White Rage Read online

  To Those Who Aspired and Paid the Price

  Contents

  Prologue. Kindling

  One. Reconstructing Reconstruction

  Two. Derailing the Great Migration

  Three. Burning Brown to the Ground

  Four. Rolling Back Civil Rights

  Five. How to Unelect a Black President

  Epilogue. Imagine

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  By the Same Author

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue

  Kindling

  Although I first wrote about “white rage” in a Washington Post op-ed following the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, the concept started to germinate much earlier.1 It was in the wake of another death at the hands of police: that of Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant, who, stepping out of his apartment building in New York City, was mowed down in a hail of NYPD bullets on February 4, 1999.2

  Though the killing was horrific enough—forty-one bullets were fired, nineteen of which hit their target—what left me truly stunned was the clinical, antiseptic policy rationale espoused by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. On the news show Nightline, the mayor, virtually ignoring Diallo’s death, glibly and confidently spouted one statistic after the next to demonstrate how the NYPD was the “most restrained and best behaved police department you could imagine.” He touted policies that had reduced crime in New York and dismissed African Americans’ concerns about racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and police brutality as unfounded. If the NYPD weren’t in those poorer neighborhoods, he asserted, the police would be accused of caring only about the affluent. Giuliani then countered that the real issue was the “community’s racism against the police” and unwillingness to take responsibility for the issues plaguing their neighborhoods.3

  But restrained and behaved police don’t fire forty-one bullets at an unarmed man. Moreover, New York’s aggressive law enforcement policy appeared to expend most of its energy on the groups bringing the smallest yield of criminal activity. 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.4

  There obviously was so much more going on here with Amadou Diallo’s death than was actually being discussed throughout the media, more than Giuliani was letting on, and more than even the outraged discussions in the beauty shops and barbershops managed to pinpoint.5 Only I didn’t know what to call it, what to name the unsettling and disturbing performance by Giuliani that I had just witnessed.

  Fifteen years later, I experienced that same feeling, although the circumstances this time were somewhat different. In August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri went up in flames, and commentators throughout the print and digital media served up variations of the same story: African Americans, angered by the police killing of an unarmed black teen, were taking out their frustration in unproductive and predictable ways—rampaging, burning, and looting.

  Framing the discussion—dominating it, in fact—was an overwhelming focus on black rage. Op-eds and news commentators debated whether Michael Brown was surrendering to or assaulting a police officer when six bullets took him down. They wrangled over whether Brown was really an innocent eighteen-year-old college student or a “thug” who had just committed a strong-arm robbery. The operative question seemed to be whether African Americans were justified in their rage, even if that rage manifested itself in the most destructive, nonsensical ways. Again and again, across America’s ideological spectrum, from Fox News to MSNBC, the issue was framed in terms of black rage, which, it seemed to me, entirely missed the point.

  I had previously lived in Missouri and had seen the subtle but powerful ways that public policy had systematically undercut democracy in the state. When, for example, the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision came down, the state immediately declared that all its schools would be integrated, only to announce that it would leave it up to the local districts to implement the Supreme Court decision. Movement was glacial. It took another generation of black parents fighting all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court in search of some relief.6 In the final analysis, however, Missouri’s schools remained separate and unequal. Thus, in the twenty-first century, Michael Brown’s school district had been on probation for fifteen years, annually accruing only 10 out of 140 points on the state’s accreditation scale.7 It was the same with policing, housing, voting, and employment, all of which carried the undercurrents of racial inequality—even after the end of slavery, the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, and the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.8 The policies in Missouri were articulated as coolly and analytically as were Giuliani’s in New York.

  That led to an epiphany: What was really at work here was white rage. With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling. In some ways, it is easy to see why. 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. In my Washington Post op-ed, therefore, I set out to make white rage visible, to blow graphite onto that hidden fingerprint and trace its historic movements over the past 150 years.

