White Rage

by Carol Anderson

  It is time to rethink America.

  Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freedpeople—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education.

  Imagine the educational prowess our population might now boast had Brown actually been implemented. What a very different nation we would be if all the enormous legal and political efforts that went into subverting and undermining the right to education had actually been used to uphold and ensure that right. If all those hundreds upon hundreds of millions of federal dollars poured into science education had actually rained down on those hungry for education, regardless of race, ethnicity, or income. Think about what a different national conversation we might be having, even as the economy turns ever more surely to knowledge-based, rather than watching our share of the world’s scientists and engineers dwindle.

  Imagine if the Civil Rights Movement had really resulted in Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community,” instead of in a society that, to this day, willfully celebrates the very presidential administration that launched a war on drugs against its own people, who were neither mobilized nor addicted to begin with—a war on drugs that was manufactured out of whole cloth for devious and self-serving ends. Think about how different our cities and our rural areas would be without the scourge of drugs that has decimated families and communities. What if all the billions of dollars that have been diverted into militarizing police for a phony war and building prison after prison had been devoted instead to education, to housing, to health care?

  Imagine if, instead of launching into spurious attacks about his citizenship and filling the blogosphere with racist simian depictions, the United States had been able to harness the awe-inspiring symbolism of our first black president, which had already led an Iranian and a Russian, among others, to see something in the spirit of America that surpassed even its material wealth.

  We shouldn’t have to imagine.

  Full voting rights for American citizens, funding and additional resources for quality schools, and policing and court systems in which racial bias is not sanctioned by law—all these are well within our grasp. Visionaries, activists, judges, and politicians before us saw what America could be and fought hard for that kind of nation. This is the moment now when all of us—black, white, Latino, Native American, Asian American—must step out of the shadow of white rage, deny its power, understand its unseemly goals, and refuse to be seduced by its buzzwords, dog whistles, and sophistry. This is when we choose a different future.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you doesn’t even come close. So please accept the power and gratitude behind the words for making this book possible. Thank you to the Op-Ed Project for helping me hone my voice, especially Chloe Angyal. In life there are game changers: Jelani Cobb and Carlos Lozada, you opened the door to the Washington Post. Thank you. Then came Rob McQuilkin, who saw what the article could become. Thank you for your insight, support, brilliance, and humor all along the way. You are the sine qua non. Claire Mao, you are indispensable. Susan Whitlock, once again, you jumped in with a keen, masterful eye. Wow! George Gibson, an editor like no other. You are simply amazing. What a gift you have and are.

  At Emory University, I thank Robin Forman, who helped in more ways than he can know to make this book a reality. Nathan McCall, thank you for providing great insight on how “to write to the front page.” Natasha Trethewey, thank you for the priceless advice. I was blessed with a cadre of research assistants who knocked it out of the park! Thank you, Teresa Green, Erica Sterling, and Timothy Rainey II. Thank you, Dianne Stewart, who encouraged me above and beyond the call of friendship; there’s a special place in the universe for you. La Shanda Perryman, I remain in awe. You took care of business so that I could do the same. How you helped me keep every last one of those balls in the air, I’ll never know, but I’m so glad you did.

  And most of all, I thank a wonderful group of friends and colleagues who read every single word, provided insightful feedback, and did so quickly even when their own research agendas, administrative responsibilities, and teaching loads were overflowing. Your generosity is incomparable. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Dorothy Brown, Sherman James, and Brett Gadsden. Dorothy, in particular, I have to single out and give my heartfelt gratitude. You persuaded me, in your distinct South Bronx way, to apply to the Op-Ed Project; you read proposals and chapters; you listened and then asked the most powerful frame-changing questions; and you directed me to salient and timely resources, especially concerning the law, the justice system, tax policy, and the Supreme Court. Maya Angelou has a poem with your name all over it: “Phenomenal Woman”—that’s you.

  Finally, I have a family that is wild, unruly, fun, smart, irreverent, and politically contentious and that has my back at all times. Earl, David, and Wendell, thank you. Barry, Rhea, Lisa, Monica, Shirley, and Uncle Sam, Aunt Barbara, and Aunt Lennie, your love and patience are priceless. And to the two most wonderful sons, Aaron and Drew, who help me keep everything in perspective, I love you.

  Notes

  Prologue Kindling

  1. Carol Anderson, “Ferguson Isn’t About Black Rage Against Cops. It’s White Rage Against Progress,” Washington Post, August 29, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ferguson-wasnt-black-rage-against-cops-it-was-white-rage-against-progress/2014/08/29/3055e3f4-2d75-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html.

  2. Michael Cooper, “Officers in Bronx Fire 41 Shots, and an Unarmed Man Is Killed,” New York Times, February 5, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/05/nyregion/officers-in-bronx-fire-41-shots-and-an-unarmed-man-is-killed.html, accessed September 9, 2015.

