Pat Taub
As I compulsively followed news stories of record numbers of Americans taking to the streets to protest the racist cop murder of George Floyd, I kept asking myself, “Why is America still so racist in 2020?”
In search of answers, I spent the weekend reading Carol Anderson’s “White Rage,” an historical account of how white rage against blacks has defined our nation from the days of Reconstruction to 2020.
I knew we were a racist country but I thought we were making progress. Before I read “White Rage,” I assumed white supremacy was restricted to Southern bigots like George Wallace, but Anderson documents how virtually every contemporary president has conspired to keep blacks down.
Reconstruction’s overt racism has been replaced by institutional racism.
Every time Blacks advance, there’s push back through legal maneuverings to twist the law to undermine Black gains. Examples are: neighborhood lines drawn to keep schools segregated and underfunded, unfair employment practices, and policing that targets blacks, imprisoning black men at record numbers. Writer Michelle Alexander refers to the astronomical incarceration rates of blacks as “the new Jim Crow,”
Pushback against Reconstruction acts like the establishment of Freedmans’ schools.
Trump’s overt racism makes him the evil twin of dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist President Andrew Johnson. Just as Johnson did every thing in his power to make life miserable for blacks, including blocking them from voting, Trump has cut back on social programs for blacks, and is threatening to shut down the post office to prevent mail-in ballots, often the best option for blacks and people of color who can’t take time off from work to vote.
Andrew Jackson and Trump, possibly the biggest racists to occupy the White House.
Anderson contends that the long pattern of denying black children decent schools and equal educational opportunities is based on the fear of seeing literate blacks advance over whites.
The one-room schoolhouses black children inhabited hundreds of years ago have been replaced by overcrowded, decrepit black schools that receive only a fraction of educational funds awarded to white schools.
Anderson cites the tenacity of blacks, who time and again, overcame huge obstacles, exemplified in the Great Migration, the period in the early 1900’s when Southern blacks emigrated to the North for higher paying jobs. Southern sheriffs, fearful that their pool of cheap labor would dissolve, appeared at train stations, ripped up tickets of black passengers or delayed Northern-bound trains for days on end. Undeterred, blacks created an underground message network to get around local sheriffs.
Southern blacks waiting to board trains for the North.
Important black legal gains, like the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education, which found Jim Crow schools unlawful, were circumvented. Schools across the country, but especially in the South, passed laws to avoid implementing Brown.
In 1957 Russia launched Sputnik, becoming the first country to land in space. In response Congress, deciding we needed smarter kids, pumped money into public education, creating the National Defense Education Act. The monies were craftily allocated in a way that black schools were left out. Anderson laments the loss of potential space engineers among talented black children.
When the 1965 Voting Rights Act was first applied in the South the number of black registered voters went from 6.7% to 59.4%. This victory was short lived. Nixon’s Supreme Court, in a series of cases challenging the VRA, stripped it of its legitimacy.
The Reagan administration made life miserable for blacks through the “war on drugs,” imprisoning blacks like there was no tomorrow. If that weren’t enough, Reagan oversaw savage cuts to anti-poverty programs.
Anderson describes how Obama’s win emboldened white rage. Threatened by the large black vote Obama received, immediately after he was elected, voter suppression mechanisms went into overdrive to deny the black vote in future elections. This is the reality we face going into the Nov. 3rd election.
Anderson asks the reader “to rethink America.” Little did she know a few years after writing this, the US would be in full protest mode, demanding a more equal, compassionate country. I hope we can get there.
