White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide

first let me say thank you, it's wonderful to have you here today. It is wonderful to be honored with Distinguished Faculty Professor John F. Morgan and it is wonderful to be at Emory. I wanted to talk about

white

rage

and I know he sounds crazy. but let me talk about how a black woman came to

white

rage

and although it seems like it started with Ferguson, it actually started in February of 1999 when a black man came home from a hard day at work and walked into her apartment and noticed You realize there was no food there, you know when you get home you worked hard, you look in the refrigerator and the refrigerator looks back at you and there comes that moment where he just says, oh, but it's in New York and you know New York , the city that never sleeps, so you know there will be food available, so you go out, step on your apartment, you know, the porch and a car pulls up.

Four NYPD officers emerge with guns drawn. 41 bullets later, Amadou Diallo falls. 19 of those bullets. hit ahmadu diallo he was unarmed he had committed no crime there was no warrant for his arrest he was just a black man in the bronx that's bad enough but then i'm watching ted koppel's late night line and mayor rudy giuliani is on and giuliani is on just unrepentant and ted koppel, as you know, he's not a softball interviewer and he's on giuliani, it's like I'm made, I'm a made, I'm a make and rudy is like what he barely says the man's name what he says my policies are working new york city is safer now than it's been in years and he pulls out his little flipcharts with a little grip showing that crime is going down my policies are working new york city is safer and I'm thinking it's not safer for amaru for who and the policies you're talking about is the broken windows policing policy, that broken windows policing policy basically heavily polices black and brown neighborhoods, criminalizes black people, criminalizes people of color, you walk recklessly, the police chase you, you throw trash on the ground, the police chase you. you're stopped, the cops are with you, you're walking, the cops are with you, you're getting ready to go out of the curve, the cops are with you, that hypervigilance is the policy that Mayor Rudy Giuliani said was working and while he was talking about it he said and my police force is the most restrained and best behaved in the United States.

I'm in Kafka land right now, you know where Gregor Sampson is, this big cockroach, but everyone acts like it's normal, right? Because I'm thinking of the most restrained and the best. he was good don't shoot 41 bullets at an unarmed man I know something is wrong but I don't know how to name it and you know we have to name things so we can face them so we can deal with them and so I don't know what to call this and I just walk away , but as an academic I keep writing I keep researching I keep thinking I keep teaching I keep writing I keep researching I keep thinking and then in August 2014 I'm I was in my home office and the TV was on and I looked who and Ferguson was on fire.

I mean, the flames are everywhere and it didn't matter. I had the remote in my hand and I was changing channels and it didn't matter. It doesn't matter, let me see my left hand, it doesn't matter if I'm on MSNB watching MSNBC, yeah, CNN or Fox Out, it doesn't matter, it's all saying the same thing, look at the blacks burning where they live, did you know the blacks? people were burning where they lived black people are burning where they live what's wrong with black people burning where they live because one of the things you start to understand is that America needs the narrative of black pathology that you know everything would be Well if only black people were right.

We've heard this and then you start filling in the blank, if only they valued education, if only they weren't bullies, if only they filled in the blank in terms of that black pathology because it's absolutely necessary in the narrative of America and There I am watching msnbc cnn and fox, all with the same narrative of black pathology, this black rage that they are talking about, well I'm sitting there and I'm shaking my head, you know how you're shaking your head and then I realize that I'm looking shoulder to shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. I'm shaking my head so hard I said no, this is white rage, this is white rage.

I had lived in Missouri for 13 years I saw the way that policy worked I saw the way that policy systematically and systemically undermined African Americans' access to their citizenship rights, but as a

nation

we were so focused on the flames that we lost the ignition let's kindling talk about some of that kindling in ferguson kindling 67 of the population of ferguson is black in the 2013 municipal elections the black voter participation rate was six percent how do you become 67 percent of the population the six percent of voters, those are numbers? from Jim Crow Alabama you do it through a series of policies, the ways you hold your elections, the ways you craft your ballots, there are a whole series of tricks you can use to turn 67 percent into six firewood because you start to think about what it means if you don't think you have a say in who your representatives are turning on, let's talk about schools michael brown school system missouri rates their school systems accredits them on a 140 point scale graduation rates enrollment rates school scores Tests a full nine yards and you can get a total of 140 points.

