White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide

first let me just say thank you it is so wonderful having you here today it is wonderful being honored with the john f morgan senior distinguished faculty lecturer and it is wonderful to be at emory i wanted to talk about white rage and i know it sounds crazy but let me talk about how a black woman got to white rage and although it looks like it began with ferguson actually it began in february 1999 when a black man came home from a hard day's work and he went home got into his apartment and realized there was no food you know that when you come home you worked hard you look in the refrigerator and the refrigerator is looking back at you and there's that moment where he's just and he's like oh but he's in new york and you know new york the city that never sleeps so you know there's going to be food available so he goes outside he steps on his apartment you know the the porch and a car rolls up four officers of the nypd hop out guns drawn 41 bullets later amadou diallo goes down 19 of those bullets hit ahmadu diallo was unarmed he had committed no crime there was no warrant out for his arrest he was just a black man in the bronx now that is bad enough but then i'm watching ted koppel's nightline and mayor rudy giuliani is on and giuliani is just unrepentant and ted koppel as you know is not a softball interviewer and he is on giuliani he's like i'm ado i'm a do i'm a do and rudy's like what he barely says the man's name what he does say my policies are working new york city is safer now than it has been in years and he pulls out his little flip charts with a little grab showing crime going down my policies are working new york city is safer and i'm thinking it's not safer for amadou safer for whom and the policies that he's talking about is the broken windows policing policy that broken windows policing policy basically hyper polices black and brown neighborhoods criminalizing black people criminalizing brown people you jaywalk the cops are on you drop some litter on the ground cops are on you you're standing cops are on you you're walking cops are on you you are getting ready to step off the curve cops are on you that hyper policing is the policy that mayor rudy giuliani said was working and while he talked about it he said and my police force is the most restrained and best behaved in the united states i'm in kafka land right now you know where where gregor sampson's this big cockroach but everybody's acting like it's normal right you know because i'm thinking most restrained and best behaved don't fire 41 bullets at an unarmed man i know something is wrong but i don't know how to name it and you know we have to name things in order to be able to face them to be able to deal with them and so i don't know what to call this thing and i'm just going but as a scholar i keep writing i keep researching i keep thinking i keep teaching i keep writing i keep researching i keep thinking and then in august 2014 i'm at in my home office and the tv is on and i look up who and ferguson is on fire i mean the flames are everywhere and it didn't matter i had the remote in my hand and i'm flipping the channels and it didn't matter let me see my left hand it didn't matter if i'm msnb watching msnbc yeah cnn or fox out it didn't matter it all said the same thing look at black folks burning up where they live did you know that black people were burning up where they lived black folks are burning up where they live what is wrong with black people burning up where they who burns up where they live because one of the things you begin to understand is that america needs the narrative of black pathology you know everything would be fine if only black folks would right we've heard this and then you begin to fill in the blank if only they would value education if only they would not be thugs if only they would you fill in the blank in terms of that black pathology because that is absolutely necessary in the narrative of america and so there i'm watching msnbc cnn and fox all with the same narrative of black pathology this black rage they're talking about well i'm sitting up there and i'm shaking my head you know how you're shaking your head like and then i realize i'm looking shoulder to shoulder to shoulder to shoulder i'm shaking my head so hard and i said no this is white rage this is white rage i had lived in missouri for 13 years i saw the way that policy worked i saw the way that policy systematically and systemically undermined african-americans access to their citizenship rights but as a nation we were so focused in on the flames that we missed the kindling that kindling let's talk about some of that kindling at ferguson kindling 67 of ferguson's population is african-american in the 2013 municipal election the black voter turnout rate was six percent how do you turn 67 percent of the population into six percent of the voters those are numbers from jim crow alabama you do it very via a series of policies the ways that you hold your elections the ways that you craft your ballots there's a whole series of tricks that you can use to change 67 percent into six kindling because you begin to think about what it means if you don't believe that you even have a say in who your representatives are kindling let's talk about the schools michael brown school system missouri rates its school systems it accredits them on a 140 point scale graduation rates matriculation rates test scores the whole nine yards and you can get a total of 140 points how many points do you think michael brown's school system got how many on 140. 20. that's a good one eric that's a good one 20 out of 140 right any anybody else 10 whoa aren't okay i believe that's called cheating [Laughter] 10 10 out of 140 points for 15 years what that means then is that the public policy leadership was very comfortable with pulling an entire generation of black children through a school system that could garner no more than 10 points an entire generation and then start pulling another generation through because we're at 15 points from k through 12. kindling kindling let's talk about the police we know that the police are here to protect and serve yeah because i'm going to be doing this throughout because there's a kind of hymn book that we sing from right we know right we know the police are here to protect and serve so in this protect and serve except in ferguson they looked at that black population as revenue generators so you're doing 26 and a 25 boom ticket i don't think you've fully stopped at that stop sign boom ticket ah looks like