out was that it was not the mere presence of black people that was the trigger for white rage instead it was black people who aspired black people who achieved black people who refused to accept their subjugation black people who demanded their basic rights that's the trigger for white rage and through a formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions white rage consistently punishes black aspiration black achievement and I know this sounds so dog gone counterintuitive doesn't it it's just look because what we know is this is the land of opportunity where all you have to do is work hard and you too can and achieve the yes we know this it's like it's like in the air we breathe isn't it and think about it in in the vineya and different venues it's like we know this culturally so that we we can finish this sentence this is the land of opportunity all you have to do is work hard keep your nose clean go to school get out and vote yes so then how is it then that government after government after government has worked hard to ensure that black children do not get an education I don't think you heard me so I'm gonna start again because again that sounds like we've got Brown the brown decision of 1954 Brown to of 1955 that says with all deliberate speed the South dug in with what's called massive resistance where you have over 100 senators and congressional representatives signing a manifesto saying that they will you do everything in their power to undermine the Supreme Court decision and to block implementation of the Supreme Court decision which should be the law of the land and they did they figured out different things like you know they say we have to have equal public schools will shut down the entire school system that way it's equal nobody gets a public education I'm telling you when you read through this stuff you're like really dog but what they also know is that white parents weren't having it what do you mean my child's not going to get an education so then what they did is part of this package of shutting down the public schools so that they could meet the standard of brown was then to provide taxpayer dollars to pay tuition for white children to go to all-white private academies so that white children's education would continue to happen a pace and be funded by the state be funded by taxpayer dollars which meant black people as well because black folks were paying taxes while there was nothing available for black children so in Prince Edward County Virginia for instance because Virginia led the massive resistance battle in Virginia they shut down the public school system in Prince Edward County for five years now think about that you're in the fifth grade and your school system shuts down and it doesn't open up again until you're in the tenth grade think about what you have lost in terms of education in those crucial five years this is also at the moment where the US economy is changing it's moving from a manufacturing based industrial based economy to a knowledge and technology based economy when you don't have the education as the economic ground underneath you changes your ability to be part of that economy has been completely sabotage let's also deal with a moment in this education component remember brown one 1954 Brown to 1955 and and let me give you some some framework of what's driving Brown because I think that that's going to help to the Plessy v Ferguson decision of 1896 said separate but equal now the southern states hopped on separate as my brother would say with the quickness they pounced on separate but the smaller word equal just defied it was like equal equal what does that mean it means that for instance in Amity County Mississippi white children were funded at a tune of a little over $30 per head black children three dollars it means that in Atlanta that would be the city too busy to hate that they didn't have enough schools for black children so black children had to go on a partial day basis 85% of black children never had a full school day they went for a few hours and then another wave of black children came in for a few more hours and then another wave of black children came in for a few more hours and by the way this would be after World War two after the US has helped defeat the Nazis I just need to also make this clear in terms of what we're talking about here so by the time we're getting into brown 1 and then brown 2 54 55 1957 because the South has still dug in the Soviets were in the middle of the Cold War the Soviets launched spoot and you is the satellite that went up and you heard Eisenhower win dang dang dang because what that meant is that the US knew that the Soviets had nukes but but believed that the Soviets did not have the technology to get that nuclear arsenal across the ocean they can hit Germany and that's why you have the forward bases in American bases in Germany but they said they can't get it across the ocean beep beep beep Eisenhower's moving Department of Defense is moving and what they come up with it's like we have got to have the brainpower to fight the Cold War we have got we've got to have the technological expertise to stay ahead of the Soviets this is in the land of people this isn't hard because when you're thinking about we're in the midst of probably nuclear annihilation we need to move and so they came up with the National Defense Education Act this was landmark because what this would do would put hundreds of millions of dollars into education into fellowships into labs into professor's in order to create a a group of Americans who had the scientific and engineering expertise to withstand whatever the Soviets could put up as this bill is working its way through Congress there were two big issues one issue dealt with the separation of church and state would Catholic universities for instance be able to access these funds but the big fight was over could Southern Univ continue to defy Braun maintain whites-only admissions and still get access to hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds