Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth Carol Anderson 20240707 : co

democracy that we are heralding on july 4, 1776. we are in a perilous time, to me, as perilous as it was when the continental army looked like they were getting their butts kicked, as perilous as it looked when the south attacked fort sumter and launched the civil war. we are in perilous times where our democracy is hanging by a thread. host: why do you say that? prof. anderson: we've got what i call a land, sea, and air attack happening on american democracy. the land attack is the assault on voting rights. the sea attack is the attack to wash away the teaching of real american history. and the air attack is the loosening of gun laws while having a narrative that the insurrection was legitimate political discourse. and well seeing that there was all of this violence and threats raining down on election workers and election officials. when you are looking at what is happening with voting, what is happening with our education system and the narratives that we come to understand this nation, and then when you look at the deployment of violence as a tool of politics, we are under a full-blown assault, aided and abetted by the u.s. supreme court, aided and abetted by hyper extreme partisan gerrymandered state legislatures . we are in trouble. and where the hope is is that we have always fought back. we have always known that this democracy was worth the fight. so we have to gear up and fight for this democracy. host: as a historian at emory university, there has been some comparisons made to pre-civil war times right now. can you make that comparison? prof. anderson: yes, in ways where you get the sense of two nations, two separate nations going in two different directions. one direction is our states that believe in the fullness of their citizens' humanity but believe that people have rights, that believe that there is this thing called democracy. on the other hand, you have those who have what i want to say is a heron vote democracy. their vision is a democracy where you have a right this labor pool that is generating enormous resources that go up to a small strata of whites, and what that small strata have done is they have convinced a larger number of whites that they too can get the benefits of this massive set of resources coming up from this rightless liverpool. but that is not how this works. you are getting a sense of a hyper racialized democracy where only a small strata have a full-blown rights versus a democracy that is multiracial, both the ethic -- multiethnic, and vibrant. those two visions of what this nation is and can be is where the collision course is. host: in this conversation today, i want to focus mainly on three of your books, that includes one person, no vote, white rage, and the second. they all seem to have come from instances that happened in our world. one person, no vote, we had the 2018 georgia gubernatorial race. white rage, michael brown. and the, philando castile. is that a fair way to put it? prof. anderson: almost. one person, no vote emanated out of the 2016 election because what struck me where the pundits saying, you know, hillary lost because black folks did not show up. they are not feeling hillary because she is hillary. she is not obama. so black folks just stayed home. what that analysis did is it ignored the fact that this was the first presidential election in 50 years without the protection of the voting rights act, which the supreme court had gutted in 2013. once you begin to factor in that you had a number of states implementing voter suppression techniques such as racially discriminatory voter id laws, such as limiting early voting, such as closing polling places in black communities, once you begin to look at that, you are coming up with a different narrative about what happened in 2016. host: what is a racially tinged voter id law? prof. anderson: i love that question, thank you. it is where you have, for instance, alabama with its voter id laws said you must have a government issued photo id, but your public housing id does not count as government issued photo id. 71% of those in public housing in alabama were african-american . what the naacp legal defense fund found was for many, it was the only government issued photo id they had. then governor bentley shut down the department of motor vehicles in the black belt counties. when the one government issued photo id you have does not count , so you are like, i will get a drivers license, but the drivers license bureaus are shut down and you have to go 50 miles to get a drivers license but if you don't have a drivers license, how do you go the 50 miles? basically a 100 mile round-trip. in public transportation is ranked 48th, alabama is ranked 48th in the nation in terms of public transportation. it is like -- it is not like you can just hop on some public transportation. that is what i mean by racially discriminatory voter id laws. host: let's look white rage. michael brown, amadou diallo, is that where that book stemmed from? prof. anderson: so many ways. i was in this thing called the op-ed project which was teaching faculty how to write for a public audience. we had a workshop later that day and i have the tv on and the news is just blaring and he did not matter which channel i was watching, because ferguson, missouri was on fire. in the pundits were all saying, look at this black rage. who burns up where they live? black folks. can you believe all of this black rage? it did not matter which channel, it was the same narrative. i had lived in missouri for 13 years. so i found myself shaking my head going, no, no, this is not black rage, this is white