you've got a broken tail light boom ticket and this is a working class neighborhood and so when you start hitting this neighborhood this community with fifty dollar tickets twenty five dollar tickets eighty dollar tickets hundred dollar tickets and you begin to think about what that means you pay the ticket or you pay your rent you pay the ticket or you keep food on the table you keep the lights on there's not disposable income here when you don't pay that ticket the next time you're doing 26 and a 25 because now there's a warrant out for your arrest then you are jailed and then the entire criminal justice process of fines and court fees and bail are all pulling from this working-class black community by the time when ferguson blew those fines and those tickets accounted for 25 percent of ferguson's operating budget 25 and let me be really clear justice was not blind justice in fact had what you call had lasiks because justice was so if the police would happen to stop somebody white and try to hand them a ticket and go oh sorry sorry not you or if the police officer handed somebody a wide a ticket and somebody white went in to go then pay the ticket it was like what are you doing i'm trying to pay this ticket and to tear up the ticket so you're getting this massive extraction from the working-class black population in ferguson kindling and so as i began to think about this kindling i began to think about the way that white rage worked white rage is not about visible violence we often think of rage as visible we often think of racism as this visible thing but white rage is subtle it is corrosive it operates through the state legislatures through congress through the judiciary through school boards it cloaks itself in legalities and so i set out man so because it's so quiet it's so subtle you don't see it and so i set out to blow graphite onto that fingerprint to be able to trace white rage throughout time not all the way back to time immemorial with the dinosaurs but at least up to the civil war all the way through to 2016. and one of the things that became clear to me as i started thinking through how white rage works it became clear to me that the presence of black people was not the trigger for white rage there's that stun almost what you're talking about willis look it is the presence of black people with ambition the presence of black people with drive the presence of black people with aspirations the presence of black people who achieve it's the presence of black people who refuse to accept their subjugation the presence of black people who demand their rights that's the trigger for white rage and this society has therefore punished black resilience and black resolve now at this point this sounds like i'm a scooby-doo-ish right because we know it's so counter-intuitive because we think of the u.s america as the land of opportunity right and so all you've got to do is work hard yes and i'm telling y'all another hymn right so so my baritones here we know the hymn we don't even have to pull out the book it is in the ether it's in the cultural language that we understand how this nation works but so what happens if you have a series of policies that in fact punish black achievement black aspiration and it sounds counterintuitive but how else can you explain how government after government after government has worked so hard to see to it that black children do not get a quality education let me give you a couple of examples in 1947 in prince edward county virginia the school board finally agreed to build a high school for the black children because remember this is a completely segregated system jim crowed and so in 47 that would be after the u.s helped defeat the nazis i need to put that in its time frame then we get a high school for black children in prince edward county within a few years that school is bursting at the seams two to three times as many children are in this space than that building can hold and so the black parents are going to the school board the all-white school board saying we need an additional school we've got kids bursting at the scene it's doggone near impossible for them to learn sitting one on top of the other like that we need a new building the school board was like no and the parents are pushing hard unrelenting demanding education for their children and the school board finally relented and put up three tar paper shacks and said your kids can go there now meanwhile the white school is nice brick with indoor plumbing which is not available in the black high school in 19 by this time we're in 1951. so there was a a young woman barbara john 17 and barbara johns was like my name is the wrong one you're going to take this you're going to take this no you're not taking this you're gonna take this yeah you're like no we're gonna walk on out of here aren't we and she starts organizing that school for a massive walkout a massive demonstration saying we're not having this we're not having it they rose up and boom hit the door administrators were like what what just happened here and they were like yeah yeah now it was she wasn't playing and so the death threats started coming in on this 17 year old child who was demanding quality education it was so bad that her parents had to spirit her way to safety to alabama boom i rest my case you know when you got to go to alabama for safety in 1951 meanwhile prince edward county becomes one of the school districts that's bundled into the brown case now when brown came down prince edward county said i got something real for you and so what the town fathers working with the state legislature decided to do was to shut down the entire public school system because that way if we've got to have equal schools then black children and white children equally do not have access to a public school and you can almost hear the aren't i smart written on them except you know so black parents are like what but they're not listening to black parents white parents are like what and they're like oh no no no we got this you know we're not going to let your white babies go you know go uneducated you know that and so what they have done is that they have set up taxpayer-funded vouchers to pay for the tuition for white children to go to all white segregated private academies so white children continue to be educated and there is absolutely nothing for black children thousands upon thousands of black children and it wasn't just in prince edward county this was in areas throughout the south and when these schools are shut down prince edward county is shut down for five years begin to think about