White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

by Carol Anderson

The Women’s March stretched from sea to shining sea the day after the inauguration in the largest civil rights protest in the nation’s history.

The ACLU, which usually brings in $3–4 million in donations a year, received $24 million in one weekend to fight against the racism and Islamophobia inherent in Trump’s Muslim ban.

A poll tax in 1942 that led to only 3 percent of the voting-age population in seven Southern states choosing elected officials was never a democracy. And neither, in this decade, is a voter turnout of 1.48 percent in Texas’s statewide election.

the millions of dollars that Republican governors and legislators have spent on new voter suppression laws—purportedly to stop a voter fraud problem that never existed—while gutting health care, mental health, and education funding in already strained state budgets, suggests that the cost of subverting democracy extends far beyond the ballot box.

We can choose not to listen to the rage and, instead, craft a stronger, more viable future for this nation. We can ask tough questions such as: 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?

A program that stops and frisks predominantly those who are the least likely to have illegal contraband is not law enforcement.

state budgets have cracked under the strain of bloated, unsustainable prison systems.

The costs of the continued misuse of the criminal justice system are more than the United States can bear—morally, politically, and financially. It is time to rethink America.

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,

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.