rage. this is where i came up with that we as a nation, we are so focused in on the flames that we missed the kindling. we missed the policies that are in place that then generate that explosion. we missed what we do with education, what we do with housing, what we do with the criminal justice system, what we do with voting rights, we miss all of those key fundamental basics of life in america and the policies that undermined them and turn around and say, look at black folks burning up where they live, without looking at the white rage underneath it. host: this is a quote from white rage. "white rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. the trigger for white rage inevitably is black advancement." prof. anderson: yes. this is what being a historian allowed me to do. it was to see the patterns. it was to see, after the civil war, when you have emancipation, this should have been, hoo! but instead, this backlash happened with the black codes trying to reinstall slavery by another name, then having andrew johnson systematically undermine what the civil war should have been about, then having the u.s. supreme court gut the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments as well as the enforcement act which dealt with racial discrimination, segregation, as well as going after white domestic terrorism. so when you have these entities such as the president of the united states, these governors, and the u.s. supreme court issuing these edicts and these executive orders and these laws that undermined that advancement of what freedom meant, that is white rage. and i carry it through to the great migration, through the brown decision, through the civil rights movement, and through the election of barack obama. host: one of the things you do with the brown decision is talked about how it was not fully implemented in some places and you use san antonio as an example. prof. anderson: part of what we see in san antonio is that you had this massive disparity. you've got this sense of equality coming up under the 14th amendment, this equal protection under the law. in a neighborhood in san antonio that was overwhelmingly mexican-american and african-american, they were taxing themselves at the highest level allowed, but still only able to generate a few dollars, like $21 per student per capita. whereas the edgewood district, which was a wealthy white suburb of san antonio, basically taxed themselves at a much lower rate but because of property values, they were able to generate so much more hundreds of dollars per capita. so the parents, the mexican-american parents sued saying, this is fundamentally unequal. we are taxing ourselves at the highest rate but because of public policy that has devalued our property, we cannot generate enough income, enough tax dollars to adequately fund a quality education for our children. u.s. supreme court said, equality does not require equal funding. so that kind of disparity that you saw then in that we see now was blessed on high by the u.s. supreme court. host: your most recent book is the second, race and guns in a fatally unequal american -- america. 42 million african-americans in the states and according to recent statistics, 25% of them are gunowners. that is doubling in the last 10, 20 years. prof. anderson: i'm not surprised. one of the things i look at in the second was how access to guns, that antiblackness drove the second amendment, so regardless of the legal status of african-americans, enslaved, three black, denizen, which was that peace between citizen and enslaved, emancipated, african-american, jim crow african-american, civil rights movement african-american, obama african-american, regardless of that kind of legal status where we think the progress we have made, the fear of black people has created this crisis that we are looking at. it has striven the second amendment. african-americans buying guns, when you begin to think about the terror that has rained down on this society, you saw the rise of the by doing militia during obama's presidency, he saw the rise of white gun ownership during obama's presidency. then we had trump, and you saw the embrace of white nationalism, white supremacists. and you saw, because of the technology, the kind of police violence that rains down on black folk. so you have african-americans doing what they have consistently done, which is to say, we have to defend ourselves in this society, nobody is coming to help us. host: what is a book you thought you were going to write? was this something you have thought about for a while? prof. anderson: no, actually. it really was the killing of philando castile that did it. my body of work deals with human rights and civil rights in african-americans. and with -- when philando castile was gunned down by a police officer because philando castile had a license carry weapon, that is why he was gunned down, and the national rifle association went virtually silent on this killing of a man sibley because he had a gun. so you had pundits asking, don't african-americans have second amendment rights? i went, that it's a great question. that is a question that i have not explored yet. so i went hunting and i went back to the 17th century. host: what did you find? prof. anderson: hoo! i found this incredible fear of the enslaved and of free blacks and the laws coming through to try to deal with this fear, to try to protect the white community from the enslaved, from free blacks. and a key element in that was disarmament, or was the banning of access to guns. so you saw that, laws coming out of virginia and south carolina, where thou shalt not have guns for those who were enslaved and for free blacks, and you saw this