so I'm thinking so let me see if I get this right nuclear annihilation Jim Crow nuclear annihilation Jim Crow the fair said yes yes you can you can maintain Jim Crow you can defy the Supreme Court you can have whites-only admissions at the University of Alabama at the University of Georgia at Ole Miss you can keep black students locked out I know we talked about the brainpower to fight the Cold War but we have to have a policy that maintains Jim Crow so when you have black people fighting for access to quality education the policy response has been no not today let's take another one because that was kind of sobering wasn't it you're like wait a minute we were ready to be nuked in order to keep up colored only in white only signs yes white rage is destructive white rage not only targets African Americans but it undermines the viability of the United States of America itself because you begin to think about what having millions upon millions of American citizens without the kind of education necessary for this kind of economy and it destabilizes and weakens the u.s. white rage does damage let's talk about the war on drugs okay that was a hole over here let's talk about the war on drugs the war on drugs because one of the things that's really important to also understand about the way white rage works is it cloaks itself in the language of democracy it cloaks itself in the language of reasonableness so that we must protect our communities from the scourge of drugs who could be against that right no-one could be against that you don't want drugs flooding into your neighborhood but think about this studies and upon studies have been done african-americans use drugs the least in certain categories of drugs than any other racial or ethnic group in America in the other categories of drugs its equal use least or equal then how is it that african-americans are arrested at ten times the rate for drug use and incarcerated at thirty five times the rate for drug use so the United States of America has spent one trillion dollars on the war on drugs and gone after the people who use drugs the least is this really a war on drugs because what the war on drugs and mass incarceration has done because the war on drugs was first launched by Richard Nixon in early 1970 and really took on its form that we see now under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s this is coming out of the Victor Riis of the civil rights movement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the implications of mass incarceration are that felons do not have access to housing the Civil Rights Act of 1965 just gutted felons do not have access to student loans education gutted felons in many states cannot vote and in some states it is permanent felony disfranchisement in Florida 25 percent of all African Americans who are voting age eligible cannot vote 25 percent now I look at that and I think about many things one is you think about the three-fifths clause remember the three-fifths clause in the Constitution that allowed the southern states to be able to count the bodies in order to get the number of representatives in Congress but those bodies had no rights and they could not vote when you think about Florida having 25 percent of its black population its adult population not being able to vote but being able to count those 1 million plus people in its tally for delegates for representatives to Congress we've got a 3/5 clause coming out of the war on drugs and when you think about what the war on drugs did to state budgets so even think about like the cost of education the cost of a college education in California for instance California at a certain moment because California was locking up folks big bad hot hard heavy you began to see a dollar-for-dollar movement out of the higher education budget into the prison budget so a state is willing to spend billions of dollars on incarcerating people but not on keeping tuition low enough so that people can get a college education and not be overburdened with loans think about that that's what the war on drugs did or let's talk about the right to vote I don't even know where to begin with this one I think I'm gonna begin with the election of Barack Obama 2008 that that was a seismic move when I talk about black achievement when you think about a black man in the White House I gotta tell you I didn't think I'd ever see it in my lifetime I was just like wrong and then I'm like looking up at the heavens mommy can you believe this oh but the way that it happened was massive grassroots organizing bringing in millions of people in fact 15 million new voters people who did not believe that they had a stake in democracy actually coming to the polls and the demographic makeup of those 15 million let me back up a bit because part of what we say is this is the greatest democracy on earth yes how many times we heard that every yeah I saw they looking like all the time and part of what makes this the greatest democracy on earth is that we vote we get to choose our representatives we don't have autocracies we don't have monarchies we have elected officials that's what makes this a democracy and we say that we want people to vote that's what we say so in 15 million people show up in 2008 who haven't been there before we should be doing the dance of joy because what this is saying is that there are 15 million new people who believe they have a stake in this nation who believe that there is something viable here that includes them and they're willing to put forth and do the work to make this thing work those 15 million included 2 million new African Americans voters two million it included two million new Hispanic voters it included 600,000 new asian-american voters and it almost doubled by percentages the number of people who made less than $15,000 a year begin to think about what that means 15 million new black Hispanic Asian American and poor who are voting did we celebrate this or did we come back with Shelby County v holder that gutted the Voting Rights