White Rage

by Carol Anderson

138. Irons, Jim Crow’s Children, 177.

  139. “Table 233: Educational Attainment by State,” U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0233.xls, accessed July 3, 2015; U.S. Census Bureau, “State Rankings—Statistical Abstract of the United States: Personal Income Per Capita in Current Dollars, 2007,” http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank29.html, accessed July 3, 2015; Miranda Hitti, “How States Rank on Health Care: Hawaii Is First, Oklahoma and Mississippi Are Last on Foundation’s First State Scorecard on Health Care,” WebMD, http://www.webmd.com/news/20070613/how-states-rank-on-health-care, accessed July 3, 2015.

  140. “Farmville, VA: Income Map, Earnings Map, and Wages Data,” http://www.city-data.com/income/income-Farmville-Virginia.html, accessed June 7, 2015.

  141. “Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks at OECD’s Release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 Results,” December 7, 2010, http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-oecds-release-program-international-student-assessment-pisa-2009-results, accessed July 4, 2015.

  Four Rolling Back Civil Rights

  1. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006); J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 291, 309, 311, 355; Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 562; Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Touchstone Book, 2001), 370–74, 520–30.

  2. Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).

  3. Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 29; Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Touchstone Books, 1978, 1990), 435; Jill Lepore, “Richer and Poorer: Accounting for Inequality,” New Yorker, March 16, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/richer-and-poorer, accessed August 4, 2015.

  4. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, foreword by Cornel West (New York: New Press, 2010, 2012), 6.

  5. James W. Loewen, “The Last Innocents: The Civil Rights Movement and the Teaching of High School History,” Southern Changes 17, no. 2 (1995): 14–17; Derrick P. Aldridge, “The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Teachers College Record 104, no. 4 (April 2006): 662–86; William Brink and Louis Harris, Black and White: A Study of U.S. Racial Attitudes Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 121; Jim Tankersley, Peyton Craighill, and Scott Clement, “Half of American Whites See No Racism Around Them,” Washington Post, June 18, 2015; Lepore, “Richer and Poorer.”

  6. Nixon, RN, 435. Also see Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. ____ (2013) http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf, accessed August 15, 2015.

  7. Danny Vinik, “The Economics of Reparations: Why Congress Should Meet Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Modest Demand,” New Republic, May 21, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117856/academic-evidence-reparations-costs-are-limited, accessed July 26, 2015; Joe R. Feagin, “Documenting the Costs of Slavery, Segregation, and Contemporary Racism: Why Reparations Are in Order for African Americans,” Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 20 (2004), 53–55.

  8. Patrick J. Buchanan, “A Brief for Whitey,” March 21, 2008, http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-a-brief-for-whitey-969, accessed July 31, 2015.

  9. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Matthew Yglesias, “America’s Slaves Were More Valuable Than All Its Industrial Capital Combined,” Slate, July 18, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/18/america_s_slave_wealth.html, accessed July 27, 2015; L. Todd Wood, “No Oprah, I’ve Never Owned A Slave … Am I Supposed to Feel Guilty About Something I Didn’t Do?” Western Journalism, April 8, 2014, http://www.westernjournalism.com/news-flash-left-living-american-ever-owned-slave, accessed July 26, 2015; Sarita Choury, “S.C. Rep. Supports Flag: ‘We Didn’t All Come from White, Plantation Homes,’” Savannah Morning News, June 25, 2015, http://savannahnow.com/news/2015-06-25/sc-rep-supports-flag-we-didnt-all-come-white-plantation-homes, accessed July 26, 2015; John Foster, White Race Discourse: Preserving Racial Privilege in a Post-Racial Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 97.

  10. Raymond Wolters, Right Turn: William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration, and Black Civil Rights (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Stephanie Greco Larson, Media and Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 90–91. For the rationale behind affirmative action, see “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commencement Address at Howard University: ‘To Fulfill These Rights,’ ” June 4, 1965, http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650604.asp, accessed July 29, 2015.

  11. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 54; Brink and Harris, Black and White, 129; Joshua L. Rabinowitz, David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Jon A. Krosnick, “Why Do White Americans Oppose Race-Targeted Policies? Clarifying the Impact of Symbolic Racism,” Political Psychology 30, no. 5 (2009): 805–28.

  12. See, for example, Ben Shapiro, “Dylann Roof Was Ultimate Lone Wolf, Left Blames Right Anyway,” Breitbart, June 22, 2015, http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/06/22/dylann-roof-was-ultimate-lone-wolf-left-blames-right-anyway, accessed August 3, 2015; John Blake, CNN, “The New Threat: ‘Racism Without Racists,’ ” November 27, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/26/us/ferguson-racism-or-racial-bias, accessed August 15, 2015.