coming through in the constitutional ratification conventions, where you get to virginia, and virginia is like, i'm not sure about this constitution thing, and why virginia was not sure about this constitution thing, one of the key elements, you had patrick henry and george mason saying, this militia that we need in order to keep the enslaved in check, james madison has put control of that thing under the federal government, under congress. so we cannot rely upon the feds to defend us when the enslaved rise up. the federal government has folks from life pennsylvania and massachusetts. they are not going to be coming down to defend us. so we need to have the protection or we will be left defenseless. they basically threatened to scuttle ratification. when that did not work, they threatened to hold a new constitutional convention. madison was scared out of his bujeebers. the articles of confederation had not worked. they worked through this new constitution that gave the federal government enhanced powers, but there was this fear that the federal government was too powerful, and this is why we have in the first congress the bill of rights. when you think about that bill of rights, freedom of religion, the right to not be illegally searched and seized, the right to a speedy and fair trial, the right not to have cruel and unusual punishment, the right to a well regulated militia for the security of a free state? that thing is an outlier. that outlier is basically the bribe to the south to not hold a new constitutional convention. it is to say, you are protected, the militia is safe. host: where are you surprised about what you found about the second amendment? prof. anderson: yes, i really was. because so much of our discussion today about the second amendment is about the individual right to bear arms, or was this really about a militia? we get this binary going on. is it about individual rights coming out of the heller decision and then the mcdonald decision? or is this about the militia, which the courts had long held that this was really about a militia? but that argument, that binary argument is irrelevant. it is irrelevant because the foundation of the second amendment is the fear of blackness, the fear of black people, defining african-americans as criminal, as a threat, as dangerous, as violent, and that the white community has to be protected. and i went, wow. that is when things began to make sense in its own weird way. so as i walk through this book, i even take us into the 20th and 21st century and i'm seeing the ways we understand citizenship through gun rights. open carry. castle doctrine, able to defend your home against an invader. i just blanked. [laughter] but those kinds of doctrines that become foundational. stand your ground. those kinds of doctrines that become foundational, when they are applied to african-americans, they don't hold. and i went, wow. so i have examples of like to me or vice, who was in an open carry state, 12-year-old playing in a park by himself with a toy gun. rented it did not have the little red tip that says i'm a toy, but ohio is an open carry state that says as long as you are not threatening anyone, you can carry your weapon openly. police pulled up and within two seconds, they shot tamia rice down. he was dangerous, he was a threat. then i juxtaposed to me to kyle rittenhouse, where you have a 17-year-old who hasn't ar-15, stalls by the police officers in kenosha when there is a black lives matter protest and the police are like, we are glad you guys are here. you want some water? it is hot out here. he then shoots three people. two of them he kills. he walks back toward the police officers with his hands up. they don't see threat, they don't see danger. they are not afraid. that speaks volumes about the second amendment. host: are you a gun person prior to writing your most recent book? prof. anderson: a gun person? no. it was not like i was pro-gun or anti-gun. i was just here. like i said, it was this discussion about philando castile that really sent me down this path of really trying to find -- to african-americans have second amendment rights? i think always -- always is a hard word, but i have generally been one that has said, we need to be reasonable about guns. the semiautomatic weapons being readily available to civilians makes no sense to me. you cannot hunt within ar-15 and eat the near afterwards -- the d eer afterwards. ar-15's are for hunting people. the basic logic is in there. i have been there on the basic logic. host: welcome back to the book tv in-depth studio, this is the first time in 2.5 years that we have been back with a guest in the studio and we are pleased that it is professor and author carol anderson. if you have been listening, you have heard some of the topics. your participation is key on book tv. here's how you can get through. here are the phone numbers. if you live in the east or central time zones, 202-748-8200. if you live in the mountain or pacific time zones, 202-748-8201. if you cannot get through on the phone over like to make a comment via text, here is the text number for text messages only. include your first name under city. 202-748-8903. we will also scroll through our social media sites. twitter, facebook. just remember, at book tv if you would like to make a comment on any of those sites. we will begin taking those in a few minutes. how long have you been at emory? prof. anderson: i got there in 2009, from the university of missouri, where i was there for 13 years. host: why did you transplant herself to georgia? prof. anderson: emory is an amazing university. and it was an opportunity to really grow and thrive, and to be in a place surrounded by