Quotes from Carol Anderson

to create the full-blown security apparatus to suppress what will eventually be the bulk of a nation's population and to find a continuous substantial flow of foreign capital to offset the inordinate expense—means that it is destined to fail.

But as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom observed, "Whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, and against its own laws and customs.

That a child could excel even when "forced to attend an underfunded school with poorer physical facilities, less experienced teachers, larger classes," and a number of other deficits compared with "a school with substantially more funds," Marshall barked, "is to the credit of the child not the State.

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as "many as 12 percent of eligible voters nationwide may not have government-issued photo ID," and that "percentage is likely even higher for students, seniors and people of color.

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.

For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship.

Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.76

First, within weeks after taking office, Johnson pardoned scores of former Confederates, ignoring Congress's 1862 Ironclad Test Oath that expressly forbade him to do so, and handed out full amnesty to thousands whom, just the year before, he had called "guerrillas and cut-throats" and "traitors … [who] ought to be hung.

I am not," Lincoln had said, "nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.

The bottom line was that black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination.

The new president, just like Lincoln, had convinced himself instead that the Civil War was only about preserving the Union. No more. No less. And therefore, he set about stitching the rebel South back into the fabric of the nation.

Now, in the twenty-first century, the sector of the U.S. economy that accounts for more than 50 percent of our sustained economic expansion, science and engineering, is relying on an ever-dwindling skilled and educated workforce. Whereas at one point, "about 40% of the world's scientists and engineers resided in the U.S.," according to Rodney C. Adkins, senior vice president of IBM, "that number [had] shrunk to about 15%" by 2012.133

The states of the Deep South, which fought Brown tooth and nail, today all fall in the bottom quartile of state rankings for educational attainment, per capita income, and quality of health.139

In 1864, two years after the Homestead Act passed, he advocated taking the plantation owners' land as well and distributing it to "free, industrious, and honest farmers,

In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways.46 White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached "staggering proportions." Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South.47 Johnson refused,

If you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens." 5 He further denounced cops as "jack-booted government thugs [who have] more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us." 6

Equally vicious was the practice of "whitecapping," which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local whites maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could "ride for miles and not see a black face.

Nor did Johnson's policies or the Black Codes ensure that African Americans would not be a "burden upon society." If anything, they guaranteed the opposite. Blacks were denied access to land, banned from hunting and fishing, and forbidden to work independently using skills honed and developed while enslaved, such as blacksmithing. Under such conditions, self-sufficiency could never have been achieved.

Plantation owners were thus notorious for "barbarities such as scalding, burning, castrating, and extracting the tongues or eyes of slaves." 23 That combination of the insatiable desire for enormous profits coupled with the sadistic brutalization of bonded African labor created an overwhelming fear among whites of the enslaved's capacity and desire for retribution. And they needed to be fearful.

Beginning in 1917 and going into the 1920s, so-called race riots, which were essentially lynchings on a grander scale, erupted in East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and numerous other cities.75 Though labeled "riots," these outbursts were more like rampages, where whites went hunting for African Americans to pummel, burn, and torture.

did not stop the mass importation of kidnapped Africans, who by 1710 already outnumbered whites in South Carolina.

Each of these—restricting felons from possessing guns, while also allowing a greater flow in urban areas for "protection" against crime, and forbidding firearms in public housing—had at its center the argument of "safety" and "security." But they had something else in common, too: African Americans were always the ones who posed the threat and always the ones who bore the brunt of the decision.

Congress, therefore, passed both the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which defined as citizens all persons born in the United States, except for Native Americans. The moderates believed they had stripped out the most objectionable clauses from the legislation—the right to vote and widespread land distribution—so that President Johnson could now easily sign both bills into law.

Sweet had also been in Washington, D.C., during the Red Summer 1919, when police allowed whites to rampage for days slaughtering black people. The tide turned only after returning African American veterans had seen enough, polished their rifles, and began shooting.93