that you're in the fifth grade when your school opens up again you're supposed to be in the 10th think about everything that you have lost in those precious five years and this is at that moment where the u s economy is beginning to transform from a manufacturing based economy to a technology-driven knowledge-based economy and we have all of these black children that the governments and the school boards have said will not be educated period what does this mean let me give you some sense of the of the power of white rage so brown one and i see law professor robert shapiro here brown one 1954 where separate but equal has no place in public education did i quote that right yes okay brown two 1955. this is the implementation decision with all deliberate speed 1956 101 u.s congressmen and senators dug in signed the southern manifesto vowing massive resistance to the supreme court decision we will use every level of power within our control to fight this thing 1957. radio signals pick up beep beep beep and you hear president eisenhower going dang dang dang because beep is sputnik the soviets have launched a satellite into the air into orbit and it is a technological feat that the u.s did not believe that the soviets could master but not it's more than that the soviets have their nuclear arsenal but the u.s is thinking yeah but they don't know how to get over the atlantic or the pacific we're good you know so we'll have some forward bases for our allies in europe and our allies in asia but we're good beep [Music] beep and so the federal government does something that it hadn't done before it pledges hundreds of millions of dollars into education to fund what they said would be the brain power to fight the cold war we need scientists and engineers to be able to counter to outrun to be able to outdo what the soviets are mastering here now this national defense education act was huge landmark and it was being guided through congress by two alabamians i think i just did spoiler alert so their concern was we want that money you you know universities like the money they like the money you know and when the feds are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to build labs and hire faculty and for post docs universities are like all on that but alabama was concerned because alabama's not admitting black folk alabama has a whites only admissions policy and we got the law of the land saying no you can't do that and so in this discussion with the eisenhower administration they're like we will shepherd this bill through we need to make sure that we do not have to abide by brown we need to make sure in financing the brainpower for the cold war that we get to maintain jim crow in our admissions policies and the federal government said yeah we're cool with that and so i'm thinking jim crow nuclear annihilation nuclear annihilation nuclear annihilation they're like no son jim crow that's more important than being able to ensure that our citizens our people have the education that they need in this incredible critical moment that's white rage anybody see hidden figures yeah think about what that would mean if we had had that kind of investment then and think about where we are now as we're trying to figure out how do we get more african-americans into stem fields when we have systematically refused to invest in those schools even after brown let me give us another give you another example the war on drugs we can really have church up in here now you know that right [Laughter] on the war on drugs because one of the ways that white rage works is it cloaks itself in reasonableness we have to keep our community safe we have to protect our children we have to ensure safety and security for our neighborhoods and who doesn't want a safe and secure neighborhood who doesn't want to protect our children it sounds reasonable but how is it then because the research is really clear that we have focused the war on drugs on the population that does drugs the least when it comes to cocaine the least and about the same when it comes to marijuana how is it in the war on drugs we have targeted those who do it the least how is it that we have spent one trillion dollars that's real money that's even beyond university money and that's what the whoo one trillion dollars on the war on drugs the war on drugs has destabilized state budgets when you think about public education i remember when i worked in ohio for the board of regents one of the things that we were fighting for was to try to get enough state money into higher education in order to drive the tuition down so that more and more students would be able to afford college instead that money went immediately into the corrections budget you can almost map like in california the dollar to dollar exchange coming out of the university of california budget going into the corrections budget and i just saw a figure that said it costs more now to incarcerate someone in california than it does to send them through harvard so this is not an issue of resources this is an issue of priorities and so you're asking yourself now self because that's how i talk to myself self what could could could drive this kind of thing where as a nation we're spending one trillion where we would destabilize our state budgets where we would block out access to higher education for our own folk but then when you realize that the war on drugs really began to emerge after the civil rights movement and those incredible gains the 1964 civil rights act and the 1965 voting rights act hard fought for blood all along the way but if you have a felony conviction which is what mass incarceration does all of a sudden your access to the non-discrimination clauses in the civil rights act there are things you cannot do with a felony conviction there are places you cannot live there are student loans you cannot have access to so you cannot go to school if you've got that felony conviction and you want to talk about the right to vote let's take florida okay i hear some folks like yeah take it say florida in florida florida has what they call permanent felony disfranchisement now what that means because it's not quite permanent but after you serve your sentence and then your your time out like parole then you have to wait 14 years from that moment to then be able to individually petition the governor asking for your voting rights back what that means is that when you look at florida about 40 percent of black men are not able to vote in florida because of felony disfranchisement 40 percent overall for african americans is somewhere between 23 to 25 percent of voting