  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.9

  And all the while, white rage manages to maintain not only the upper hand but also, apparently, the moral high ground. It’s Giuliani chastising black people to fix the problems in their own neighborhoods instead of always scapegoating the police. It’s the endless narratives about a culture of black poverty that devalues education, hard work, family, and ambition. It’s a mantra told so often that some African Americans themselves have come to believe it. Few even think anymore to question the stories, the “studies” of black fathers abandoning their children, of rampant drug use in black neighborhoods, of African American children hating education because school is “acting white”—all of which have been disproved but remain foundational in American lore.10

  The truth is that enslaved Africans plotted and worked—hard—with some even fighting in the Union army for their freedom and citizenship. After the Civil War, they took what little they had and built schools, worked the land to establish their economic independence, and searched desperately to bring their families, separated by slavery, back together. That drive, initiative, and resolve, however, was met with the Black Codes, with army troops throwing them off their promised forty acres, and then with a slew of Supreme Court decisions eviscerating the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

  The truth is that when World War I provided the opportunity in the North for blacks to get jobs with unheard-of pay scales and, better yet, the chance for their children to finally have good schools, African Americans fled the oppressive conditions in the South. White authorities stopped the trains, arresting people whose only crime was leaving the state. They banned a nationally distributed newspaper, jailed people for carrying poetry, and instituted another form of s
lavery under the ruse of federal law. Not the First Amendment, the right to travel, nor even the basic laws of capitalism were any match.

  The truth is that opposition to black advancement is not just a Southern phenomenon. In the North, it has been just as intense, just as determined, and in some ways just as destructive. When, during the Great Migration, African Americans moved into the cities, ready to work hard for decent housing and good schools, they were locked down in uninhabitable slums. To try to break out of that squalor with a college degree or in a highly respected profession only intensified the response: Perjured testimony was transmuted into truth; a future Nuremberg judge ran roughshod over state law; and even the bitterest newspaper rivals saw fit to join together when it came to upholding a lie.

  The truth is that when the Brown v. Board of Education decision came down in 1954 and black children finally had a chance at a decent education, white authorities didn’t see children striving for quality schools and an opportunity to fully contribute to society; they saw only a threat and acted accordingly, shutting down schools, diverting public money into private coffers, leaving millions of citizens in educational rot, willing even to undermine national security in the midst of a major crisis—all to ensure that blacks did not advance.

  The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa.

  The truth is that, despite all this, a black man was elected president of the United States: the ultimate advancement, and thus the ultimate affront. Perhaps not surprisingly, voting rights were severely curtailed, the federal government was shut down, and more than once the Office of the President was shockingly, openly, and publicly disrespected by other elected officials. And as the judicial system in state after state turned free those who had decided a neighborhood’s “safety” meant killing first and asking questions later, a very real warning was sent that black lives don’t matter.

  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.

  Thus, these seemingly isolated episodes reaching back to the nineteenth century and carrying forward to the twenty-first, once fitted together like pieces in a mosaic, reveal a portrait of a nation: one that is the unspoken truth of our racial divide.

  One

  Reconstructing Reconstruction

  James Madison called it America’s “original sin.”1 Chattel slavery. Its horrors, Thomas Jefferson prophesied, would bring down a wrath of biblical proportions.2 “Indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”3

  In 1861, the day of reckoning came. The Southern states’ determination to establish “their independent slave republic” led to four years of war, 1.5 million casualties, including at least 620,000 deaths, and 20 percent of Southern white males wiped off the face of the earth.4

  In his second inaugural address, in 1865, Abraham Lincoln agonized that the carnage of this war was God’s punishment for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil.”5 Over time the road to atonement revealed itself: In addition to civil war, there would be the Emancipation Proclamation, three separate constitutional amendments—one that abolished slavery, another that defined citizenship, and the other that protected the right to vote—and, finally, the Freedmen’s Bureau, with its mandate to provide land and education. Redemption for the country’s “sin,” therefore, would require not just the end of slavery but also the recognition of full citizenship for African Americans, the right to vote, an economic basis to ensure freedom, and high-quality schools to break the generational chains of enforced ignorance and subjugation.

  America was at the crossroads between its slaveholding past and the possibility of a truly inclusive, vibrant democracy. The four-year war, played out on battlefield after battlefield on an unimaginable scale, had left the United States reeling. Beyond the enormous loss of life to contend with, more than one million disabled ex-soldiers were adrift, not to mention the widows seeking support from a rickety and virtually nonexistent veterans’ pension system.6 The mangled sinews of commerce only added to the despair, with railroad tracks torn apart; fields fallow, hardened, and barren; and bridges that had once defied the physics of uncrossable rivers now destroyed. And then this: Millions of black people who had been treated as no more than mere property were now demanding their full rights of citizenship. To face these challenges and make this nation anew required a special brand of political leadership.