  3. Nightline, “America in Black and White: The Shooting of Amadou Diallo,” ABC, February 26, 1999.

  4. Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss, “An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias,” Journal of the American Statistical Association (September 2007): 813–23; New York City Department of Planning, “2000 Census Summary,” https://www.census.gov/census2000/states/ny.html, accessed November 22, 2015.

  5. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  6. Missouri v. Jenkins, 495 U.S. 33 (1990); Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70 (1995).

  7. This American Life, “The Problem We All Live With,” July 31, 2015, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/transcript, accessed November 19, 2015.

  8. Gary R. Kremer, Antonio F. Holland, and Lorenzo J. Greene, Missouri’s Black Heritage, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); Greg Gordon, “2006 Missouri’s Election Was Ground Zero for GOP,” Common Dreams, May 3, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/05/03/2006-missouris-election-was-ground-zero-gop, accessed November 19, 2015; U.S. Department of Justice, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” March 4, 2015, http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf, accessed November 19, 2015.

  9. For the health consequences of black resilience, resolve, and success, see Sherman A. James, “John Henryism and the Health of African Americans,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18 (1994): 163–82.

  10. Jo Jones and William D. Mosher, “Fathers’ Involvement with Their Children: United States, 2006–2010,” National Health Statistics Report, no. 71 (December 20, 2013): 1–21, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr071.pdf, accessed September 7, 2015; Frank Vyan Walton, “The Absent Black Father Myth—Debunked by CDC,” Daily Kos, May 13, 2015, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/13/1383179/-The-absent-black-father-myth-debunked-by-CDC, accessed Ju
ly 28, 2015; Christopher Mathias, “NYPD Stop and Frisks: 15 Shocking Facts About a Contro-versial Program,” Huffington Post, May 15, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/13/nypd-stop-and-frisks-15-shocking-facts_n_1513362.html, accessed September 8, 2015; “White and Hispanic Teens More Likely to Abuse Drugs Than African Americans,” Duke Medicine, November 7, 2011, http://corporate.dukemedicine.org/news_and_publications/news_office/news/white-and-hispanic-teens-more-likely-to-abuse-drugs-than-african-americans/view, accessed September 8, 2015; Karolyn Tyson, William Darity Jr., and Domini R. Castellino, “It’s Not ‘A Black Thing’: Understanding the Burden of Acting White and Other Dilemmas of High Achievement,” American Sociological Review 70, no. 4 (August 2005): 582–605.

  One Reconstructing Reconstruction

  1. Alexander Tsesis, ed., The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), xviii.

  2. A. J. Langguth, After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 59; “Personal Freedom,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/enlight/person.htm, accessed January 16, 2015.

  3. “Personal Freedom,” PBS.

  4. James M. McPherson, “In Pursuit of Constitutional Abolitionism,” in The Promises of Liberty, ed. Tsesis, 27; “Civil War Casualties. The Cost of War: Killed, Captured, Wounded, and Missing,” http://www.civilwar.org/education/civil-war-casualties.html, accessed January 25, 2015.

  5. “Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln,” Saturday, March 4, 1865, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp, accessed November 6, 2015.

  6. Theda Skocpol, “America’s First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War Veterans,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (Spring 1993): 85–116; Megan J. McClintock, “Civil War Pensions and the Reconstruction of Union Families,” Journal of American History 83 (September 1996): 456–80; Donald R. Shaffer, “ ‘I Do Not Suppose That Uncle Sam Looks at the Shin’: African Americans and the Civil War Pension System,” Civil War History 46 (June 2000): 132–47.

  7. David Brion Davis, “The Rocky Road to Freedom: Crucial Barriers to Abolition in the Antebellum Years,” in The Promises of Liberty, ed. Tsesis, xiii.

  8. Alexander Tsesis, “The Thirteenth Amendment’s Revolutionary Aims,” in The Promises of Liberty, 10, 11; Davis, “The Rocky Road to Freedom,” xii; Langguth, After Lincoln, 23.

  9. William M. Wiecek, “Emancipation and Civic Status: The American Experience, 1865–1915,” in The Promises of Liberty, ed. Tsesis, 87.

  10. Michael Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 33; Rick Beard, “Lincoln’s Panama Plan,” New York Times, August 16, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/lincolns-panama-plan/?_r=0, accessed November 22, 2015.

  11. “Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention,” January 9, 1865, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/tenncon.htm, accessed February 25, 2015.

  12. Frank L. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: The Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931, 1959).

  13. Langguth, After Lincoln, 61.

  14. Confederate States of America—Mississippi Secession: “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,” Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp, accessed January 27, 2015.

  15. Davis, “The Rocky Road to Freedom,” xvi.

  16. “The Condition of Affairs in South Carolina,” Liberator, June 23, 1865.

  17. Davis, “The Rocky Road to Freedom,” xvii.

  18. Frederick Douglass, “The Serfs of Russia … Were Given Three Acres of Land,” in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1892), https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/recon/douglass.htm, accessed January 13, 2015.