  13. Jesse Curtis, “Awakening the Nation: Mississippi Senator John C. Stennis, the White Countermovement, and the Rise of Colorblind Conservatism, 1947–1964” (master’s thesis, Kent State University, 2014), 149.

  14. Mark Green and Gail MacColl, There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 85–86, 90, 91; Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 59.

  15. Brink and Harris, Black and White, 106, 129.

  16. Curtis, “Awakening the Nation,” 147.

  17. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 5–6.

  18. Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), 290.

  19. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 15, 19; O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 280–81.

  20. Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68–97.

  21. David O. Sears and Tom Jessor, “Whites’ Racial Policy Attitudes: The Role of White Racism,” Social Science Quarterly 77, no. 4 (December 1996): 756.

  22. Brink and Harris, Black and White, 100, 120.

  23. Ibid., 104; “Indicator 16: Median Family Income,” 44, National Center for Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/yi/yi16.pdf, accessed July 26, 2015. Table B–42: Civilian Unemployment Rate, 1965–2011, Economic Report of the President, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ERP-2012/pdf/ERP-2012-table42.pdf, accessed July 26, 2015.

  24. No. 263. Educational Attainment, by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1960 to 1998, U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999, 169, https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec04.pdf, accessed July 26, 2015.

  25. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968); Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 US 1 (1971); Penick v. Columbus Board of Education, 5
83 F.2d 787 (1978).

  26. Herbert Hill, “Race and the Steelworkers Union: White Privilege and Black Struggles,” review of Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America, in New Politics 8, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 32, Winter 2002, http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue32/hill32.htm#r15, accessed November 15, 2015; Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971).

  27. Rosemary Stevenson, “Black Politics in the U.S.: A Survey of Recent Literature,” Black Scholar 19, no. 2 (March–April 1988): 58–61.

  28. Brink and Harris, Black and White, 120.

  29. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 29; Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 551–78.

  30. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 361.

  31. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 44.

  32. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 281.

  33. Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 74.

  34. Jaclyn Ronquillo, Thomas F. Denson, Brian Lickel, Zhong-Lin Lu, Anirvan Nandy, and Keith B. Maddox, “The Effects of Skin Tone on Race-Related Amygdala Activity: An fMRI Investigation,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2, no. 1 (2007): 39–44.

  35. “The First Civil Right,” Nixon campaign ad, 1968, http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1968, accessed August 8, 2015.

  36. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 30; Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 44, 46–47.

  37. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 30.

  38. For the history of linking African Americans with crime, see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2010); Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  39. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 296.

  40. Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics.

  41. Berman, Give Us the Ballot, 74.

  42. Ibid., 76; Allen v. State Board of Elections, 393 U.S. 544 (1969). Also see Todd S. Purdum, “The Republican Who Saved Civil Rights,” Politico Magazine, March 31, 2014, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/the-movers-behind-the-civil-rights-act-105216, accessed August 8, 2015.

  43. Berman, Give Us the Ballot, 77.

  44. ABC News Turning Point, “Murder in Mississippi: The Price of Freedom,” Anthony Ross Potter (producer), (New York: ABC News, 1994), VHS.

  45. Thornton, Dividing Lines, 487–89.

  46. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 109–110, 215.

  47. Department of Justice, “History of Federal Voting Rights Laws: The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 1965 Enactment,” http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/intro/intro_b.php, accessed July 30, 2015.

  48. South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327–28 (1966).

  49. Colby, “The Voting Rights Act and Black Registration in Mississippi,” 130; Dean J. Kotlowski, “Unhappily Yoked? Hugh Scott and Richard Nixon,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 125, no. 3 (July 2001): 247.

  50. Berman, Give Us the Ballot, 77.

  51. Kotlowski, “Unhappily Yoked,” 247–49.

  52. Berman, Give Us the Ballot, 78.

  53. Ibid., 83; South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301; Lawrence Edward Carter, Walking Integrity: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 43–44.

  54. Department of Justice, “The Effect of the Voting Rights Act,” http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/intro/intro_c.php, accessed July 30, 2015.

  55. Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 1218 (1969) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/396/1218/case.html, accessed July 30, 2015.

  56. Nixon, RN, 418–24; Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Clement Haynsworth Dies at 77; Lost Struggle for High Court Seat,” New York Times, November 23, 1989.

  57. Robert D. Bullard, “The Mountains of Houston: Environmental Justice and the Politics of Garbage,” Cite (Winter 2014), 28–33; Christopher Silver, “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities,” in Urban Planning and the African American Com-munity: In the Shadows, ed. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997), http://www.asu.edu/courses/aph294/total-readings/silver%20–%20racialoriginsofzoning.pdf, accessed August 4, 2015.

  58. Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court, 141.

  59. Ibid.; Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District, 337 F. Supp. 280 (1971).

  60. Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District.

  61. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973); Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court, 141.