age eligible african americans cannot vote in florida now florida doesn't mind counting their heads when it comes to the census in order to get the number of representatives in congress is just though that those folks do not have any kind of say in who their representatives will be in a representative democracy it reminds me of the three-fifths clause so while i'm talking about the vote let me just move on to that next piece in 2008 barack obama was elected president of the united states seems like a long time ago doesn't it and and and the way that he did it though is that through his organization that organizing capacity in those communities 15 million new voters came to the polls in 2008 15 million now what we say as a democracy is that we love that because that means then that people aren't alienated that they believe they have a stake in this nation that they believe that they they have a buy-in because what we know is that if you have masses of alienated people in your society your society is getting ready to quake but having people buying in believing they have a stake 15 million and then let me give you some some of the data the demographic data on that 15 million 2 million were african-american that's almost a third of atlanta think about that in terms of two million were hispanic six hundred thousand were asian americans and almost doubling the percentage of those who made less than fifteen thousand dollars a year that's also known as ib broke okay 15 000 so to double almost double that percentage so think about that this is a kind of demographic richness it's the kind of demographic diversity that is really beginning to speak to america this is the kind of thing we should be embracing because you get black folk coming to the polls the response was massive voter suppression that specifically targeted those very groups voter suppression that went after african americans hispanics asian americans and the poor let me give you a couple of examples about the way that this policy works like voter id so one of the things again masking itself in is that you've got voter fraud have we heard about voter fraud we have rampant voter fraud it's everywhere and and we have to protect the integrity of the ballot box from this voter fraud now justin levitt a law professor out of california actually ran the numbers and he found that from 2000 to 2014 there were 1 billion votes and 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud 31 is rampant but under the myth the lie of voter fraud one of the things that we see coming to the fore is the demand for voter id now again it sounds innocuous we have a major problem voter fraud we're only requiring people to have id it sounds simple enough but the way that it works like in alabama let's start with alabama in alabama in fact in 2011 alabama passed a voter id law but they knew that this law could not get through the department of justice where alabama had to have pre-clearance via the voter rights act to get any of the laws that it was changing in terms of voters through the department of justice and so and and what that meant for instance is that the republicans tape themselves saying things like we've got to figure out how to depress the black voter turnout okay i'm thinking that's a smoking gun and you know we've got these aborigines and these illiterates who will get on these hud finance buses and drive themselves to the polls so they know that this law is not going to get through the department of justice but the moment virtually the moment that the supreme court gutted the voting rights act with the shelby county beholder decision in 2013 alabama implemented that law the way that the law works is it says you must have a government-issued photo id to vote okay and so in alabama alabama's a poor state it's ranked number 47th or 48th in terms of poverty that's poor and so you have a lot of folks in public housing in fact 71 of the people in public housing are african-american in alabama alabama decided that public housing id would not count in order to be able to vote now i'm like i don't think it gets more government issued than public housing but you see in that one move what you're able to do is you're able to wipe away black folk and poor folk by crafting which ids are acceptable to be able to vote and this is a a mechanism that we will see throughout then what alabama did alabama the governor then shut down the department of motor vehicles in the black belt counties the black belt counties are the counties that have a sizable to majority black population so when you shut down the department of motor vehicles then that means that you've got to go a couple of counties over in order to be able to get the the id that you need in order to be able to vote except you don't have a driver's license and alabama is ranked 48th in the nation in terms of public transportation so you don't have public transportation to get there again it looks innocuous on the surface but the ways that the policy works it is designed to destroy african americans access to the ballot box that victory that was won in 1965. i could go on i really could yeah i'm going to go on just a bit more because this stuff is crazy so you take texas in texas texas texas required a government-issued photo id then said your student id like from the university of texas which would be a state-funded institution university would not count but your government your your i'm sorry your concealed gun permit would so your gun permit counts and your student id does not again this is a way you can begin to shape the electorate in terms of who has access to the polls what texas also did is that only in about one-third of the counties in texas is there a department of motor vehicles only in one third and so texas in fact when they were drawing up the law sb14 they figured out that for almost two million of the p of their citizens it was going to be about 125 mile one-way trip to the nearest department of motor vehicles which means a 250-mile round trip and so initially in the law they had we will reimburse you but right before that law passed they drew a line through the reimbursement so now you have to figure out how to make a 250 mile round trip without a driver's license without public transportation to be able to get the card that you need to be able to vote this is how you shape the electorate this is how you begin to punish black people and brown people for voting and poor people and asians this is how you do it and understand that all of this was done without a clan cross burning all of this was done with folks in judicial robes not