White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

by Carol Anderson

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.

The bottom line was that black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination.

As in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order.

The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.

Why use property taxes as the basis for funding schools when that method rewards discriminatory public policy and perpetuates the inequalities that undermine our society?