Act and then a wave of voter suppression laws that systematically targeted those very groups for instance voter ID so the narrative goes we have to protect the integrity of the ballot box have you heard that we have to make sure that our our people have the confidence in our election systems yes and voter fraud undermines that confidence have we heard about voter fraud how many here have heard about voter fraud yeah okay so a professor law professor went from looked at all cases of voter fraud voter impersonation fraud because this is what voter ID goes after and from the year 2000 to the year 2014 I believe it was he found out of 1 billion votes 31 cases out of 1 billion votes 31 cases after Shelby County v holder which gutted the Voting Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act as I said came out of the civil rights movement within two hours Texas had passed its voter ID law one of the harshest in the in the nation the way that it worked is Texas said because again part of the way white rage works is it feels commonsensical I've had so many people say well of course you how hard is it to get an ID have you heard that one mm-hmm how hard is it I have to use an ID to check out a library book have you heard that one okay but it's not an ID it is a government-issued photo ID and so what Texas has said is that you need a government-issued photo ID and your ID your student ID like from the University of Texas doesn't count now that's a state University but that doesn't count your gun registration card does count and your driver's license counts but there's only a Department of Motor Vehicles in one third of the counties in Texas Texas has figured out I'm tell you this is little this is an Atlanta you can't make this stuff up Texas has figured out that for many of its people they're going to have to drive about a hundred and twenty-five miles to the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles but remember you don't have a driver's license how do you get a hundred and twenty five miles without a driver's license how am i doing so far mm-hmm you see it and so you've got a 250 mile round-trip to get this document that you need in order to vote now right before Texas passed SB fourteen one of the things because it recognized that you had this trip one of the things that it did was it had language in there to reimburse people for the cost of having to go 250 miles to go get this the legislators drew a line through that and and said now we're not reimbursing anybody if they really wanted to vote they'd find a way to get there now remember they also don't have public transportation so without public transportation without a driver's license how are you supposed to gain access to the identification card that you need in order to have your right to vote honored Texas is not alone in North Carolina North Carolina the Fourth Circuit said targeted african-americans with nearly surgical precision North Carolina got data on what types of ID african-americans had and didn't have and then wrote the law to require the ones that most African Americans did not have or let's take Alabama because we go an equal-opportunity here in Alabama Alabama also required government-issued photo ID and then said public housing ID doesn't count I'm sorry would this be public housing because that would be government you're like no but you can see how this begins to target the poor then in what are called the Black Belt counties and those are the counties in Alabama that have a large percentage of African Americans those are also the counties that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 when the rest of Alabama did not by requiring a government-issued photo ID Alabama then said boom public housing the ID doesn't count but your driver's license does and then shut down the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Black Belt counties now there was a hue and cry when that happened because Alabama is kind of storied in the Civil Rights lexicon right you know we've got Montgomery we've got Selma so they thought they were governor Bentley thought he was being slick so he said but I didn't shut him down in Montgomery and Selma you can't make this up and and so but the hue and cry was so intense he went fine fine and he relented I won't shut him down but now they're open one day a month so begin to think about what that means in terms of your access to vote so that's what I mean in terms of these policies and realize that none of this none of this was done with a clan cross-burning all of this was done coolly methodically systematically and all of this undermines not just the african-american community but it undermines the United States of America and we have got to be cognizant of that so in my book white rage I trace this historical pattern I trace it from the end of the Civil War when you have to me what is like the huge achievement where African Americans go from being property to being human beings Wow huge and the incredible backlash that happened there like with the Black Codes that required African Americans to sign a labor contract an annual labor contract and if they refused to sign they could be arrested and charged with vagrancy and then have their labor auctioned off and that they could only work in certain fields like mmm agriculture anything else they'd have to have a judge sign off on or the mayor to the Great Migration which is isabel wilkerson in her Magisterial book the warmth of other Suns talks about this is the first step that the servant class took on its own without asking the backlash the white rage of the policies that came out of the great migration where Jacksonville for instance passes a law that black people could not leave the city for better employment let me stop that say that again the african-americans could not leave Jacksonville in order to get a better job what happens in the capitalist economy what is one of our kind of basic tenants in a capitalist economy how many students do I have in here oh cool okay when you get your degree