white sheets this is how white rage works the impact for instance of voter suppression in the 2016 election you know i talk about that kind of black pathology language that we have you know so after the election how many of you heard well you know black folks just didn't turn out to vote this was the first election in 50 years without the protections of the voting rights act black voter turnout went down by seven percent voter suppression works what i'd like to do now is just read a couple of sections from the book now i got to get my glasses on because i'm no longer 25 and the one section i'm going to read deals with the war on drugs and i start off by noting here we go i start off by noting the the what michelle alexander has done in going through and noting how in key supreme court cases racism has been embedded in the operating code of the war on drugs taken together those rulings allowed indeed encouraged the criminal justice system to run racially amok and that's exactly what happened on july 23 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 built 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 handcuffed in pajamas underwear and uncombed bed hair being paraded into the jail for booking the local newspaper the tulia sentinel ran the headline two of your streets cleared of garbage the editorial praised law enforcement for reading tui of drug dealing scumbags the raid was the result of an 18-month investigation by a man who would be named by texas's 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 operation and made more than 100 drug undercover undercover drug purchases he was held as a hero and his testimony immediately led to 38 of the 46 being convicted with 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 received 25 years while her husband william cash love landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine the case began to unravel however when kizzy's sister tanya went to trial coleman swore that she had 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 drugs 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 a tall bushy-haired man only to have bryant bald and 5'6 appear in court it finally became very clear that something was awry coleman in fact had no proof whatsoever 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 his on the bags of drugs no records over the span of an 18-month investigation he never wore a wire now he claimed to have written each drug transaction on his leg but to have washed away the evidence when he showered [Music] and i'm thinking either the boy hasn't showered in 18 months never mind additional investigation led to no corroborating proof of his allegations and when the police arrested those 46 people and vigorously searched their homes 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 in tulya texas with a clear racial bias coleman had accused 10 of tulia'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 credico of the william mosley consular fund called tulia a mass lynching taking 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 going to string you up anyway but this wasn't 1930 it was the beginning of the 21st century with a powerful civil rights movement that had bridged those two eras and finally this is in the chapter how to unelect a black president 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 in their achievement provide no protection not even to the god-fearing on june 17 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 the 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 tri-sea the progeny of the white citizens council of the 1950s that had terrorized black people closed schools and worked hand-in-hand with state governments to defy federal civil rights laws despite the group's availed racist belief system in the mid to late 1990s the group boasted of having 34 members who were in the mississippi legislature including then senate majority leader trent lott of mississippi by 2004 mississippi governor haley barber chair of the republican national committee and 37 other powerful politicians had all attended tri-c events in the 21st century earl holt iii who is chair of the tri-c gave 65 000 to republican campaign funds in recent years including donations to the 2016 presidential campaigns of rand paul rick santorum and ted cruz the tri-sea 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 dealing roof so desperately craved he drank in the poison of its message got into his car drove to charleston entered emmanuel 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 you've taken over our country he said and he knew this to be true well not even a full month after dylan roof gunned down nine african americans at emmanuel amy republican presidential frontrunner donald trump fired up his silent majority audience of thousands in july 2015 with a macabre promise don't worry we'll take our country back no it's time instead that we take our country forward into the future a better future thank [Applause] you

Channel: Emory University

Views: 5,581,726

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Id: YBYUET24K1c

Length: 51min 47sec (3107 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018

Reddit Comments

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[u/alllie]

Anderson earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1981 and 1983, respectively. She earned a PhD in history from The Ohio State University in 1995. She was awarded a fellowship to study at Harvard University in 2005, where she worked on her book, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2014, Anderson argued that the unrest following the 2014 Ferguson shooting was a manifestation of "white rage", or white backlash against African American advancement. The column was one of the most-read articles of the year, receiving thousands of comments, and Anderson was offered a book contract. The resulting book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, expanded on the history of anti-black racism and retaliation in the United States.

[u/2akurate]

The title already is a load of crap, i cannot believe people fall for this horse shit.

[u/bimyo]

Black people will advance when they stop blaming everyone else for their problems. They need to stop acting like children and step up to take care of themselves.

[u/bimyo]

Black people will advance when they stop blaming everyone else for their problems. They need to stop acting like children and step up to take care of themselves.

[u/Outrageous_Koala_547]

White Americans and their cognitive dissonance. Diversity Scary. Yet they attack the Capitol. Get help.