We’re never going to get where we need to go. Why is it important for us to confront that myth to see Lincoln and the lasting effects of slavery more truthfully?Ĭarol Anderson: Because if we don’t deal with what really happened, we’re starting off on the wrong road.
I recently spoke with Carol Anderson-a professor of African-American studies at Emory University-about confronting cultural myths about race, the role of Chicago in the Great Migration, and whether she’s optimistic about the future of race relations in the United States.Īdam Morgan: Lincoln is often portrayed as a hero for abolishing slavery and championing equality, but history tells a different story.
“The truth is,” she writes in the introduction, “white rage has undermined democracy, warped the Constitution, weakened the nation’s ability to compete economically, squandered billions of dollars on baseless incarceration, left an entire region sick, poor, and undereducated, and left cities nothing less than decimated.” All because African-Americans wanted to be treated equally. Now, Anderson has expanded on the same theme in White Rage, which chronicles the relentless abuse of African-Americans at the hands of whites from Reconstruction to the Obama administration.
“White rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors who cast its efforts as noble,” she continued. Over 4,000 comments later (most of which aren’t worth reading), it was one of the newspaper’s most-read articles of the year. Instead of remembering Ferguson as a manifestation of black rage, she cautioned that “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,” Anderson wrote. Two summers ago, responding to the death of Michael Brown and the ensuing unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Carol Anderson penned a controversial (for some) op-ed for the Washington Post.
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