How many points do you think Michael Brown's school system got? How many in 140? It's not okay, I think that's called cheating 10 10 out of 140 points for 15 years, what that means then is that the public policy leadership became very comfortable with removing an entire generation of black children through a school system that couldn't get more than 10 points. an entire generation and then start raising another generation because we are at 15 points from k to 12. kindling kindling let's talk about the police we know that the police are here to protect and serve, yes, because I'm going to do this at all times because there's a kind of hymn book that we sing, we know that, we know that the police are here to protect and serve, so in this protect and serve, except in Ferguson, they looked at the black population as income generators, so you're doing 26 and a 25 boom bill I don't think you stopped completely at that stop sign boom bill ah it looks like you have a broken tail light boom bill and this is a working class neighborhood so when you start coming into this neighborhood this community with fifty dollar bills twenty-five dollar bills eighty dollar bills hundred dollar bills and you start thinking about what that means you pay the bill or you pay the rent you pay the bill or you keep food in the table you keep the lights on there is no disposable income here when you don't pay that fine the next time you turn 26 and 25 because now there is a warrant for your arrest, then you get jailed and then the whole criminal justice process of fines, court costs and bail. everyone was leaving this working class black community at the time that Ferguson wasted those fines and those fines were 25 percent of Ferguson's operating budget 25 and let me be very clear, justice was not blind justice, in fact it had the who you call had lasik because justice was like that, if the police stopped someone white and tried to give them a ticket and said, "sorry, sorry, not you," or if the police officer gave someone a ticket wide and someone white came in to leave and then paid the fine, it was What are you doing?

I'm trying to pay this fine and break it so you get this massive extraction of the working class black population in Ferguson Kindling and so when I started thinking about this kindling, I started thinking about the way white rage worked white rage It's not about visible violence, we often think of anger as something visible, we often think of racism as something visible, but white anger is subtle, it's corrosive, it operates through state legislatures, through Congress, through the judiciary. through school boards it's cloaked in legalities and that's why I set out, man, because it's so quiet it's so subtle that you don't see it and that's why I set out to blow graphite into that fingerprint so I can trace the white rage throughout of time, not all. the way back to time immemorial with the dinosaurs, but at least until the civil war until 2016. and one of the things that became clear to me when I started to think about how white rage works was that it became clear to me that the presence of blacks was not the trigger for white anger, there is that daze, almost what you are talking about, Willis, look, it is the presence of blacks with ambition, the presence of blacks with drive, the presence of blacks with aspirations, the presence of blacks.

The people who achieve this are the presence of black people who refuse to accept their subjugation. The presence of black people demanding their rights is the trigger for white anger and therefore this society has punished the resilience and determi

nation

of black people. Now at this point this sounds like I'm right like Scooby-Doo because we know he's very counterintuitive because we think of America as the land of opportunity, right? So all you have to do is work hard, yeah, and I tell everyone that. Another anthem, so my baritones here know the anthem, we don't even have to take out the book, it's in the ether, it's in the cultural language, we understand how this nation works, but what if you have a set of policies that actually They punish black achievements, black aspirations, and it sounds contradictory, but how else can you explain how government after government after government has worked so hard to make sure that black children do not receive a quality education?