and you're living in Dayton right now yes and say you've got a job at Walmart at eight dollars an hour but you get your degree like oh I got my University of Dayton degree you need to recognize because you're planning on getting paid right look at that smile that's a man just planning on getting fade but Dayton has a law that you cannot leave Intel is calling they've got a six-figure salary for you did you smile again but you can't leave Dayton to get a better job does that not sound like but this is America in the 20th century I then moved to brown then to the civil rights movement and the election of Barack Obama and I trace all of this through key three key sectors education the criminal justice system and the right to vote because I think it begins to really lay out a pattern of white rage I'd like to read a couple of excerpts for you right now oh good they're my glasses I was telling them over there one of the one time I did this and I left my glasses in the car the words were just swimming it was bad it was really bad I'm gonna do one on the war on drugs I'm gonna do two one on war on drugs and one on Barack Obama in the chapter on the civil rights movement and as I'm moving in and I'm discussing the war on drugs I get to the point where I'm doing Michelle Alexander's the new Jim Crow and I'm highlighting the key Supreme Court decisions that embed racism in the operation of the law for the war on drugs taken together these rulings allowed indeed encouraged the criminal justice system to run racially amok and that's exactly what happened on July 23rd 1999 in Tulia Texas in the dead of night local police launched a massive raid and busted a major cocaine trafficking ring at least that's how it was billed by the local media which after having been tipped off lined up to get the best most humiliating photographs of 46 of the town's 5,000 residents in pajamas underwear and uncombed bad hair being paraded into the jail for booking the local newspaper the Tullius Sentinel ran the headline your streets cleared of garbage the editorial praised law enforcement for reading to Leah of drug-dealing scumbags the raid was the result of an 18-month investigation by a man who would be named by Texas Attorney General as outstanding lawman of the year Tom Coleman didn't lead a team of investigators instead he single-handedly identified each member of this massive cocaine opera and made more than 100 undercover drug purchases he was hailed as a hero and his testimony immediately led to 38 of the 46 being convicted with the other cases just waiting to get into the clogged court system Joe Moore a pig farmer was sentenced to 99 years for selling $200 worth of cocaine Kizzy white Kizzy white received 25 years while her husband William cash loved landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine well the case began to unravel however when Kizzy sister Tanya went to trial Coleman swore that she has sold him drugs Tanya however had video proof that she was at a bank in Oklahoma City 300 miles away cashing a check at the very moment he claimed to have bought cocaine from her then another defendant Billy Don wafer had time sheets and his boss's eyewitness testimony that wafer was at work and not out selling drugs to Coleman and when the outstanding lawman of the Year swore under oath that he had purchased cocaine from Ewell Bryant at all bushy haired man only to have Bryant bald and 5 foot 6 appear in court it finally became very clear that something was awry Coleman in fact had no proof what so ever that any of the alleged drug deals had taken place there were no audio tapes no photographs no witnesses no other police officers present no fingerprints but he is on the bags of drugs no records over the span of an 18-month investigation he never wore a now he claimed to have written each drug transaction on his leg but to have washed away the evidence when he showered now I'm gonna stop right there because we have two problems happening here at least either the boy only showered once in 18 months or he went out bought drugs with home shower went out with that shower for 18 months [Laughter] additional investigation Teli dad this isn't you really cannot make this stuff up it is just additional investigation led to no corroborating proof of his allegations when the police arrested those 46 people and vigorously searched their homes and possessions no drugs were found nor were weapons money paraphernalia or any other indications at all that the housewife pig farmer or anyone else arrested were actually drug kingpins what was discovered however was judicial misconduct running rampant in the war on drugs and Tulia Texas with a clear racial bias Coleman had accused 10% of to Lea's black population of dealing in cocaine based on his word alone 50% of all of the black men in town were indicted convicted and sentenced to prison Randy Creta Co of the William Moses counselor fund for racial justice called to Leah ass lynching taken down 50% of the male black adult population like that it's outrageous it's like being accused of raping someone in Indiana in the 1930s you didn't do it but it doesn't matter because a bunch of Klansmen on the jury are gonna string you up anyway but this wasn't 1930 it was the beginning of the 21st century and there was a powerful civil rights movement that had bridged those two eras the next one that I want to deal with is the election of Barack Obama and I spend a lot of time in that one talking about voter suppression but also the level of disrespect black respectability or appropriate behavior doesn't seem to matter if anything black achievement black aspirations and black success are construed as direct threats Obama's presidency made that clear aspirations and the achievement of those provide no protection not even to the god-fearing on June 17th 2015 South Carolinian Dylan roof a white unemployed 21 year old high school dropout was on a mission to take his country back ever since George Zimmerman had walked out of a courthouse a free man after killing Trayvon