  19. Davis, “The Rocky Road to Freedom,” xvi.

  20. “Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention,” January 9, 1865, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/tenncon.htm, accessed February 25, 2015.

  21. “The Fight for Equal Rights: Black Soldiers in the Civil War,” http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war, accessed February 18, 2015; Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, American Presidents Series, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz (New York: Times Books, 2011), 98.

  22. Leslie M. Harris, “The New York City Draft Riots of 1863,” excerpt from In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html, accessed February 19, 2015.

  23. Davis, “The Rocky Road to Freedom,” xviii.

  24. Langguth, After Lincoln, 87.

  25. “The Condition of Affairs in South Carolina,” Liberator, June 23, 1865.

  26. Samuel Thomas: Testimony before Congress (1865), Col. Samuel Thomas, Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands in 39th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate Exec. Doc. 2 (1865).

  27. Michael A. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 148.

  28. Langguth, After Lincoln, 39–40, 74.

  29. Ibid., 39–40.

  30. Mark O. Hatfield, with the Senate Historical Office, Andrew Johnson (1865): Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789–1993 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1997), www.senate.gov.

  31. Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 113; Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams, 105–6.

  32. St. George L. Sioussat, “Andrew Johnson and the Early Phases of the Homestead Bill,” Mississippi Valley Historical Association 5, no. 3 (December 1918): 273.

  33. Langguth, After Lincoln, 134.

  34. Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 115; Richard B. McCaslin, “Reconstructing a Frontier Oligarchy: Andrew Johnson’s Amnesty Proclamation and Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 313; W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1865–1880, introduction by David Levering Lewis (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 246.

  35. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 245.

  36. “Forty Acres and a Mule,” BlackPast.org, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/forty-acres-and-mule, accessed February 19, 2015.

  37. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 223.

  38. Langguth, After Lincoln, 106, 115.

  39. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988), 159–61.

  40. Langguth, After Lincoln, 83; Peter Dreier, “The Status of Tenants in the United States,” Social Problems 30, no. 2 (December 1982): 181; Hannah L. Anderson, “That Settles It: The Debate and Consequences of the Homestead Act of 1862,” History Teacher 45, no. 1 (November 2011): 118.

  41. Sioussat, “Andrew Johnson and the Early Phases of the Homestead Bill,” 276–80; Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 115, 121.

  42. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 245; Brooks D. Simpson, review of Hans Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography, in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 114, no. 3 (July 1990): 446–48; David W. Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).

  43. Sioussat, “Andrew Johnson and the Early Phases of the Homestead Bill,” 276.

  44. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams, 112–13; Langguth, After Lincoln, 121.

  45. Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 100.

  46. “Report on the Condition of the South by Carl Schurz,” first published 1865, 39th Congress, Senate, 1st Session, Ex. Doc. No. 2, 89–91, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/give-me-liberty4/docs/CSchurz-South_Report-1865.pdf, accessed February 19, 2015; Langguth, After Lincoln, 111.

  47. Ibid.; Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 117.

  48. Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 118.

  49. Hatfield, “Andrew Johnson.”

  50. Gordon-Ree
d, Andrew Johnson, 118–19.

  51. “Radical Politics in Virginia (May 1866),” in Documentary History of Reconstruction, vol. 1, ed. Walter Lynwood Fleming (Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark, 1906), 230, 231.

  52. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams, 111.

  53. Louisiana Democratic Platform, October 2, 1865, in Documentary History of Reconstruction, ed. Fleming, 229; Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856).

  54. Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, 112.

  55. Quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 199.

  56. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 167.

  57. Mississippi Black Code, Laws of the State of Mississippi, Passed at a Regular Session of the Mississippi Legislature, Held in Jackson, October, November, and December, 1865 (Jackson, 1866), 82–93, 165–67; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Random House, 1980), 368; David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), 21.

  58. Foner, Reconstruction, 209, 215.

  59. Langguth, After Lincoln, 108–9.

  60. “Labor in the Rebel States,” North American and United States Gazette, November 18, 1865.

  61. “What the South Has Done,” North American and United States Gazette, November 18, 1865.

  62. Andrew Johnson, “First Annual Message,” December 4, 1865, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29506, accessed February 21, 2015.

  63. Jennifer Mason McAward, “McCulloch and the Thirteenth Amendment,” Columbia Law Review 112, no. 7, Symposium: The Thirteenth Amendment—Meaning, Enforcement, and Contemporary Implications (November 2012), 1786–87; Francis Newton Thorpe, The Constitutional History of the United States (Chicago: Callaghan and Co., 1901), 200–201, 209–10, 220.

  64. Langguth, After Lincoln, 132.

  65. Stephanie Condon, “After 148 Years, Mississippi Finally Rati-fies 13th Amendment, Which Banned Slavery,” CBS News, February 18, 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/after-148-years-mississippi-finally-ratifies-13th-amendment-which-banned-slavery, accessed February 22, 2015.