scholars who are asking really tough, hard questions, and seeking the answers. then there's atlanta. which is an amazing city. host: missouri, columbia, atlanta. where did you start life? prof. anderson: i started in columbus, ohio. that is not accurate, my father was in the military, so i was born on an army base, then we lived in germany for several years, then when he retired from the military after 20 plus years , he moved to columbus, ohio because he wanted my brother to go to ohio state. that is where i did a lot of my growing up. host: where did you go to school? prof. anderson: i went to school, my undergrad and my masters are at miami university, and oxford, ohio, and my phd is from the ohio state university. host: why did you decide to become a scholar? what appealed to you about getting a phd? prof. anderson: i love learning. there were always folks in our home -- books in our home and discussions about what was happening in the world, about politics, civil rights, injustice. it was me trying to figure this thing out. i had wonderful mentors along the way that really helped me figure out how to become a scholar. there was alan engel, who was my con law professor at miami. i know this is going to be hard to believe but we were going over some case and i popped off, and he went, miss anderson, may i see you after class? i'm going through that, oh my gosh, an getting ready to get thrown out of this class, it is a five hour class, i'm going to lose full-time status. rolling through my head. i walk up to him after class and he said, have you ever thought about going to graduate school? i went, yes, but i have no idea how to get there. he's like, come with me. having mentors like that who helped shepherd me through what can be an opaque process was instrumental. it was that natural love of learning. i was one of those kids who would read the world book encyclopedia, then read it all over again just in case i missed something. host: what do you teach? prof. anderson: i teach the civil rights movement. i teach 20th century african-american history. i teach war crimes and genocide. i teach american human rights policy. i teach the black athlete in american society. at one point, i taught u.s. cold war foreign policy. host: let's go back to your home state of georgia. you have a black athlete running for senate down there. prof. anderson: yes, we do. yes, we do. what we really have is a deployment of representation that is not representative. it was the same way that the republicans tapped alan keyes to run against obama, thinking, here is somebody black, that ought to do it. it was the same thing with herschel walker. football star out of the university of georgia, wow, let's put him up against raphael warnock. what we are seeing is someone who has a history of violence, someone who consistently lies about his credentials, and someone who has not thought through policy. to have someone -- the reason he is there is because he is black, not because he can do the heavy lifting of being a u.s. senator. it was a cynical ploy. so the answer that he gave after uvalde, after the killings in uvalde, texas, where they said, how would you handle the issue of guns? and he said, well, cain slew abel, and then you have this disinformation. but we need is a department so you can have -- a department that looks at young men, looking at young women on social media, because of constitutional rights. it was like a hard drive that has been corrupted. so it had these little soundbites on their, then he stung them together. i know i need to say something about the bible, i know i need to say something about social media, i know i need to say something about constitutional rights and disinformation, and that is what we got, but that was not policy, that was not thoughtful. it is insulting to think that black folks are going to run that way simply because he is black. that is not enough. host: have you ever been in ebenezer when pastor warnock is preaching? prof. anderson: i haven't. host: is it hard to get in at that point? on a sunday morning? prof. anderson: anyone can come in, i'm sure. ebenezer is a storied church. it is like bedrock foundational to the history of black atlanta and the history of the civil rights movement. it is where dr. martin luther king preached, it is where daddy king was. it is ebenezer. host: a lot of news reports indicated that the 2022 georgia primary election after the georgia legislature made some changes to the voting laws went smoothly and there was good turnout. prof. anderson: and i'm going to like and that -- liken that to, the house set, how can this be oppressive and we had a great turnout? what that does not look at is the mobilization of civil society, all of the work of the new georgia project, all of the work of the black voters matter fund, all of the work of the naacp, all of the work of the lef and aclu and got leo and asian americans advancing justice, all of those groups trying to move folks through, under, beyond, over, across the barriers that the georgia legislature set in place. i liken it to -- somebody tries to rob you, they don't succeed. you are able to fend them off, there are a group of folks who are able to help fend them off. does the fact that they were not successful wash away the fact that they tried to rob you? no. because they tried. but you had a group of folks who helped you fend off that person that was mugging you. so when you look at sp 202, it is a mugging of georgia voters. it is predicated on the big lie, the trumpian big lie of massive voter fraud that no one can prove because it did not happen. and it is predicated on, how do we stop these folks -- because we had incredible turnout in