Martin and a racially polarized nation debated the verdict roof had looked to understand the history of America trolling through the internet he stumbled across the Council of conservative citizens the traicee the progeny of the 1950s white Citizens Council that had terrorized black people close schools and worked hand-in-hand with state governments to defy federal civil rights laws despite the groups of vowed racist beliefs system in the mid to late 1990s as the Southern Poverty Law Center reports the group boasted of having 34 members who were in the Mississippi legislature and had powerful Republican Party allies including Vince Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi by 2004 Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour the chair of the Republican National Committee and 37 other powerful politicians had all attended tri-c events in the 21st century the tri-c's chair earl hope the third gave $65,000 to republican campaign funds in recent years including donations to the 2016 presidential campaign of rand paul rick santorum and ted cruz the traicee then enjoyed precisely the cachet of respectability that racism requires to achieve its own goals within american society and its website of hatred and lies provided the self-serving education Dylan roof so desperately craved he drank in the poison of its message got into his car drove to Charleston entered Emanuel AME Church and landed in a Bible study with a group of african-americans who were the very model of respectability roof prayed with them read the Bible with them thought they were so nice then he shot them dead leaving just one woman alive so that she could tell the world what he had done and why yet taken over our country he said and he knew this to be true well not even a full month after Dylan roof had gunned down nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump fired up his silent majority on of thousands in July 2015 with a makka promise don't worry we'll take our country back no it is time that we take our country forward into the future a better future thank you [Music] thank you thank you thank you yeah and so do some Q&A there's gonna be at least one microphone circulating right there's a couple actually good raise your hands and our friends will find you hi is it working yeah I can barely hear myself that's why I don't know uh good evening thank you so much for for your presentation and I got the book I want it signed I'll be the first in line I'm a big admirer of your work and I gotta say us as an educator I'm a professor in English and I do believe in the power of Education and I do know that on a daily basis one of the biggest challenges that I have when teaching my students at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is specially to help them deal with the idea of white privilege and avoid having them just turn back and just say like wait no I'm not privileged you know I don't have I'm not a millionaire and so I wonder if you have any ideas as to how we can better educate people about the consequences of privilege and how not only should they be aware of it and how it works but how to actually prevent the kinds of oppression that it often perpetuates thank you thank you great question I mean I'm glad I'm not taking her exam one of the things that I do in my class is I have my students actually do the research themselves because it's one thing to have me going womp womp womp womp like the Charlie Brown adult right but I'm also very well aware that as I walk in it's black woman so there are all kinds of there's all kinds of stuff that goes with that identity of black woman but there is something about getting into the documents themselves so for instance I had one of my students who just you know he's like I don't understand this whole racism thing I don't get it and I don't understand how after the civil rights movement black folks are still where they are so it really seems to me that the structural stuff has been removed the laws have been changed so if black folks can't cut it it's because black folks can't cut it that sounds that sounds a lot like what we hear right I mean we hear it in different guises we hear it in different forms but that's what it's saying then he got into the records and one of the things is that there was an organization that actually tracked Klan membership in Georgia's judiciary and legislature yeah and this is post-civil rights so this is tracking in the 70s 80s and 90s when he gets into those records and he starts identifying who the judges are and the kinds of cases that they're ruling on he's like wait a minute wait a minute we've got some systemic stuff happening here and that is part of what allowed him to become open to seeing things into asking that next question one of the key elements one of the things that I did with white rage is that usually in conversations about race in America and we have all been there it turns into either a shouting match it either turns into guilt anger just read all gone dick you lessness that's my term and a lot of that is because it's based on myth it's based on well you know all of those black folks on welfare but that means that we don't really understand what the real numbers on welfare truly are and so what I or affirmative action how many of you have heard the mess about affirmative action that we've got all of these unqualified minorities getting into college yes yes getting these jobs when you really look at the way affirmative action works and so we we end up in these myths and so what I set out to do in white rage was to actually have fact-based documented so there's like almost like a footnote after every sentence it feels like in there because I want people to be able to go to the sources themselves and learn for themselves to then be able to have fact-based conversations evidence-based conversations because that's the way we're going to get out of this mess that's the way it's going to work I fully truly believe so let's take affirmative action because that is one of those hot