“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.” White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. “White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies…It’s not the Klan. This two-steps-forward, and some-number-of-steps-back pattern in American history is the result of what Carol Anderson calls “white rage.” Anderson is a professor of African American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. She describes “white rage” this way.
The progress of the Civil rights era was met by Nixon’s war on drugs and what Michelle Alexander has dubbed the New Jim Crow.Īnd then, in 2016, after eight years of an African American presidency, a new election – fraught with examples of voter suppression – resulted in the election of the most blatantly racist administration in modern history. The end of the civil war and the eradication of slavery was met with the Black Codes in Mississippi and nine other former confederate states, new laws “that undercut any chance or hope for civil rights, economic independence, or even the reestablishment of families that had been ripped apart by slavery.” (Anderson, 19) Then in response to the Reconstruction came the Jim Crow Laws. Every inch of progress has been met with a countervailing counterforce.
Have we made progress in this country in terms of race? Yes, but it has not been straight forward. And yet we hardly need reminding, that the ideal which we seek lies in stark contrast to the reality in which we live.
0 kommentar(er)
