White Rage: Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

so much for being here at noon when you could be eating and i want to thank sherry for inviting me i i've got to tell you when i heard she was coming to georgia tech you probably heard the james brown ow all the way from memory because i was like yes what i'd like to do is to kind of give you an overview of how i got to white rage and then read a couple of excerpts from the book and then open it up for q a and so white rage began with an op-ed that i did for the washington post as ferguson blew up but white rage actually in my head began germinating long before that it began germinating in february 1999 when amadou diallo a young black man steps out of his apartment building in new york city the nypd roll up on him and fire 41 bullets 19 of them hit amadou of course went down because that's what 19 bullets do to you amadou had no weapon he had no criminal charge he was just a man who had been at work all day and wanted to go get something to eat and for that he was gunned down because he was black now that was bad enough but then it was watching mayor rudy giuliani on ted koppel's nightline talking about this and he barely barely mentions amadou diallo's name it's like he didn't even exist instead what rudy giuliani talked about was how well his policies were working how new york was a much safer city how crime had gone down and he had his flip charts showing that his policies were working and i'm thinking your policies don't work if an unarmed man is gunned down you know i mean you've got 41 bullets coming at him but that didn't seem to resonate but i've got something back in here going there's something going on and then as a scholar i continue to work continue to work continue to write continue to think continue to work and then boom august 2014 and i'm watching tv and ferguson is on fire and it didn't matter what station i turned to whether it was msnbc cnn or even fox they were all saying the same thing they were talking about black rage look at black folks burning up where they live why do black people burn up where they live now depending then on the station you got the question of what is wrong with black people or you got the whole black people but whatever it was it was a thing about black rage but there i was and and then i realized i'm shaking my head because i'm seeing shoulder to shoulder shoulder to shoulder and i said no what we're really dealing with here is not black rage what we're really dealing with here is white rage and then i went er whoa because then it was like that moment when it began to crystallize i had lived in missouri i taught at the university of missouri for 13 years so i had lived in missouri for a while and i saw the way that public policy systematically eroded african-americans access to their basic citizenship rights things like ferguson is 67 percent black you had a six percent turnout rate in the twenty thirteen municipal election black turnout rate sixty seven percent of the population is black six percent turnout rate for african americans in the 2013 election you got to do some kind of incredible policy tweaking twerking to turn 67 percent down to six and they did ferguson the school where school system where michael brown went to school had been on probation for 15 years let me explain what probation means in missouri missouri has a a scale that okay so you get so many points for graduation rates you get so many points for ap you get so many points we're done about so many points we're not enough you a school system can get 140 points michael brown school system got 10. for 15 years so we have a system that is really cool with taking an entire generation of black children through a school system that can only garner 10 points a year and then have another slew coming in 15 years at 10 policy the police force in ferguson did not believe it was there to protect and serve it looked at that black population as revenue generators who brought in about 25 of the operating budget for the city of ferguson which means you stop folks all the time you didn't turn on your your turn signal when you change that lane that didn't look like a full stop you were going five miles over the speed limit now understand that while the police are doing this they're also letting whites go so you've got disparate policing here this is what's going on in ferguson but that's not what you saw in the narrative that was coming out instead it's like look at black folks burning up where they live well i'm into policy i study policy and i started looking at this saying okay what we have here is that in the united states you kind of think about the kind of society that we are we like the spectacular we like the and we have paid so much attention to the flames that we've missed the kindling we see the eruption but we don't see all that made that eruption possible so what i set out to do in that washington post op-ed was to make white rage visible to basically grow blow graphite onto a fingerprint and trace because this is the other thing this is an a historical nation in so many ways we we see the now but we don't see how we got here and i'm a historian so i took us back to the civil war and reconstruction and moved us all the way up through obama but you know you can only do so much in a thousand-word op-ed and so i then turned white rage that op-ed into a book one of the pieces that i began to work through was that white rage is often invisible it's invisible because it isn't about violence often when we think about um racism or racial violence or we're thinking about the klan burning across somewhere white rage works through the courts it works through