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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMUST READ: "IT'S ABOUT WHITE RAGE."
This is an opinion column that was written back in August. Excellent article.Opinions
Ferguson isnt about black rage against cops. Its white rage against progress.
By Carol Anderson August 29
Carol Anderson is an associate professor of African American studies and history at Emory University and a public voices fellow with the Op-Ed Project. She is the author of Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960.
On Aug. 17, police in Ferguson, Mo., wait to advance after using tear gas to disperse a crowd protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown. (Charlie Riedel/Associated Press)
When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What weve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.
Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesnt have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.
White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obamas ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, theres a reaction, a backlash...
SNIP
...So when you think of Ferguson, dont just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutors staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities, such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ferguson-wasnt-black-rage-against-copsit-was-white-rage-against-progress/2014/08/29/3055e3f4-2d75-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html
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MUST READ: "IT'S ABOUT WHITE RAGE." (Original Post)
FourScore
Dec 2014
OP
bemildred
(90,061 posts)1. Totally.
And they never give up, and they feel no compunction about cheating and lying and playing dirty all the way down. If you aren't racist too, they will come after you, whatever color you might be.
barbtries
(28,788 posts)2. it must be.
take the reaction from St Louis to the Rams players who protested. they're offended by it - they are pushing the meme that justice was done! come ON...they cannot even allow that the protesters have a reason. i'm so sick of it all.