  62. Catherine S. Chilman, “Families in Poverty in the Early 1970’s: Rates, Associated Factors, Some Implications,” Journal of Marriage and Family 37, no. 1 (February 1975); 51, 53.

  63. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Cherminsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court, 143; Samantha Meinke, “Milliken v Bradley: The Northern Battle for Desegregation,” Michigan Bar Journal (September 2011), 20.

  66. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

  67. Ibid.

  68. Cornell University Law School, Legal Information Institute, “Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke,” https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/438/265, accessed August 16, 2015; William Trombley, “Bending of Medical School Admission Rules Rapped: UC President, Regents’ Chairman Upset over Davis Dean’s Favors for Powerful and Wealthy,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1976.

  69. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978); Lewis Powell to William Brennan, memo, July 23, 1978, Bakke 76-811, Folder 10, Lewis Powell Papers, Washington and Lee School of Law, http://law2.wlu.edu/powellarchives/page.asp?pageid=1322, accessed July 7, 2015; Memorandum to the Conference from Mr. Justice Powell, 1st Draft, November 1977, 23, Powell Papers; Justice Byron R. White, Memorandum for the Conference, October 13, 1977, Powell Papers; William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8.

  70. Scott Jaschik, “Affirmative Action for White C+ Guys,” Inside Higher Ed, November 2, 2006, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/02/towson, accessed August 8, 2015; Rob Mank, “Men Far More Likely to Benefit from Affirmative Action in College Admissions,” CBS NEWS, September 26, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/men-far-more-likely-to-benefit-from-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions, accessed August 8, 2015. Administrators struggle to create gender balance on campuses because men’s entrance qualifications are far below women applicants.

  71. Justice Marshall dissent, First Printed Draft, June 28, 1978 (2 of 2), Bakke 76-811, Powell Papers, Washington and Lee School of Law, http://law2.wlu.edu/powellarchives/page.asp?pageid=1322, accessed July 7, 2015.

  72. Joseph L. Naar, “Blacks in College Doubled Since 1970,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 37, no. 3 (July 1978): 239–40.

  73. Bowen and Bok, The Shape of the River, 1–11.

  74. Frank Newport, “Americans Say Reagan Is the Greatest U.S. President,” Gallup, February 18, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/146183/Americans-Say-Reagan-Greatest-President.aspx, accessed August 7, 2015.

  75. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 355.

  76. Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, produced by Pro Bono and Pagano, produce and directed by Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano (New York: First Run Features, 2010), 88 minutes, DVD; Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 48; Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, 66.

  77. Comment by Hugh Jim Bissell on August 13, 2015, at 07:01:07 A.M. PDT, https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/11/1411087/-Head-of-Dept-of
-History-at-West-Point-destroys-argument-that-Civil-War-wasnt-fought-over-slavery?detail=emailclassic, accessed August 15, 2015.

  78. Bob Herbert, “Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant,” New York Times, October 6, 2005.

  79. Michael Schaller, Ronald Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3, 35; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5; Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 323, 326–32, 334, 341–44; Jill S. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  80. Pearl T. Robinson, “Black Political Power—Upward or Downward,” The State of Black America, 1982 (New York: National Urban League, 1982), 83; Ellen Warren, “Reagan Urges ‘Colorblind’ Society,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 12, 1986, http://articles.philly.com/1986-02-12/news/26089072_1_soviet-nuclear-secrets-illegal-quotas-colorblind-society, accessed November 16, 2015; Peter Grier, “Reagan and Civil Rights: Building Just Society; Affirmative Action v. Colorblindness,” Christian Science Monitor, May 26, 1983, http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0526/052641.html, accessed November 16, 2015.

  81. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 370; Green and MacColl, There He Goes Again, 89; Niara Sudarkasa, “Black Enrollment in Higher Education: The Unfulfilled Promise of Equality,” National Urban League, The State of Black America, 1988 (New York: National Urban League, 1988), 8, 10, 11–12.

  82. Green and MacColl, There He Goes Again, 116.

  83. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 370.

  84. Anne C. Lewis, “Administration Seems Willing to Turn Back Both the Clock and the Constitution on Civil Rights,” Phi Delta Kappan 64, no. 8 (April 1983): 523–24; Wolters, Right Turn, 335–58.

  85. William Bradford Reynolds, “Individualism vs. Group Rights: The Legacy of Brown,” Yale Law Journal 93, no. 6 (May 1984): 1002–3; Mary C. Doyle, “From Desegregation to Resegregation: Public Schools in Norfolk, Virginia 1954–2002,” Journal of African American History 90, no. 1–2 (Winter 2005): 73–76; John E. Jacob, “Black America, 1987: An Overview,” The State of Black America, 1988, 2; Anne C. Lewis “With Liberty and Justice: For Whom?” Phi Delta Kappan 67, no. 3 (November 1985): 179–80.