the legislatures passing laws it works through city councils and school boards in those very boring meetings where all kinds of things are being decided about school districts about gerrymandering voting districts white rage is often invisible and cloaked in the the the the the shawl of respectability and what i also began to understand is that for white rage it's not the mere presence of blackness the mere presence of black people that provoke this this incredible um sense of angst and anger that comes through in policies instead it's black advancement black progress black achievement that is the trigger for white rage it's black people who refuse to accept their subjugation it's black people who demand their rights it's black people who aspire who achieve it's black people who refuse to give up it's black people who are resilient now think about the crazy dichotomy that that is because what we are doing as a society is we are punishing black people via policy for achieving in the land of opportunity we are punishing black people for aspiring and it sounds almost fantastical until you look at the history because how else do we explain how government after government after government has fought so hard to ensure that black children would not get a decent education we see this coming out of slavery we particularly see it in the road up to the brown decision after brown it was like boom we will shut down the entire school system before we'll see to it that black children get access to equal resources for a decent education think about all of the machinery the legislative and judicial machinery that it took to shut down public school systems across the south to ensure that black children would not get an education but what they did was to use the tax money to fund um vouchers tuition payments for white students to go to white only private academies so that white children would continue to get educated using tax dollars tax dollars that black parents were paying into those coffers while black children sat out why because black children wanted to get an education think about that or as we know this nation has a war on drugs that has led to mass incarceration and michelle alexander has laid that out beautifully in the new jim crow african americans there's studies coming out of the university of washington and out of duke that show that african americans use drugs the least and sell drugs the least of all racial and ethnic groups so then you've got to ask yourself now self yes we do have those conversations how is it that the group that is using drugs the least and selling drugs the least are arrested and incarcerated at 10 times the rate for others how are we punishing most those who are doing it the least so we're punishing folks for not using drugs and not selling drugs we're decimating economies and communities that way but yes we are or think about in a democracy how we punish black people for voting that just doesn't add up does it but that is what we have done as a society we we're living in this moment again right now because obama had the audacity to believe he could be president and you saw a wave of new voters in 2008 casting ballots 15 million new voters including two million new african-american voters two million new hispanic voters six hundred thousand new asian american voters and you also saw a wave of voters who make less than fifteen thousand dollars a year coming out to the polls now what we say as a democracy is that we want people to have a stake in this in this land because we know that a mass of alienated individuals in fact makes the nation creak and crumble if nation loses its legitimacy but when people have a stake in what's going on you begin to have the kind of vibrancy that sustains a nation but we have punished black people for voting and understand that all of this was not done with burning across this was done by the u.s supreme court this was done by the u.s congress systematically methodically and so i set out in the book to trace these key signposts of white rage reconstruction in reconstruction in reconstruction you have this moment where four million freed people move from being property to being humans into being citizens that is a seismic shift you want to talk about advancement property to citizen the apparatus of the state came up like nobody's business to quash that one of those methods was the black codes that i talk about extensively in the book then there's the great migration the great migration is that moment where ten percent of the black population left the south it was when they said we control our own destiny yes we control our own destiny we want better jobs we want good schools for our children we want the right not to be lynched and so we're out of here and the response from the south was stopping the trains now remember in the middle of a war that's stopping the trains banning the chicago defender don't we have the first amendment then i also begin to track the brown decision that's the third moment because here with brown the u.s supreme court says separate and unequal has no place in american society it is the thing that is supposed to drive the stake through the heart of jim crow instead you've got massive resistance where you have over a hundred congressmen senators signing an oath basically that they will resist the supreme court's ruling with everything that they have you get states like virginia that begin to put the mechanisms in place to shut down the public school systems in prince edward county for instance in virginia they shut down the school system for five years i want you to kind of think about that you're in the fifth grade they shut down your school you