buttons you know that's the one because part of the way that white rage works as well is it treats things like a zero-sum game so that the only way that black people can get can be at the expense of whites right I mean this is how we've heard this thing come up all the time affirmative action the actual greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action and college admissions our males particularly white males now that's not the story you get and you're looking going wait a minute what do you mean richest beneficiary dude oh I love that look right there you like I mean he's looking up at me like what you talking about Willis [Laughter] let me explain basically in high school girls are kicking butt they take their academics seriously the girls are like yeah yeah their GPAs are higher generally their test scores higher and their accomplishments violinist National Merit Scholar data so when college admissions officers are looking if they went straight by these kinds of straight academic achievements what they're going to end up with is a is an incoming class that is far disproportionate female-to-male something like 65 to 35 or something like that now the problem is is that many universities and colleges are going after those u.s. News & World Rankings because they like to do this way well you know we're number 27 well you know we're number 15 well you know we went up three spots I mean y'all y'all heard this before right well if a college or university is overwhelmingly female its rankings aren't as high and college admissions officers are like I am here to make sure that our rankings are high the other problem is is that males don't want to go to a college or university that is that far disproportionate female and females don't want to go to a college or university that is that disproportionate so on those three markers of and so what that means then is that college admissions officers have to dig down deep in the mail pile in order to come up with almost a balance in the incoming class but that means then that they're digging down where the cutoff for for the females has been here for the male's it's here the greatest beneficiary because of the gendered imbalance in terms of academic Chi I'm seeing some crazy swag happening here right now you're like yeah I'm gonna be wearing that on campus yeah is it and so that's the greatest been but what we hear like in the Abigail Fisher case out of Texas right is that unqualified minorities got her slot let me walk quickly through Abigail Fisher's case okay so Texas has it's ten percent rule if you graduate in the top ten percent of high school in Texas you're you gain automatic admission what that has actually done has been to provide for a disproportionate number of whites in the incoming class at Texas now that's not the story we hear but that's what has happened then what Texas does after that initial ten percent is that they have the second tier like the B tier and in that they're looking for grades test scores something that makes you stand out are you a great soprano do you have them crazy acting chops you know is there something are you on the debate team is there something that you're bringing forth and race is also one of the factors it is not the factor it is one in a large constellation of factors in that second tier and don't quote me on the numbers but there were like forty seven students admitted in that second tier of that number like forty two were white there was another group of african-americans and Latinos who had higher test scores and higher GPAs than Abigail Fisher who were not admitted Abigail's focus are on the five African American and Latinos who were admitted into the University of Texas and she thought it was her slot because that's part of the way the zero-sum game works her slot because her father was a graduate from Texas and so she thought she ought to get the legacy now the way that legacies works so like with with Harvard Harvard's incoming class this year was 30 percent legacy and over 90 percent white because if your student population in previous years has been all white then generally their children will be white and so the legacy automatic so it's built in without being racialized without seeing race you see how this works and so and so let me tell I'm Nam on this a while but this is but that so let's take California because remember I talked about California the dollar to dollar swap and California ended affirmative action with prop 209 was that a talk but will by Troy duster who was a professor out there at the time he's now at NYU I believe but what he talked about was Berkeley has 3,500 incoming slots for freshmen he said we couldn't grow because the state was pulling money from us so we couldn't hire more faculty we couldn't build more residence halls we couldn't grow the capacity of the university because the funding simply was not there because it was moving he could see a dollar-for-dollar moving from universities to prisons so they had 3500 slots he said we had 16,000 applications for 3500 slots 9,000 of those had 4.0 so automatically you have 5500 if you just do a slice on okay we're only taking four point o's you've got 50 500 4.0 s that are not getting into Berkeley now one of the other things then is that college admissions officers are asking questions about the dynamics of that incoming class do you really want an incoming class of only 4.0 s no no and I know that sounds shocking doesn't it you're like well of course you do no you really don't you want some 4.0 is up in there to be sure but what if you've got somebody who is an incredible artist and has a three nine and so those are the choices that are having to be made in this resource constriction because we have made a choice to fund prisons and not education and then we have defined that as a zero-sum game where whites are being taken advantage of in losing their opportunities because of this thing called political correctness and affirmative action that is making unqualified people take their slots part of the