Let me give you a couple of examples. In 1947, in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the school board finally agreed to build a high school for black children because remember this is a completely segregated system, Jim Crowed, and in '47 that would be after the United States helped to defeat the Nazis. I need to say that. In your time frame, we have a high school for black children in Prince Edward County, within a few years that school is bursting at the seams, there are two or three times more children in this space than that building can hold. , so black parents are going to the school board the all white school board says we need an extra school we have kids bursting onto the scene it's almost impossible for them to learn sitting on top of each other so we need a new building for school school The board said no and the parents are pushing tirelessly demanding education for their children and the school board finally relented and put up three tar paper shacks and said their children can go there now, meanwhile the white school is nice brick with indoor plumbing that is not. available at the black high school in 19 right now we are in 1951. so there was a young woman barbara john age 17 and barbara johns was saying my name is wrong you are going to take this you are going to take this no you are not going to take this, you're going to take this, yeah, you say no, let's get out of here, right? and she starts organizing that school for a massive strike, a massive demonstration saying we're not going to have this, we're not going to have it, they stood up and boom hit the door, the administrators were like what just happened here and they said, yeah , yes, now it was that she was not playing and then the death threats started coming in on this 17. year old girl who demanded a quality education, she was so bad that her parents had to fight their way to safety to Alabama boom, I rest my case, you know, when you had to go to Alabama for safety in 1951, meanwhile, Prince Edward County becomes one of the The school districts that are included in the brown case now, when Brown fell, Prince Edward County said, "I have something real for you," so what the city fathers, working with the state legislature, decided to do was close the entire public school system because that way we do have than having equal schools, then black kids and white kids don't have access to a public school either and you can almost hear it written on them "I'm not smart" except you know black parents are like what, but they're not listening to black parents white parents are like what and they say oh no no we don't have this you know we're not going to let your white babies go you know they leave without an education you know and then what they've done is they've created vouchers funded by the taxpayers to pay tuition for white children to go to all the private segregated white academies so that white children continue to receive education and there is absolutely nothing for black children, thousands and thousands of black children and it was not like that . only in prince edward county this was in areas all over the south and when these schools close prince edward county is closed for five years you start to think you're in fifth grade when your schoolopens again, it is supposed to To be in the tenth, think about everything you have lost in those precious five years and this is the moment when the American economy is beginning to transform from a manufacturing-based economy to an economy based in technology driven knowledge and we have all these black children that governments and school boards have said will not be educated period, what does this mean?

Let me give you an idea of ​​the power of white anger. So Brown One and I see law professor Robert Shapiro here Brown One 1954 where separate but equal has no place in public education Did I quote correctly? Yeah, okay, brown two. 1955. This is the implementation decision with all deliberate speed. 1956. 101 entrenched US Congressmen and Senators signed the Southern Manifesto. Pledged massive resistance to the Supreme Court's decision, we will use every level of power under our control to fight this 1957 thing. Radio signals pick up beep beep beep and you hear President Eisenhower doing dang dang dang because the beep is sputnik the Soviets have launched a satellite into the air into orbit and it's a technological feat that the United States didn't think the Soviets could master, but no, it's more than the Soviets They have their nuclear arsenal, but the United States is thinking so, but they don't know how to overcome it.

In the Atlantic or in the Pacific we're fine, you know, we'll have some forward bases for our allies in Europe and our allies in Asia, but we're fine, beep, beep, and the federal government does something it hasn't done before. promises hundreds of millions of dollars in education to fund what they said would be the intellectual capacity to fight the cold war. We need scientists and engineers to be able to counter, overcome, and surpass what the Soviets are dominating here now in this national system. The defense education bill was a major milestone and was being guided through Congress by two Alabamians.

I think I just made a spoiler alert, so their concern was that we want that money. You know, universities like money. They like money. You know, and when the feds are putting in. spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build labs and hire professors and postdocs, universities are like all that, but Alabama was worried because Alabama doesn't admit black people. Alabama has a whites-only admissions policy and we have the law of the land saying no. I can't do that and that's why in this discussion with the Eisenhower administration they say we're going to guide this bill, we've got to make sure we don't have to comply with Brown, we've got to make sure we fund cold weather brainpower. war we can keep jim crow in our admissions policies and the federal government said yeah we're fine with that so I'm thinking jim crow nuclear annihilation nuclear annihilation nuclear annihilation they're like no son jim crow that's more It is important to be able to ensure that our citizens, our people, have the education they need in this incredible critical moment that is white rage.

Anyone can see hidden figures. Yes, think about what that would mean if we had had that kind of investment at the time and think about where we are now. As we try to figure out how to get more African Americans into the agricultural fields when we have systematically refused to invest in those schools, even after Brown, let me give us another example from the war on drugs, we can really have a church. up here now you know that in the war on drugs because one of the ways that white anger works is that it is covered up with reasonableness we have to keep our community safe we ​​have to protect our children we have to ensure the safety of our neighborhoods and who doesn't want a safe and secure neighborhood, who doesn't want to protect our children, it sounds reasonable, but what is it like then?