don't have a school until you're in the tenth grade what have you lost in terms of education and learning from the fifth grade to the 10th grade and remember this is also at that time when the us's industrial economy is beginning to flip and is beginning to move to a knowledge-based economy so what we have basically done is to conscribe a mass of people to destitution because we have refused to believe that they have a right to quality education then there's the civil rights movement that gives us the southern strategy and the southern strategy has so much to do with the moment that we're in right now and then there's obama's election and so those are the five signposts that i map out in whiterage and then walk us through the policies and i look particularly at education the criminal justice system and the right to vote what i'd like to do right now is to read a few passages from it okay yeah i'm going to need my glasses on this one and you know and this is one of the things like so you know with glasses you you need one set for reading and another one so i'm going to be doing this but after the brown decision as i said there was massive resistance um and by the time we get so brown as 1954 brown two which is the with all deliberate speed is 1955. by 1970 we're still fighting so you know you so you've already had another generation of children going through in texas a group of parents in the neighborhood called the edgewood district edgewood was 96 mexican-american and black it was the poorest district in san antonio but they valued education for their children so much that they taxed themselves their property at the highest rate allowable in the state and as we know schools are funded via property taxes overwhelmingly but the value of your property has so much to do with public policy where the city's zoning laws will allow for instance the landfill because if your house is next to a landfill i'm here to tell you it doesn't have much value where the city is going to allow say liquor stores and not when you begin to look at the ways that zoning laws work you begin to see the effect and impact on property values so they taxed themselves at the highest level and were able to generate 21 per capita 21 dollars per student now alamo heights which was a predominantly white neighborhood in san antonio taxed themselves at basically near the lowest rate and they were able to generate over 300 dollars per student by taxing themselves at nearly the lowest rate while taxing edgewood taxing themselves at the highest gets to 21 the folks in edgewood scream foul that having schools based on property taxes that are based on discriminatory policies inherently violates the brown decision and equal protection under the law in a march 1973 ruling a 5-4 decision and the five justices four of them were richard nixon appointees and one was an eisenhower appointee they ruled that there is no fundamental right to education in the constitution and that texas's laws did not discriminate against all poor people in texas now thurgood marshall whom by the way i love thurgood marshall his descent is powerful i'm going to read a piece of it fully recognizing the implications of rodriguez this is the rodriguez decision justice thurgood marshall was apoplectic more than 40 percent of black children 14 and under lived with families below the poverty line as compared with about 10 percent of white children under those circumstances marshall feared african-american children would not stand a chance the decision he wrote in his descent could only be seen as a retreat from a commitment to equality of educational opportunity as well as an unsupportable capitulation to a system which deprives children of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens he was simply dumbfounded that the majority would acknowledge the existence of widely disparate funding for schools across texas but then instead of focusing on the cause of that disparity clumsily pirouette to all of the state's supposed efforts to close the gaps the issue marshall explained is not whether texas is doing its best to ameliorate the worst features of a discriminatory scheme but rather whether the scheme itself is in fact unconstitutionally discriminatory and he founded the height of absurdity that texas could actually argue that there was no correlation between funding and school quality and then from that faulty premise deduce that there were no discriminatory consequences for the children of disadvantaged districts and he was therefore equally unimpressed with texas's tendency to parade before the justices stories of children who had excelled despite living in under-resourced districts as some sort of proof that funding was irrelevant that a child could excel even when forced to attend an underfunded school with poor physical facilities less experienced teachers larger classes and a number of other deficits compared with a school with substantially more funds marshall bart is to the credit of the child not the state but rodriguez placed the onus solely on the backs of the most vulnerable while walling off access to the necessary resources for quality education and played beautifully into the colorblind post-civil rights language of substituting economics for race yet achieving a similar result the simple truth was that by virtue of the sheer demographics of poverty rodriguez would have not only a disparate impact on african-american children but a disastrous one i know sobering and you should her face is up here she's just like oh man and that's how i felt when i was researching and writing this i did yeah there were times i'm doing this so the next one that i'd like to read to you deals with