Those are the final words of a powerful Washington Post op ed by Carol Anderson, Associate Professor of African American studies and history at Emory University, among other things.
The full title of the piece, which I strongly urge you to read, is Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.
She places Ferguson in as deep a historical context as I have yet seen, perhaps appropriate for the her subject matter as a college professor, going back to White rejection of the intent of the 13thj, 14th and 15th Amendments. She reminds us of the institution of Black Codes after the withdrawal of the Union Army from the South as a result of the deal that made Hayes President of the US even though Tilden had clearly won the popular vote and may have by an honest count won the electoral vote as well (shades of 2000).
She also tells us about United States v. Cruikshank, a case with which I admit despite teaching government and history I was not familiar, which limited the application of the Bill of Rights against the states and argued that the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment applied only to actions by state governments, and thus private citizens could not be prosecuted for violating the rights of freedman - this in the aftermath of a riot against Republican Freedman by white Democrats during an election, in an attempt to keep them from voting.
As a side note, Justice Scalia and others who made the atrocious Heller ruling, this opinion ruled "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendments means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress,and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government. " Here I might note that this meant the Freed Slaves did not necessarily have a right to bear arms if a state wanted to restrict it. And for context I remind people that the institution of gun control in California was in response to Black Panthers showing up at the state legislature carrying. Blacks can be killed by white police with impunity if the cop has even a hint of feeling threatened even if no weapon is evident (no doubt if a weapon is) but White militia types can aim at Federal law enforcement at the Bundy ranch and not be charged, and now we have the Oathkeepers (white) "patrolling" around Ferguson - will they shoot Blacks with the same kind of impunity we have seen over the years?
But there is so much more to this op ed.
Please keep reading.
Anderson is clear - "crystal" if I may quote from a movie - on how seeming advances for the rights of Blacks to become more fully and equally a part of American society are opposed. She reminds us of the Southern White push back after Brown v Board -
Nearly 80 years later, Brown v. Board of Education seemed like another moment of triumph — with the ruling on the unconstitutionality of separate public schools for black and white students affirming African Americans’ rights as citizens. But black children, hungry for quality education, ran headlong into more white rage. Bricks and mobs at school doors were only the most obvious signs. In March 1956, 101 members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, declaring war on the Brown decision. Governors in Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere then launched “massive resistance.” They created a legal doctrine, interposition, that supposedly nullified any federal law or court decision with which a state disagreed. They passed legislation to withhold public funding from any school that abided by Brown. They shut down public school systems and used tax dollars to ensure that whites could continue their education at racially exclusive private academies. Black children were left to rot with no viable option.
Here I need to provide some context missing from this otherwise superb op ed.
Brown was issued in 1954, as most know. But it, and the parallel decision for the District of Columbia,
Bolling v Sharpe (which was necessary because until that parallel decision the Equal Protection Clause which was the basis of
Brown had never been applied against the Federal government), had no specific enforcement provisions. The Court accepted additional arguments and in 1955 issued what is known as
Brown v Board II, which declared that segregated schools needed to be integrated "with all deliberate speed." In the South the focus was on the word "deliberate." That, combined with the massive resistance, came close to totally undercutting the intent of
Brown, and led to the results Anderson describes.
She notes a similar backlash to the hope many of us had after November 2008 when Obama was strongly elected - 365 electoral votes, a 7.2 percent popular margin, the largest percentage of the popular vote by a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, a Black man carrying 3 states of the Confederaccy (NC, VA, FL). And yet
A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.
She rightly notes the intent of Voter ID laws is primarily to suppress Black votes:
A joint report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the NAACP emphasized that the ID requirements would adversely affect more than 6 million African American voters. (Twenty-five percent of black Americans lack a government-issued photo ID, the report noted, compared with only 8 percent of white Americans.) The Supreme Court sanctioned this discrimination in Shelby County v. Holder , which gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to 21st-century versions of 19th-century literacy tests and poll taxes.
Anderson also reminds us that the Tea Party attack on government is at least in part an attack on the Black community, because
Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.
She covers a lot of history, older and more recent.
She reminds us of Trayvon and Zimmerman as well as Brown and Wilson.
We see otherwise incomprehensible Supreme Court decisions, such as
Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14years.
She reminds us of fear, of stop-and-frisk laws targeting people of color, of 3 strikes laws that disproportionally affect the Black community. We learn yet again the impact of the Great Recession has also disproportionally affect people of color, especially blacks.
She insists we remember all these things.
Then she ends with two sentences, that should be an essential part of our understanding:
Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.
I am going to end by quoting from a comment on the thread, one not demonstrating precisely the kind of White Rage about which Anderson writes. Someone named Asa Gordon posted this:
Douglass, in his "Address to the people of the United States" (September 24, 1883), declared:
"Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resented and resisted at every step of his progress ... The color line meets him everywhere ... In spite of all your religion and laws he is a rejected man. ... and yet he is asked to forget his color, and forget that which everybody else remembers. ... He is sternly met on the color line, and his claim to consideration in some way is disputed on the ground of color."
"It is our lot to live among a people whose laws, traditions, and prejudices have been against us for centuries, and from these they are not yet free. To assume that they are free from these evils simply because they have changed their laws is to assume what is utterly unreasonable and contrary to facts. Large bodies move slowly. Individuals may be converted on the instant and change their whole course of life. Nations never. Time and events are required for the conversion of nations."
"The practical construction of American life is a convention against us. Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may. Examples are painfully abundant "
What Frederick Douglass saw is unfortunately still too true for far too many.
In the words of Pete Seeger, when will we ever learn?