White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

by Carol Anderson

The House and Senate agreed, refused to scuttle “the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress,” and instead renewed the Voting Rights Act for another five years.

When, on July 3, 1969, the federal court ordered the state to implement Brown by that fall, Nixon’s attorney general, as well as his secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, convinced the judges to reverse the decision because “time was too short and the administrative problems too difficult to accomplish … before the beginning of the 1969–1970 school year.”

the Department of Justice, in league with HEW, ignored that Mississippi had already had more than a decade to develop a plan.

to put it another way, Alamo Heights secured nearly 1,500 percent more in funding with a significantly lower tax rate.

More than 40 percent of black children fourteen and under lived with families below the poverty line, as compared with about 10 percent of white children.

The decision, he wrote in his dissent, could “only be seen as a retreat” from a “commitment to equality of educational opportunity” as well as an “unsupportable” capitulation to “a system which deprives children … of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens.”

That a child could excel even when “forced to attend an underfunded school with poorer physical facilities, less experienced teachers, larger classes,” and a number of other deficits compared with “a school with substantially more funds,” Marshall barked, “is to the credit of the child not the State.”

For Marshall, the court’s decision had less to do with “the neutral principle of law” than it did with public sentiment that “we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal justice.” The consequences of this kind of cowardice for the United States, he warned, are “a course … our people will ultimately regret.”

Attempting to observe the law while also living up to an ethos they had now taken to heart, universities frantically turned to vaguer notions of “diversity,” but the definition of that word soon became so expansive that by the twenty-first century white males would actually be the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in college admissions.

Ronald Reagan oversaw the rollback of many of the gains African Americans had achieved through the Civil Rights Movement. Between 1981 and 1988, conditions regressed to levels reminiscent of the early 1960s.74

Despite his profession of, and supposed obsession with, a “colorblind” society where, as he said, “nothing is done to, or for, anyone because of race,” Reagan’s budget proposals targeted very specifically those programs in which blacks were overrepresented even as he protected the other portions of the “social safety net,” such as social security, where African Americans were but a small fraction of the recipients.

He also leveled a double-digit cut for a program designed to provide educational support for poor children in the classroom at the very moment when the share of black youth living below the poverty line had increased to almost 43 percent.

During the early 1980s, the overall black unemployment rate stood at 15.5 percent—“an all time high” since the Great Depression—while unemployment among African American youth was a staggering 45.7 percent.

There was just one problem. There was no drug crisis in 1982. Marijuana use was down; heroin and hallucinogens use had leveled off, even first-time cocaine use was bottoming out.102

But, as Reagan well knew, such a crisis was certainly coming, for it had been manufactured and facilitated

Reagan’s “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.

sold in little rocks of crack that reaped more than $230,000 per kilo in retail profit. Now, drug money, and all its attendant violence, pounded on a population with double-digit unemployment and declining real wages.

spread the pain as they set up drug franchises throughout the United States to sell crack like it was on the dollar menu.110 Soon crack was everywhere, kicking the legs out from under black neighborhoods.

The Reagan administration’s protection of drug traffickers escalated further when the CIA received approval from the Department of Justice in 1982 to remain silent about any key agency “assets” that were involved in the manufacturing, transportation, or sale of narcotics.

Unlike in 1981, when Reagan had indicated that treatment for addicts was the route he would take, his speeches and policies now became focused on enforcement, criminals, and harsh, no-mercy punishment.

With the onset of the epidemic of crack, a drug that had become thoroughly associated with African Americans, notions of treatment went out the window, despite numerous studies proving that treatment was not only more effective but also more fiscally sound and prudent. And, as one DEA agent remarked, “no one has yet demonstrated that enforcement will ever win the war on drugs.”

As the NAACP explained the law’s 100-to-1 formulation, “a person must possess 500 grams of powder cocaine before they are subject to the same mandatory prison sentence (5 years) as an individual who is convicted of possessing just 5 grams of crack cocaine (despite the fact that pharmacologically, these two drugs are identical).”

now, felony convictions, chiefly via the war on drugs, replaced the explicit use of race as the mechanism to deny black Americans their rights as citizens.

“in twenty states, the percent[age] of blacks incarcerated is at least five times greater than their share of resident population.”

Thus, the “United States did not face a crime problem that was racialized; it faced a race problem that was criminalized.”166

last of these, in some ways, was to be expected. What wasn’t anticipated, however, was that for the first time in history, the black voter turnout rate nearly equaled that of whites.5

Even the Bush campaign’s concerted drive to find rampant voter fraud throughout the nation uncovered that out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, all of 26 convictions or guilty pleas were registered—roughly .00000013 percent of the tallied ballots.30

The goal, as one Mitt Romney supporter expressed in 2012, was to “Put the White Back in the White House.”31 And those efforts turned poor whites, students, and the elderly into collateral damage that got caught in the blowback.