the war on drugs it has been as effective as anything else in rolling back the gains from the civil rights movement in terms of access to equal protection under the law and voting rights now and in the book i kind of walk through very briefly how michelle alexander's how she talks about what the court has done its rulings in terms of really creating a racially biased criminal justice system and then i give an example i'm going to talk about tulia texas has everybody here heard of tulia oh okay taken together those rulings allowed indeed encouraged the criminal justice system to run racially amok and that's exactly what happened on july 23rd 1999 in tula texas in the dead of night local police launched a massive raid and busted a major truck 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 central sentinel ran the headline tullia streets cleared of garbage the editorial praised law enforcement for reading tui of drug dealing scumbags well 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 attached to the federally funded panhandle regional narcotics task force based in amarillo about 50 miles away from tulia 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 undercover drug purchases he was held as a hero and his testimony immediately led to 38 of the 46 being convicted with the other cases just waiting in the clogged court system joe moore a pig farmer was sentenced to 99 years for selling two hundred dollars worth of cocaine to the undercover narcotics agent kizzy white received 25 years while her husband william cash love landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine there's that face again the case began to unravel however when kinsey'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 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 a tall bushy-haired man only to have bryant bald and about five feet six appear in court it finally became 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 on the bags of drugs except his 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 lord you can't make this up but to have accidentally remove the evidence when he showered now i say to you i gotta stop right i gotta stop right there because we've got either two really bad things happening here either the man did not shower for 18 months or he did a drug buy wrote it down showered wiped it off and went oh man then the next day did a drug buy shower wiped it off oh man so we've got two bad things happening here neither of which really hit the level of plausibility and i'm telling when i read that piece i went no no yeah [Music] additional investigation led to no corroborating proof of his allegations and when the police arrested those 46 people and vigorously search 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 drug kingpins what was discovered however was judicial misconduct running rampant in the war on drugs in tullia texas with a clear racial bias coleman had accused 10 percent of tulia's black population of dealing in cocaine based on his word alone 50 of all black men in the town were indicted convicted and sentenced to prison randy credico of the william moses consular fund for racial justice call tulya a mass lynching taking down fifty percent of a male black population like that it's 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 are on the jury and they're going to string you up anyway but this wasn't 1930 it was the beginning of the 21st century and a powerful civil rights movement had bridged those two eras and yeah finally what i'd like to do is the last reading and then open this up for questions is on the obama era because obama's victory unleashed white rage in ways that we didn't even think imaginable so i deal a lot with the voter suppression but there was also an incredible level of violence and so i'm gonna respectability or appropriate behavior doesn't seem to matter if anything black achievement lack aspirations and black success are construed as direct threats obama's presidency made that clear aspirations and the 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 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 tri-c the progeny of the 1950s white citizens council 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 about racist belief system in the mid 19 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 then 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 earl hope iii 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-c then enjoyed precisely the cache 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 dylann 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're taking over our country he said and he knew this to be true well not even a full month after dylann roof had gunned down nine african-americans at emmanuel ame church in charleston republican presidential front runner 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 more than a century and a half of anger and fear have undermined american democracy trampled on the constitution and treated some citizens as chattel and others as collateral damage this didn't have to be the land of opportunity did not have to be the land of missed opportunities we as a nation have a choice we've always had those choices but instead of seizing the moment and moving forward we have been diverted by the rage and the fear that have kept us spiraling and recurring themes of racism discrimination disfranchisement illiteracy and a thoroughly inequitable criminal justice system it is time to diffuse the power of white rage thank you i'm

Channel: CMOFOTO

Views: 221,192

Keywords: RACE WHITE RAGE

Id: cVAf8_5QH_I

Length: 41min 35sec (2495 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2017