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In 1999, blacks and Hispanics, who made up 50 percent of New York City’s population, accounted for 84 percent of those stopped and frisked by the NYPD; while the majority of illegal drugs and weapons were found on the relatively small number of whites detained by police.
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. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve.
To cast the war as something else, as Lincoln did, to shroud that hard, cold reality under the cloak of “preserving the Union” would not and could not address the root causes of the war and the toll that centuries of slavery had wrought. And that failure of clarity led to a failure of humanity.
As in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order. Indeed, in the antebellum South, the enslaved were actively forbidden from learning to read and write. Many paid dearly for their literacy.
The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although “resentful of black progress” and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the “kind of upstanding white citizen[s]” who were “positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.”11 The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.