Because the research is really clear that we have focused the war on drugs on the population that uses drugs. less when it comes to cocaine, less and almost the same when it comes to marijuana, how come in the war on drugs we have focused on those who do it least? How come we have spent a trillion dollars? That's real money, even beyond. university money and that's what a trillion dollars in the war on drugs the war on drugs has destabilized state budgets when you think about public education I remember when I worked in Ohio for the board of regents one of the things for What we were fighting for was trying to get enough state money for higher education to reduce tuition so that more and more students could afford college, instead that money immediately went into the corrections budget, you can almost map it, like in California, the dollar-to-dollar relationship.

The exchange comes out of the University of California budget and goes into the corrections budget and I just saw a figure that says it now costs more to incarcerate someone in California than to send them through Harvard, so this is not a question of resources, it is a question of priorities and so you're wondering now because that's how I talk to myself, what could drive these kinds of things that as a nation we're spending a trillion on, what would destabilize our state budgets, what we would block. access to higher education for our own people, but then when you realize that the war on drugs really began to emerge after the civil rights movement and those incredible achievements, the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights of 1965, fought hard for blood all the way, but if you have a conviction for a felony, which is what causes mass incarceration, suddenly your access to the nondiscrimination clauses in the law civil rights there are things you can't do with a felony conviction, there are places you can't live, there are students Loans you can't access, so you can't go to school if you have that conviction for a felony and you want to talk about the right to vote let's take Florida okay I heard some people say yeah take it they say Florida in Florida Florida has what they call permanent felony disenfranchisement now what that means because it's not entirely permanent, but after you serve your sentence and then your time off as parole, you then have to wait 14 years from that point to then be able to submit an individual petition to the governor asking for your vote.

Rights back, what that means is when you look at Florida, about 40 percent of black men can't vote in Florida because of felony disenfranchisement. The 40 percent overall for African Americans is between 23 and 25 percent of voting age. Eligible African Americans cannot vote. In Florida, Florida now doesn't mind counting its heads when it comes to the census for the number of representatives in Congress, but those people have no say whatsoever in who their representatives will be in a representative democracy. It reminds me of the three-fifths clause, so while I'm talking about voting, let me move on to the next piece in 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.

It seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? and the way he did it is that through his organization that ability to organize in those communities 15 million new voters went to the polls in 2008 15 million now what we say as a democracy is that we love that because that means that the people are not alienated because they believe they have a stake in this nation, they believe they have an acceptance because what we know is that if there are masses of alienated people in your society, your society is preparing to shake, but having people buying believing that have a share of 15 million and then let me give you some of the data, the demographic data of those 15 million. 2 million were African Americans, that is, almost a third of Atlanta.

Think about that, in terms of two million, they were Hispanic. Six. one hundred thousand were Asian Americans and it almost doubled the percentage of those making less than fifteen thousand dollars a year, which is also known as ib broke well 15,000, so double almost double that percentage, so think about this is a type of demographic wealth, it's the type of demographic diversity that is really starting to speak to America, this is the type of thing that we should embrace because there are black people going to the polls, the response was massive voter suppression that specifically targeted those same groups that persecuted African Americans.

Hispanics, Asian Americans and the poor, let me give you a couple of examples of how this policy works as voter ID, so one of the things that is again masked is that there is voter fraud, have we heard about the electoral fraud that we have rampant? Voter fraud is everywhere and we must protect the integrity of the ballot boxes from this voter fraud. Now Justin Levitt, a California law professor, crunched the numbers and found that between 2000 and 2014 there were 1 billion votes cast and 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud 31 is widespread, but under the fraud lie myth election, one of the things we see come to the fore is the requirement for voter ID.

