Carol Anderson talking:
As I laid out in White Rage, part of what happened is that when African Americans advance, when they gain access to their citizenship rights, you see a wave of policies emanate out of Congress, out of the White House, to knock back those gains, those advancements. We saw that after the Civil War with Reconstruction.
Now, move this forward. Part of what we’re seeing now is the backlash to Obama’s election. And so, we saw a wave of voter suppression laws come up. And when you look at these key battleground states and the things that they’re doing, they’re vintage. They go back to the era of Jim Crow, they go back to the era after the Civil War, when the point was: How do we intimidate these newly freed people who now have their citizenship rights? How do we strip them of their citizenship rights? One was massive voter intimidation, being at the polls with rifles. It is then a series of laws coming on, from literacy tests and grandfather clauses and poll taxes—all of those things for disfranchisement. We move to the Voting Rights Act of ’65, and then we get to Shelby County v. Holder, where this Supreme Court gutted it. And this is what we see as the result.
after Civil War, the Reconstruction, slaves are freed. What happens is, is that they don’t get free. They get—they’re immediately hit with a thing called the Black Codes. And the Black Codes required the newly freed people to sign labor contracts with plantation owners and mine owners and lumber mill owners. And they refuse to sign the labor contract, then they could be arrested and then have their labor sold. They’d be put on the auction block, and their labor then sold to the highest bidder. And they wouldn’t be able to leave until that fine was paid off. It also said that they couldn’t carry weapons to be able to hunt, or they couldn’t fish, so they couldn’t even feed themselves. They had to work. And they could not leave that mine owner or that plantation owner for a year. If they left for better wages, better working conditions, they could be arrested, charged with vagrancy, and their labor auctioned off.
voting was just verboten. They could not vote. I mean, and this is why you have to have then the 15th Amendment coming in in about 1870, providing the right to vote, because that thing of moving from property to citizen was so abhorrent, so repulsive to white Southerners, that they went, “Absolutely not,” and did everything in their power to strip African Americans of their citizenship rights.
when I talk about white rage, I don’t actually mean the Klan and the cross burning, because that’s simple. In this society, we know how to identify that. This is the much more subtle, the much more destructive type of racial violence. And it emanates out of Congress, out of the Supreme Court, out of state legislatures. And it’s designed to, in fact, undercut black achievement, black aspirations and black advancement.
So we see that, for instance, with—when Trump, at the presidential debate, and they said, “Well, how would you handle issues of racial healing and the racial divide?” and he said, “I’ve got words that somebody refuses to say, and that’s ‘law and order,’ and that’s ‘stop and frisk.'” That is a dog whistle. That is—those are policies that, in fact, undermined the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65, has led to mass disfranchisement, so that you’ve got almost 8 percent of the black population unable to vote.
– Donald Trump in North Carolina instructing security guards to remove a black man from the crowd, describing him as a thug. While Donald Trump described the man as a protester, it turned out he was actually a Trump supporter. Sixty-three-year-old C.J. Carey said he went to the rally to give Trump a letter.
for all of Trump’s outreach to the black community, there was no outreach. The point was, is that his racism was so palpable that it was turning off white educated voters, and so he tried to smooth that edge. But, in fact, the racism that is undermining—undermining, but undergirding, his campaign is there, so a supporter is immediately a thug. So, a black man is immediately criminalized as thug. And this is a businessman who is a Trump supporter. And that gives you some sense of the kind of perspective, the policy perspective, that Trump will enact if he becomes president.
I was surprised by how consistent and supple white rage was, how it consistently used the language of democracy, the language of freedom, the language of protecting the integrity of the ballot box, as a means to undermine and undercut. So, we get not only the Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, but we also get, for instance, in the Brown decision, where the Supreme Court has said “separate but equal” cannot be the law of the land, and watching these people who say that they are inherently about democracy, in fact, undermining that democracy by violating court orders consistently, over and over again, kind of like what we’re seeing right now as the Fourth Circuit, for instance, has told North Carolina, you know, “Your voter suppression laws can’t stand,” and they keep doing it.
part of what we’re seeing right here is the policy of stop and frisk, which came after the advances of the civil rights movement. And so, stop and frisk is based on the broken windows theory of policing. And it says, what we have to do—if we stop these little minor crimes, then we can really stop the big ones form happening. But that’s not what really goes on. In fact, you get the criminalization of blackness. In New York City, for instance, although blacks and Latinos made up 50 percent of the population, they accounted for 84 percent of those stopped, although twice as many weapons were found on the handful of whites that were stopped as opposed to blacks and Latinos. And so, if this was really about law enforcement, you would see greater policing of the white population. This is about something else. And so, what we’re seeing in the case of the broken taillight, in terms of the expired tag, that’s that hyperpolicing that’s going on because of stop and frisk, and it leads to the death of black people.
For Bill Clinton, part of what I see is that he went the route of the Southern strategy, which was to play to the blacks as criminals. And this is where you see—and blacks as welfare cheats. And so, this is where you see his workforce legislation. This is where you see the kind of hyperpolicing with superpredators and all of that. And this led—again, it fed into the mass incarceration of the black population. Now, what Bill Clinton would do is he would try to play culturally black—so that was, you know, the saxophone on Arsenio or all that—but the way that his policies worked were in fact very anti-black. Now, with Hillary, what I see is that she was there with him in the ’90s.
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Carol Anderson
professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is the author, most recently, of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
— source democracynow.org