  Could the slaughter of more than six hundred thousand men, the reduction of cities to smoldering rubble, and casualties totaling nearly 5 percent of the U.S. population provoke America’s come-to-Jesus moment? Could white Americans override “the continuing repugnance, even dread” of living among black people as equals, as citizens and not property?7 In the process of rebuilding after the Civil War, would political leaders have the clarity, humanity, and resolve to move the United States away from the racialized policies that had brought the nation to the edge of apocalypse?

  Initially, it appeared so. Even before the war ended, in late 1863 and early 1864, Representative James M. Ashley (R-OH) and Senator John Henderson (D-MO) introduced in Congress a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was, in important ways, revolutionary. Immediately, it moved responsibility for enforcement and protection of civil rights from the states to the federal government and sent a strong, powerful signal that citizens were first and foremost U.S. citizens. The Thirteenth Amendment was also a corrective and an antidote for a Constitution whose slave-owning drafters, like Thomas Jefferson, were overwhelmingly concerned with states’ rights. Finally, the amendment sought to give real meaning to “we hold these truths to be self-evident” by banning not just government-sponsored but also private agreements that exposed blacks to extralegal violence and widespread discrimination in housing, education, and employment.8 As then-congressman James A. Garfield remarked, the Thirteenth Amendment was designed to do significantly more than “confer the bare privilege of not being chained.”9

  That momentum toward real freedom and democracy, however, soon enough hit a wall—one that would be more than any statesman was equipped to overcome. Indeed, for all the saintedness of his legacy as the Great Emancipator, Lincoln himself had neither the clarity, the humanity, nor the resolve necessary to fix what was so fundamentally broken. Nor did his successor. And as Reconstruction wore on, the U.S. Supreme Court also stepped in to halt the progress that so many had hoped and worked for.

  Lincoln had shown his hand early in the war. Heavily influenced by two of his intellectual heroes—Thomas Jefferson, who advocated expulsion of blacks from the United States in order to save the nation; and Kentuckian Henry Clay, who had established the American Colonization Society, which had moved thousands of free blacks into what is now Liberia—Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans. He had selected Chiriquí, a resource-poor area in what is now Panama, to be the new home for millions of African Americans. Lincoln just had to convince them to leave. In August 1862, he lectured five black leaders whom he had summoned to the White House that it was their duty, given what their people had done to the United States, to accept the exodus to South America, telling them, “But for your race among us there could not be war.”10 As to just how and why “your race” came to be “among us,” Lincoln conveniently ignored. His framing of the issue no
t only absolved plantation owners and their political allies of responsibility for launching this war, but it also signaled the power of racism over patriotism. Lincoln’s anger in 1862 was directed at blacks who fully supported the Union and did not want to leave the United States of America. Many, indeed, would exclaim that, despite slavery and enforced poverty, “We will work, pray, live, and, if need be, die for the Union.”11 Nevertheless, he cast them as the enemy for wickedly dividing “us” instead of defining as traitors those who had fired on Fort Sumter and worked feverishly to get the British and French to join in the attack to destroy the United States.12

  From this perspective flowed Lincoln’s lack of clarity about the purpose and cause of the war. While the president, and then his successor, Andrew Johnson, insisted that the past four years had been all about preserving the Union, the Confederacy operated under no such illusions. Confederate States of America (CSA) vice president Alexander H. Stephens remarked, “What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?”13 This was a war about slavery. About a region’s determination to keep millions of black people in bondage from generation to generation. Mississippi’s Articles of Secession stated unequivocally, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery … Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”14 In fact, two thirds of the wealthiest Americans at the time “lived in the slaveholding South.”15 Eighty-one percent of South Carolina’s wealth was directly tied to owning human beings.16 It is no wonder, then, that South Carolina was willing to do whatever it took, including firing the first shot in the bloodiest war in U.S. history to be free from Washington, which had stopped the spread of slavery to the West, refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and, with the admission of new free-soil states to the Union prior to 1861, set up the numerical domination of the South in Congress. When the Confederacy declared that the “first duty of the Southern states” was “self-preservation,” what it meant was the preservation of slavery.17