Now again it sounds harmless. We have a major problem. Electoral fraud. We only require people. Having an ID sounds simple enough, but the way it works is like in Alabama, let's start with Alabama. In fact, in 2011, Alabama passed a voter ID law, but they knew that this law couldn't get through the department of justice where alabama had to have prior authorization through the voting rights act to get any of the laws that were changing in terms of voters through the justice department and what that meant, for example, is that the republicans They record themselves saying things like we have to figure out how to depress black voter turnout, okay, I'm thinking it's a smoking gun and you know we have these aboriginals and these illiterate people that will get on these HUD financial buses and drive themselves to the polls to know that this The law will not pass through the Department of Justice, but the moment the Supreme Court practically gutted the voting rights law with the Shelby County beholder decision in 2013, Alabama implemented that voting rights law. the way it works, it says you have to have a government issued photo ID to vote is fine, so in Alabama, Alabama is a poor state, it's 47th or 48th in terms of poverty, that's poor, so there are a lot of people in public housing, in fact, 71 of the people in public housing are African American in alabama alabama decided that the public housing ID would not count towards voting now I think I don't think the government issues more than housing public, but you see in that movement what you are what we can do is be able to eliminate the blacks and the poor by elaborating what identifications are acceptable to be able to vote and this is a mechanism that we will see throughout what Alabama did, the governor of Alabama and then they closed the department of motor vehicles in the black belt counties the black belt counties are the counties that have a significant or majority black population so when you close the department of motor vehicles that means you have to go around a couple of counties to be able to You will be able to get the ID you need to be able to vote, except you don't have a driver's license and Alabama is 48th in the country in terms of public transportation, so you don't have public transportation to get there.

Again, it seems harmless on the surface, but the way politics works is designed to destroy African Americans' access to the ballot box, that victory that was won in 1965. I could go on, I really could, yes, I'm going to go on. only. a little bit more because these things are crazy, so you take Texas in Texas, Texas required a government-issued photo ID and then you said your student ID was from the University of Texas, which would be a state-funded institution . College wouldn't count, but your government is your Sorry, your concealed weapons permit would, so your concealed weapons permit counts and your student ID doesn't count again.

This is one way you can begin to shape the electorate in terms of who has access to the ballot box. What Texas also did is that only about a third of Texas counties have a department of motor vehicles, only about a third, so Texas, in fact, when they were writing SB14, they found that for almost two million of its citizens was going to be about a 125-mile one-way trip to the nearest department of motor vehicles, which means a 250-mile round trip, so initially in the law they had, we'll reimburse you, but fair before itpassed that law they drew a line through the refund so now you have to figure out how to make a 250 mile round trip without a driver's license without public transportation so you can get the card you need to be able to vote this is how you shape the electorate this is how you start punishing blacks and browns for voting and the poor and the asians this is how it is done and it is understood that all of this was done without burning a clan cross all of this was done with people in judicial robes and not with white sheets that's how white anger works the impact, for example, of voter suppression in the 2016 election, you know, I'm talking about that kind of black pathology language that we have, you know, after the elections, how many of you listened correctly?

They know that black people just didn't turn out to vote on this. It was the first election in 50 years without the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Black voter turnout dropped by seven percent. Voter suppression works. What I would like to do now is simply read a couple of sections of the book. Now I have to get my glasses on because I'm not 25 anymore and the only section I'm going to read is about the war on drugs and I start by pointing out here we go. I begin by pointing out what Michelle Alexander has done in going through it and noting how in key Supreme Court cases racism has been incorporated into the operational code of the war on drugs, taken together, those rulings allowed, indeed encouraged, the criminal justice system went racially insane and that's exactly what happened on July 23, 1999 in Tulia, Texas, on The Dead.

At night the local police launched a massive raid and dismantled an important cocaine trafficking network, at least that is how the local media built it, which, after being alerted, lined up to obtain the best, most humiliating photographs of 46 of the 5,000 city residents handcuffed. in pajamas, underwear and disheveled hair in bed, being taken to jail for arresting the local newspaper, the Tulia sentinel made the headline, two of its streets cleaned of garbage, the editorial praised law enforcement for reading tui of drug trafficking garbage, the raid was the result of a 18 month-long investigation by a man who would be named by the Texas attorney general as outstanding lawyer of the year, Tom Coleman did not lead a team of investigators, but rather identified by aloneeach member of this massive cocaine operation and made over 100 undercover drug purchases, he was considered a hero and his testimony immediately led to 38 of the 46 being convicted with other cases waiting to enter the congested judicial system joe moore to a Pig farmer was sentenced to 99 years for selling 200 worth of cocaine, Kizzy White received 25 years, while her husband, William Cash Love, received 434 years for possession of an ounce of cocaine, the case began to unravel; she had sold him drugs, Tanya, however, had video evidence that she was at a bank in Oklahoma City, 300 miles away, cashing a check at the same time he claimed to have bought drugs from her.