Voters showed up at the polls only to find that their names were nowhere to be found. They had been disfranchised. Indeed, after the election, Florida’s secretary of state identified only 85 names (out of the original 180,000) that should have been removed from the list.

burdens he alluded to, however, were borne only by those jurisdictions with a long, well-documented history of discrimination and a systematic pattern, after the initial passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, of trying to craft laws that violated the basic right to vote for all citizens.

By the following year, right before the 2014 midterm elections, thirteen additional states had passed voter restriction statutes. All were under the guise of protecting the “integrity” of the ballot box, but all had the intent of limiting and frustrating voting by African Americans and, now, Latinos too.

Thus, in September 2014, in a stinging dressing-down of the state, district court judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos ruled that Texas’s voter-ID law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose.” Texas, she emphasized, had levied “an unconstitutional poll tax” on its citizens.54

The Supreme Court, she wrote, could not allow a “purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters” to be used in a federal election. But that is precisely what the U.S. Supreme Court did.57

in the 2014 midterm elections, the United States had the lowest voter turnout since 1942.64 So many of those who had been mobilized and energized in 2008 were now disillusioned, demoralized, and, in many cases, disfranchised, and most simply stayed home.

During the 2008 campaign, John McCain’s strategists deliberately demonized not just Obama’s policies but also the man himself, who mystically morphed into this Muslim, black nationalist, socialist, foreign, Arab, Kenyan, un-American immigrant monstrosity straight out of The Manchurian Candidate.

Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.

Sadly, the ascent of a black man to the presidency of the United States did not, despite all the talk of hope and a post-racial society, signal progress. Instead, it has led to a situation, not so unlike the era of Jim Crow, where a sense of physical vulnerability is shared across classes in the black community.86

Black respectability or “appropriate” behavior doesn’t seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama’s presidency made that clear. Aspirations

He drank in the poison of its message, got into his car, drove to Charleston, entered Emanuel AME Church, and landed in a Bible study with a group of African Americans who were the very model of respectability. Roof prayed with them. Read the Bible with them. Thought they were “so nice.” Then he shot them dead, leaving just one woman alive so that she could tell the world what he had done and

despite Trump’s apparent inability to “pivot” toward anything presidential, Republicans simply refused to do the one thing that would have stopped the mogul’s destructive ascent to the White House cold: put an end to voter suppression.

after Obama’s election, Governor Rick Scott welded together a series of guidelines that required a fourteen-year waiting period after sentencing requirements were completed before a person could even petition the governor to restore his or her voting rights. The process, by design, is cumbersome, unduly harsh, and, not surprisingly, since Scott’s tenure in office, led to only 8 percent of the requests gaining approval—as compared to 93 percent in Iowa and 86 percent in Kentucky.21

The Electoral Integrity Project, in fact, would label the state a “pseudo-democracy” somewhere between Iran and Venezuela because of the vicious voter suppression laws and ruthless GOP government officials whose quest for control was shameless and relentless.

So effective was the GOP’s voter suppression that a greater percentage of African American voters cast a ballot in counties hit by Hurricane Matthew and under a state of emergency than in those counties “under the new voter suppression rules.”36

Gerrymandered districts, not only in North Carolina but also in Wisconsin and Alabama, therefore, remained in place during the 2016 election.39 State

Similar to George Wallace’s run for the presidency in 1968, Trump’s supporters bristled at the thought that public policies would provide any help to African Americans and were certain that blacks were getting much more than they deserved from the government while the “average American” was getting much less. The message was clear: They weren’t deserving and weren’t really even Americans.49

those benefits came with a bitter and unforgivable downside. ACA was Obamacare, which was bad enough in itself.51 But there was also the “anger … that other people were getting even better, even cheaper benefits—and those other people did not deserve the help.”52

Trump supporters explained that Obamacare was proof that “Americans have grown too lazy and entitled,” that these “other people are getting health care for free,” and that “the economy is rigged for people who receive government assistance.”53

she spoke of a society where all would benefit and have access, not just whites.59 Trump, on the other hand, dangled a vision before his constituency where the vast resources of the nation would flow to whites, who in a few years would be a numerical minority,

This is what allowed Trump supporters who are dependent upon the Affordable Care Act to nevertheless elect politicians who had tried nearly sixty times to repeal the ACA but who also espouse racially tinged lies about voter fraud and the need for voter suppression laws.

First, we can never forget that most Americans who voted were repulsed by Trump’s racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. He lost the popular vote by more than 2.8 million ballots—greater than the combined total populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North Dakota.71