A caveat before reading: I am a white, relatively recent immigrant to the USA. I am providing further reading links below, and encourage comments with more and better reading & listening. I speak from a place of privilege, and understand that I am not an authoritative voice on these matters (I have so much to learn). Please forgive and correct my mistakes.
“Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites. Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted.”
I want to get a couple of things out of the way right away:
Rights are not pie. Everyone can have them without diminishing anyone else
Your freedom ends where my freedom begins. We all have some sacrifices we agree to make for the betterment of society and civilization. For example, George Flynn’s right to life means no one had the right to murder him, badge or no badge.
Saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ does not mean no one else’s lives matter. It is a reminder, a call to action. It means ‘Black Lives Matter Too’.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
I finished listening to this book several weeks ago and had been waiting for the right time to post a review of it. Carol Anderson defines white rage as:
White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.
To continue her point:
In a 1981 interview, GOP consultant Lee Atwater explained the inner logic of, as one commentator noted, “racism with plausible deniability.” “You start out in 1954,” Atwater laid out, “by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that,” he then deflected.
If you do not understand what is going on with BLM and the current riots all over the US, please listen to this book. There is an insidious history of legislation, criminalization, and institutionalized bias that I (as an immigrant) was unaware of the depth. When I moved to the US, I leaned towards the camp of “Slavery was centuries ago, what are they crying about?” This is not about slavery. This is about the fact freedom has never been truly granted to the freed.
“Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freedpeople—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education. ”
Education is paramount and there is a woeful amount of it within the US. Speaking with my American friends about the history they were taught in schools always makes me despair as the scope of their education was so narrow.
My education was narrow, and we all can learn more. We can all do better. We must do more to help the least of us, the poorest of us, to educate with the truth. We cannot hide from history. We can only face it, learn from it, and do better.
Black Lives Matter.
-L.J.
“The truth is, white rage has undermined democracy, warped the Constitution, weakened the nation’s ability to compete economically, squandered billions of dollars on baseless incarceration, rendered an entire region sick, poor, and woefully undereducated, and left cities nothing less than decimated. All this havoc has been wreaked simply because African Americans wanted to work, get an education, live in decent communities, raise their families, and vote. Because they were unwilling to take no for an answer.”