Then another defendant, Billy Don Wafer, had time sheets and eyewitness testimony from his boss. that wafer was at work and not selling drugs to coleman and when the outstanding law enforcement officer of the year swore under oath that he had bought cocaine from ewell bryant, a tall man with bushy hair, only for bryant to go bald and 5 '6 appeared in court. It finally became very clear that something was wrong. Coleman in fact had no evidence that any of the alleged drug deals had taken place. There were no audio tapes or photographs or witnesses. No other police officer presented any fingerprints except his own on the drug bags.

There are no records. During an 18 month investigation he never wore a microphone and now claimed to have written every drug transaction on his leg but washed the evidence away when he showered and I'm thinking the kid didn't shower in 18 months, never mind, a Further investigation did not lead to evidence to corroborate their accusations, and when police arrested those 46 people and vigorously searched their homes, no drugs, weapons, money, paraphernalia, or any other indication that the housewife, pig farmer, or any other person arrested. They were actually drug lords, what was discovered, however, was judicial misconduct running rampant in the war on drugs in Tulya, Texas, with clear racial bias.

Coleman had accused 10 of Tulia's black population of trafficking cocaine based only on his word to 50 of all black men. in the city they were charged, found guilty and sentenced to prison randy credico of the consular fund william mosley called tulia a mass lynching that killed 50 of the adult black male population that way it's outrageous it's like being accused of raping someone in indiana in the 1930s. I don't, but it doesn't matter because a bunch of klansmen on the jury are going to hang you anyway, but this wasn't 1930, it was the beginning of the 21st century with a powerful civil rights movement that had united those two eras. and finally, this is in the chapter on how to unelect a black president.

Black respectability or proper behavior doesn't seem to matter at all. The achievements of black people. Black aspirations and success are interpreted as direct threats. Obama's presidency made the clear aspirations in achieving him no protection. not even for the God-fearing On June 17, 2015, South Carolina's Dylan Roof, a 21-year-old unemployed white high school dropout, was on a mission to take back his country from that George Zimmerman walked out of the courthouse a free man after killing Trayvon Martin. and a racially polarized nation debated the verdict ceiling had sought to understand American history by surfing the Internet he stumbled upon the conservative citizens council the tri-be the progeny of the white citizens council of the 1950s that had terrorized blacks closed schools and worked hand in hand with state governments to challenge federal civil rights laws despite the racist belief system used by the group in the mid and late 1990s, the group boasted 34 members who were in the Mississippi legislature, including then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi in 2004, Mississippi Governor Haley Barber, Republican National Committee Chairman, and 37 other powerful politicians had attended Tri-C events. in the XXI century.

Earl Holt III, Tri-C chairman, donated $65,000 to Republican campaign funds in recent years. including donations to the 2016 presidential campaigns of rand paul rick santorum and ted cruz, the tri-sea enjoyed precisely the seal of respectability that racism requires to achieve its own goals within American society and its website of hate and lies provided interested education. deal with the roof he wanted so desperately that he drank the poison of its message got into his car drove to charleston entered the emmanuel ame church and landed at a bible study with a group of African Americans who were the very model of respectability roof prayed with them He read the Bible with them he thought they were so nice and then he shot them dead, leaving only one woman alive so she could tell the world what he had done and why they had taken over our country, he said and he knew this was True, well, not even a full month after Dylan Roof shot and killed nine African Americans in Emmanuel Amy, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump ignited his silent majority audience of thousands in July 2015 with a promise macabre, don't worry, we will take our country back, no, it's time for us to take our country into the future, a better future, thank you.