the 2020 election and the 2021 runoff. in the 2021 senatorial runoff, black voter turnout was almost 92%. when you are in a democracy that is multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, you embrace that kind of turnout. you are like, we did something bite, how do we continue on with this? unless you are going for a heron vote democracy and you are like, how do we stop this? host: last question before we get to calls. in all your books, the subject of human rights plays a role. it is not permeate necessarily, but you bring it up and you weave it in. why is that? prof. anderson: human rights are so foundational for me. it was my first book, it was my dissertation that became my first book, eyes off the prize. i asked the question, how could all of the blood, all of the courage, all of the effort by civil rights folk lead to an america where the life expectancy of afghan americans has declined, where you are having massive disparities of infant and maternal mortality rates? where you are having massive wealth gaps that shape the kinds of ways people can move through this society? how could the civil rights movement, that is one of the things we herald -- we look at this going, we have overcome -- this is the unfinished business of democracy, handling that business. how could all of that have still left the america we are in? and what my research showed was that we had a civil rights movement, not a human mice movement. i wondered how that happened. you had malcolm x saying, how does a black man going to get his civil rights before he gets his human rights? everybody was like, hoo! what i found was you had the naacp and web dubois saying the same thing a generation earlier. what could create that level of community amnesia as if malcolm was the first one seated? that is where i found the power of the cold war and the power of anti-communism in the mccarthy witchhunts, that defined human rights, the right to health care, the right to education, the right to housing. those are the things that the soviets want and if you are a real patriot, you don't want that. and how those witchhunts were systematically targeting african americans and african-american organizations that were vying for this human rights platform to the point where it became politically safer to argue on a platform of civil rights, and safer does not mean safe, because we know the violence that rained down on folk for fighting for civil rights, but it became politically safer to be able to argue on a civil rights platform. all we want is what is in the bill of rights. what can be more american than the bill of rights? than to talk about the right to housing, the right to health care, the right to employment, the right to leisure. looking at the universal declaration of human rights. the u.n. had been cast as a communistic organization by the right wing. my work deals with those truncated rights and the residuals of what that looks like as we live through this america. host: i promised that was the last question before we go to calls. a couple more came to mind, but we will hear from leo in the bronx. you are on with carol anderson. caller: thank you. ms. anderson, i enjoy seeing your lectures on c-span when you speak to college students. but my question is, stacey abrams changed her position. she used to be against the idea of requiring people, when they vote, to present ids. i heard recently she changed her position. could you explain why? prof. anderson: thank you for that question. part of what you are seeing has been basically the work of the sense that voter ids are reasonable. voter ids, everybody has an id, and that we have voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud. so it is not too much to ask for people to show an id in order to protect democracy, in order to protect our elections. they have looked at polls and ascent to something -- and it is something like 70% of americans believe voter fraud happens on a regular basis, and 50% believe it happens regularly. so coming up against that tide, it allows for the discussion about we've got to have laws that protect our voting rights. when the soul it runs up against is voter id and you've got most americans believing that voter ids are fine, again, because it plays to a middle-class norm and the racial discrimination that is inherent in the ways that these states have deployed voter id, it felt like a battle, a battle too far. host: cornelius, louisiana. good afternoon. caller: good afternoon. happy and blessed forthcoming up for the fourth of july. carol anderson, i am enjoying you and stuff. i see you are a history professor and i was telling the call screener, i was a democrat for a long time, but i joined the republican party because of some different things that the democrats were doing. my parents were kennedy democrats, but they were republicans first because the republican party helped out african-americans and stuff. and my question for you, i believe in god, guns, and gold. our constitution, if you look at ben franklin, he said, this is a representative republic, not a democracy. so we are supposed to be a representative republic, or constitutional republic. i agree with you on racism. when philando castile got murdered, that cop should have never done that, the nra should have said something. after the civil war, the nra was trying to teach blacks to have gun ownership to protect themselves when the democrats had the klan and stuff. i don't know if you know the history of the democratic party. the klan was the military wing of the democratic party, they were the ones that came up with the jim crow laws and like that. host: all right, cornelius, very quickly, why are you a republican