work that we have to do is that conversation we have with the facts because once we know how this thing really works not how the sound bites work and when we're having the conversations among ourselves one of the major ways to defuse the power of white rage is to get rid of the zero-sum game and to really think about how vibrant we could really be if we've made the kinds of investments in our people so that we have the kind of strength culturally politically economically where that pie is doing what it's supposed to do instead of where we were where we can continue to conceptualize it like this because as I said we spent a trillion dollars on the war on drugs what do we have to show for it what would a trillion dollars look like if we put it into education what would a trillion dollars look like if we put it into healthcare what would a trillion dollars look like if we could fix those potholes those are the kinds of conversations that we need to have is it's being fact-based it's being non polemical it's listening I mean it's really important to listen and it's a conversation that whites need to have with whites because I know that was a long answer hi I'm general likes I'm a human rights studies student here at University of Dayton so I've grown up in a generation that a lot of society believes we're colorblind especially you mentioned Michelle Alexander's new Jim Crow in the mass incarceration system obviously our systems are not colorblind in and of themselves what are some practical ways that our younger generation which sees a lot of the civil rights movements and stuff like that as historical issues and not as much present because we like to think we're colorblind what are some practical ways that we can get out and start changing those systems I think practically I've got to say right now my students are on fire they're there they they've they felt as I twice they felt the earth move underneath them and so they're mobilizing they are organizing they are reading they and it's not just protesting to be protesting they're being very strategic because they understand I mean so so like the civil rights movement I teach a class on the civil rights movement I taught at this spring after the election all right I walked into that class and I said you're in Mississippi the mayor hates you City Council hates you your state legislature hates you cops hate you your US senator and your US Representative Supreme Court President there like I said but you know what folks in Mississippi in 1950 face those conditions and they figured it out let's do that and so part of what we do is I teach the for instance the civil rights movement of strategy so yes we get the narrative but it's not just it's not just sitting down or protests and they have they were very strategic they figured out the strengths and the weaknesses in the system they figured out who their allies were they figured out who their allies were for each engagement realizing that the allies that are with you in this engagement may not be with you in this one and understanding what that means but you're going to need them here and you may not need them there because there's somebody else to pick up this piece it's understanding the way that media works it's understanding the that we tend to think monolithically you know so it's that you know well the government well it turns out in the government that there are people in bureaucracies within that government that are actually allies it's identifying them giving them the work the the tools that they need to work within that bureaucracy while you're pushing on the outside in boudoir radicals the the second book I did that's what the n-double-a-cp did as it was figuring out how do you take down colonialism because I'm fascinated by how do you change a norm how do you change something like colonialism when it was really cool to have Empire my Empire is bigger than yours did I show you my Empire oh my gosh we read their records and you're like really dawg really how do you change something that was a status symbol how the European powers understood what made them a great power into something that becomes this burden that they really didn't want to say that they had and to get rid of as fast as they could what kinds of mobilization and forces make that happen and that's what I track in bushwa radicals part of that was the n-double-a-cp identifying folks within the UN identifying folks within the State Department that they could begin to pass policy papers and position papers and background information - that could help then reframe and reshape the debates that were happening internally while the n-double-a-cp is pushing and its allies are pushing from the outside we have much to learn from this history in many ways we've been here before and it just feels like or as Fred Sanford uses a lose bat it really feels now see on I don't enough to know Sanford and Son but in that history are the strategies that the seemingly powerless used to find and wield that power to craft a space for us to be here today our work is to do again and that's what we do we so realistically we are looking at our allies we are talking we are coordinating we are figuring out the weak points in in a system of oppression and we are pushing on those weak points we are figuring out how to reshape and reframe the narratives so that what looks caki phonic or it looks illegible we can't quite figure it out that we're able to put a very powerful narrative on it that captures the sensibilities of people who have either been complacent or have been confused or haven't thought that it affected them that's what we do does that help okay I think I think it's about time we call it a night thank you so so much [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: University of Dayton

Views: 68,077

Rating: 4.6815476 out of 5

Keywords: Carol Anderson, White Rage, Human rights, University of Dayton, racism, Racial Divide

Id: o5sFcee1TLo

Length: 84min 47sec (5087 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018