33. White Rage (history of African-American inequality, especially Jim Crow)

White Rage. Carol Anderson

The author was prompted to write this book by the usual framing in terms of black rage of discussions of police shootings of several unarmed black men. She had the epiphany that what was really at work was white rage, which didn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. It achieved its ends far more effectively by working the halls of power, including the courts, the legislatures, and government bureaucracies. The trigger for this white rage, inevitably, was black advancement, which was resented on its own accord but also viewed as a threat to white privilege. The book begins with a brief discussion of the divisions over slavery leading to the Civil War and a somewhat more detailed discussion of the almost hundred year Jim Crow era after the Civil War.

Soon after the Civil War, efforts to reconstruct the South with governments that included and rehabilitated former slaves collapsed entirely. The Jim Crow era began shortly after President Andrew Johnson blocked many provisions to help former slaves and pardoned leaders of the old Confederacy so they could be reinstated to run state governments as they pleased. The Supreme Court ruled that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ending slavery could not be enforced by the federal government but only by the states that had just fought a war to defend slavery. Hence, white supremacy was reestablished along with a system of share-cropping very similar to slavery that provided black subordination for a system of cheap, exploitable, rightless labor.

In this system, blacks couldn’t hold any other employment besides laborer or domestic and were banned from hunting and fishing. They were forbidden to seek better wages and working conditions with another employer. If they left the plantation, lumber camp, or mine, they would be jailed and auctioned off, with their labor sold to the highest bidder. The penalty for defiance, insulting gestures, and other undesired behavior was a no-holds-barred whipping. Civil rights like voting, serving on juries, and equal education were blocked by legal or other means. These means included descent into an orgy of anti-black violence of vigilante raids by the KKK, massacres, and thousands of lynchings. Even as late as 1944, only 5% of age-eligible African-American voters were registered to vote in the old Confederacy.

During World Wars I and II, the shortage of labor in the North led to the first and second great migrations of blacks from the South to the North. Southern whites resisted this threat to the foundation of their economy by arresting participating blacks, imprisoning recruiting agents from the North, shutting down papers advertising northern jobs, and stopping north-bound trains. Nevertheless, large numbers of blacks managed to flee to the North only to step into a new articulation of seething, corrosive hatred. From 1917 into the 1920s race riots, which were rampages of whites against blacks, occurred in many cities from white’s fears about jobs and housing.

The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were parts of the campaign to end the hundred year Jim Crow system of pervasive racist segregation, blatantly unequal education, restricted employment, judicial abuse, and voter suppression of African-Americans in the South. Southern Whites responded to this campaign with rage and intense resistance by mobs, police departments, and leading politicians at all levels of government. In 1956, 101 members of congress, all from states of the old Confederacy, signed the Southern manifesto in defiance of the Supreme Court. Public schools were shut down and their funding diverted to vouchers for segregationist private schools. A multitude of defiant state and local laws and police and mob violence led to massive clashes and unpunished murder against civil rights advocates, and eventually the assassination of leaders, such as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr.

Within about a decade, this overt racism mostly gave way to still pervasive covert racism that relied on implicit (dog whistle) rather than explicit terms to support racist policies, including voter suppression. This transition was reflected in Nixon’s cynical Southern Strategy to capture votes influenced by racism. As his chief advisor John Ehrlichman explained, the point was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.” Most southern politicians quickly embraced these ideas while rejecting the civil rights laws and Great Society of the Democrats. Consequently, the formerly solidly democratic South became solidly Republican instead. In addition, Nixon managed to name four justices to the Supreme Court who supported this agenda, despite the rejection of two of his nominees for previous segregationist activity.

Thus the stage was set for the Regan administration to continue the reversal of the earlier civil rights gains. Fears that African-American’s gains could come only at white’s expense were shamelessly exploited with code words like “welfare queens, reverse discrimination, and affirmative action.” This was done to elicit support for cutting taxes by gutting the safety net and for consolidating Republican control by limiting civil rights protections, including for minority voting. The Great Society and civil rights laws had been developed to ameliorate hundreds of years of violent and corrosive repression that resulted in up to $24 trillion in multigenerational African-American devastation from lost wages, stolen land, educational impoverishment, and housing inequalities. Yet, this uncontestable history was callously disregarded to present the claim that it was actually the much better off whites who were the victims because of government handouts to lazy blacks.

The Voting Rights Act of 1964 hampered some of the usual techniques for voter suppression like poll taxes, literacy tests, and understanding clauses, but many other forms of voter suppression remained. A relatively recent innovation, particularly after the election of an African-American president in 2008, was the requirement for government-issued photo IDs. (197 million federal votes from 2002 to 2005 resulted in only 26 convictions for voter registration fraud.) These requirements prey on structural difficulties, some imposed by cynical Republican governments, for impoverished minorities to obtain photo IDs. Reportedly, roughly 25% of black, 16% of Latino, and only 8% of white voters are without a current, government-issued ID. The 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act undermined challenges to this kind of voter suppression.

Despite all of this, the key to voter suppression remains the severe socio-economic disadvantage of African-Americans as a result of the devastating residue of centuries of slavery and Jim Crow and of growing inequality enhanced by voter suppression. Those in power use congressional redistricting to minimize minority representation. They limit the locations and hours of voting stations so minorities must miss work, travel long distances, and wait in long lines to vote. They send mass mailings to minority neighborhoods and remove names from the rolls when return to sender cards came back. (This technique resulted in removal of 180,000 names in Florida in 2012, of which only 85 were found to be correctly identified.) They create requirements for W2 forms, bank statements, and utility bills that are difficult for minorities who are unemployed, less likely to have bank accounts, and who live in multigenerational housing.

In another book, global economist Branko Milanovic, who studies inequality, regards this kind of voter suppression as a major tool of the plutocrats entrenched at the top of US government to facilitate the growing inequality that benefits them. He points out that the overlapping influence of race and class has resulted in the overwhelming difference in voting of 80% for the top decile and only 40% for the lowest decile. As the author of this book pointed out, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, whose ALEC drafted model voter-ID legislation, said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. (GOP) leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”