today? caller: because the democrats have lied to us. they have always wanted to defund the police, they don't want us to have guns. we are killing our own selves with these gang members and drug dealers and stuff, so all of us need to be armed up. host: thank you very much. professor. if somebody raised that point to you in class. prof. anderson: there were a couple of points there. one was what the democrats are, and yes, after the civil war, the democrats where the party of white supremacy. unabashed whites of tennessee. one of the things that has happened, though, it is called the southern strategy, and what the southern strategy did was, as the democrats began to deal with the issue of civil rights for african-americans because of the great migration, because african-americans were moving out of the jim crow south, is that you had republicans going, there is gold in those hills of white resentment about civil rights, and you see it being deployed in 1948, in 1952, in 1960 four, and you particularly see it being deployed with richard nixon in 1968. and ronald reagan in 1980. if you wonder why we have this demographic shift, it is because of the southern strategy, where the republicans brought in this sense of anti-civil rights as their mantra. and with the issue about guns and we are killing each other -- one of the things we hear about is black on black crime, that is the narrative of black pathology. yes, 80% of black people are killed by black people. over 80% of white people are killed by white people. but we don't have the narrative of white on white crime. why is that? sometimes we have to ask the next question. and what you also have is you have washington, d.c. and chicago have implemented gun safety laws to try to deal with the homicide rates in those cities. you have the u.s. supreme court, first in the heller decision, then in the mcdonald decision, undermine those safety laws. and he sought guns flooding in to those communities again. this is why, after uvalde, while you have governor abbott talking about, but what about chicago? because that becomes the kind of trope of black violence that gets deployed consistently by republicans. host: text message from kelvin in baltimore. "good afternoon. how does the evangelical right play a part in fueling our divide in our society, presumably, or presently, and its influence in the supreme court, i.e. the federalist society?" prof. anderson: the role of white evangelical christianity is powerful. it really became a force i want to say in the 1970's and really took hold in the 1980's and has not let go. there is a wonderful book called the long southern strategy by todd sills and angie maxwell that looks at the three pillars of the long southern strategy. one of those is racism. another pillar is patriarchy. and the other pillar is white evangelical christianity. and the role that it plays in the republican -- in the domination of the republican party and in shaping those policies. so we are seeing this in the recent scotus decisions where you have, in maine, where maine was only finding secular schools -- funding secular schools and where you had these white evangelical christian schools going, we want to some of that public money, and the supreme court says, yeah, you have to do this. it is where you have the recent decision where the coach was kneeling on the 50 yard line and you had the supreme court ignoring the evidence that this is a public school, this was a public event on a public field, where you have the power of the coach around his players kneeling in a christian prayer. you have to ask yourself, if maine happens to have the school of satanic devotion, are they going to be eligible for public funds? part of what you are seeing happening is this narrowing definition of what is religion and you have lauren boebert for instance talking about, she is sick about hearing about the separation of church and state. well, that is the first amendment. treating it as if it is made up. so much of what we are seeing in america is myth history, made up history, used to justify policies that are absolutely abhorrent to this democracy. host: next call comes from pamela in maryland. caller: hi, thank you for taking my call. dr. anderson, it is an honor to speak with you. i am a 30 six years married african-american mom of two african-american sons and i would like to know, kind of alluded to already and you have done some -- can you speak to the issue and ideology that we are still fighting the confederacy and its ideology through the states rights that have ensued from andrew johnson, who was the president after lincoln's assassination, who was a starch states rights supporter, and he favorite the restoration of the confederate states for their civil government to be back in power, and as a result during that time, black codes were path that the pride -- that the private civil rights. for example, they never got their 30 acres and a mule and the former slave owners were getting money for every slave that was made free, i believe it was $300 or something. anyway, how all of this still is going on, is the undercurrent today that we face and how in the 1960's, there was a flip and like you said, the republicans began to embrace the states rights ideology and i thought they were dixiecrats, but the democrats were now embracing the rights of the federal government to protect african-americans and others -- can you speak to how, in essence, we are still fighting this confederacy and the ideology? it has just changed forms. host: before we get an answer, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? you live in a nice community, one of the wealthiest majority black communities in america. have you faced some of the issues you talk about? caller: i am a public servant, i am a state employee and i work for young ladies on medical assistance and the undocumented who don't have health care and we provide health care and make sure they have access so they can have healthy babies. on a public servant. i was raised by a maternal grandmother. i lost my mom to him ammonia -- to pneumonia. i see what we are dealing with. this is stuff that i read about. i never thought i would be living in a time where my rights were being assaulted and having to go vote. my family came from alabama. my mom was born and based in alabama. to see what we have to go through -- my father was born and raised in georgia. to see what we have to face in 2022 is mind-boggling. i wanted to see if she could give me answers. prof. anderson: absolutely. one of the things -- i was giving a talk in virginia and i said, one of the things is that when we look at germany, germany had a de-nazification program. we never had a de-confederation program. instead, what we had, we started erecting statues to it, to its leaders, robert e. lee, jefferson davis. we started having in our textbooks, because of the united daughters of the confederacy, the lost cause becomes this heroic event and when you begin to think about what that means for the way our children learn, what they understand, so that slavery really was not that bad. you had benevolent, kind owners. the enslaved were fed well, they were clothed, they had housing. what could be so bad? and you have this mean, nasty north coming down and trying to impose its will on these good, honest, hard-working, noble folk. when that becomes the narrative that is in our textbooks until like the 1970's, hoo. and think about the battles we have had recently over taking down these confederate monuments in these public spaces. because what that is telling us is that this is who we should be honoring. and so we've got these tectonic plates underneath american society that basically says, the confederacy, they were good. slavery was not that bad. i think about bill o'reilly, who, after michelle obama talked about living in a house that was built by the enslaved, and on his show he said, it was not that bad. they were housed, they were clothed, they were well fed. so how bad could it be? when you get that coming in in the 21st century, it is the thing that we have not dealt with. we have not dealt with slavery. and when you look at how these states are demanding a revision of the curriculum so that it does not make white students feel uncomfortable, that it does not cause a kind of sense of being ill at ease, so we don't talk about slavery -- and i saw where in texas, they are thinking about renaming slavery involuntary relocation. when you can create these euphemisms to cover the horrors of what this nation has been through, when you don't deal with the reality of slavery, you don't deal with the reality of genocidal violence against indigenous people, you don't deal with the reality of xenophobia in our anti-immigrant policies, you don't deal with the reality of the relocation of the japanese, many don't deal with any of those realities, you don't understand america. and frankly, you do a disservice to america, because america is an aspirational nation. we hold these truths to be self-evident. so having folks fight to make those truths self-evident is a key piece of american history. but when you remove that and treat those aspirations as if they have already been achieved, that is what allows for the embrace of the confederacy and the whitening up of slavery, whitewashing of slavery. i remember i got a notice from an organization that i had been supporting that said, "come visit our beautiful plantations in mississippi, come see true southern charm." i thought, what kind of mess is this? i sent them a note back and i said, no more than you would herald a tour of auschwitz as a testament to find german engineering should you look at these plantations as anything then what they are, a place where human beings were bred, were born, were beaten, were worked without pay, were tortured. these slave labor camps. when you try to pretty it up, you defile american history. so part of what we are looking at is the defiling of american history by not dealing with the confederacy and how it was able to maintain its power through the southern democrats, and now through the republicans. host: should those plantations be maintained as historic sites? prof. anderson: yes, they should. and they should be maintained as historic sites the same way auschwitz is maintained as a historic site. you need to have accurate history in those sites laying out what really happened there. there was one of those battles, our net gordon reed is the one that talked about this, those battles over monticello. thomas jefferson's place, where prior to, you had this, he was one of the founding fathers, oh my god, he was brilliant, he was wonderful, and then you are like, where was sally hemmings? that narrative, that history is essential for understanding the battles that we have in america, this kind of, we hold these choose to be self-evident, but we've got to protect slavery. we are the leader of the free world, we are the jim crow leader of the free world. that kind of dichotomy is absolutely essential for understanding this nation. host: next call comes from nate in arizona. caller: hi. this is a wonderful show. ms. anderson, i never watch c-span, i just happened to turn the tv on. i just got intrigued. i am 60, black man, i live in arizona. i had returned to school when i was 47, got a degree and entrepreneurship. but to go into the class, i had to write an english paper to get accepted into the university. i basically just picked a topic, the disproportionate incarceration of african-american males. the ages of 18 and 35. so i called the paper, down by law. as i was listening to you, you are a teacher, you are a professor of a masters program at emory? is that correct? prof. anderson: i'm a professor at emory university in the department of african-american studies and i have history doctoral students. host: and you chair. prof. anderson: that is repaired -- that is right. caller: my grandfather was a historian. so i was thinking, i wanted to get my masters but i was not sure what i wanted to do. i turned the show on and i heard you talking, and my question is, for those who might have the same question, like i can't go to emory. does it offer un-online masters program? host: thank you -- offer an online masters program? host: thank you dave. prof. anderson: none of my classes offer online. during the pandemic, we went to online classes for the protection of our students and the faculty, but we are now back in the classroom. host: carol anderson, we always ask authors what their favorite books are, or what they are currently reading. i want to go to what you said about currently reading. usually we get specific titles, but this is quote from an email, a bazillion. "i'm a judge in the nonfiction category for the nonfictional book awards." your books have been in this running before as well. prof. anderson: what are you reading? i am reading a bazillion books. they are coming through and going in and they are fascinating. it is intriguing seeing authors so with different types of subjects across the board. host: and this is your first time being a judge? prof. anderson: yes. i was a judge last year for the pulitzer. this is the first one for the national book award. host: how many books will you have to read before the ceremony in november? prof. anderson: we get somewhere between 600 to 700 books, a bazillion. [laughter] and just plowing through them, to really make sure we are making good choices. host: favorite books? professor carol anderson. unburied sing. it's even worse than it looks. the girl who kicked the hornets nest. war without mercy. from here to equality. which of those five books do you want to speak to? prof. anderson: i think it is going to be somewhere between jasmine ward and steve larson. the girl who kicked the hornets nest. i know that may sound like an odd choice. this is a book based in sweden. host: it is fiction. prof. anderson: it is. i have reread it five or six times. i love that book. it speaks to my sense of justice. it speaks to my sense of, even when you are looking at a leviathan, you can take on the leviathan and win. it is going to be hard, it is going to be tough. the story deals with a young woman who was brutalized by her father, but her father was basically a secret agent for the government, and so they let him get away with this violence against his family. she had had enough. this is like the first book. the girl with the dragon tattoo. she had had enough and she sets him on fire. they commit her to an insane asylum, and then she has a war who abuse -- ward -- a trustee who abuses her. you see this story unraveling, where she is getting at the heart and soul of a corrupt government, one that defies the constitution, one that had set itself up outside the government to be more important than the representative government that was there. she takes them on. she has an incredible journalist who is helping her. she has an attorney who sees how the law can be deployed to help her. she has incredible computer skills to help herself. that combination. that book speaks to me because again, it is about justice, it is about what is right, it's about writing a wrong -- righting a wrong. it is about holding the folks accountable who abuse the trust of government, the trust of the people. host: we have about an hour left with our guest, author carol anderson. we will put the phone numbers up on the screen if you would like to dial in. (202)-748-8200 if you live in the eastern or central time zones. (202)-748-8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. if you want to send a text message, (202)-748-8903. please include your first name and your city. we also have some social media sites we will scroll through in case you want to make a comment that way. nana, louisville, kentucky. caller: good afternoon, dr. anderson. i am an african cultural scholar, and i've been listening to this show. i blocked it out early in the week, that dr. anderson was going to be on. dr. anderson, as i looked at your second book -- forgive me, i don't know how i don't know more of you because you are outstanding -- but talking about your second book -- your fourth -- the second, something is happening now that i want you to address. i see justin kentucky, four police officers were killed. a few days before that, a young african-american man was stopped by police and he was not comfortable with them and he fled, but he ended up getting 90 shots fired at him, 60 entered his body. i think his name is jayland walker. the crux of what i'm asking is, i want you to speak to how -- how under the second amendment, can we have protection of arms but when an african-american person has a gun, and even in kentucky don't even have to have permits anymore. i'm thinking about getting me a holster and a gun, and carrying openly. then we will have some gun control when they see african-americans running around with guns on their hips. what i wanted you to address is, the whole dynamic of a white man can kill some amount of people and somehow they can capture him without a scratch and take him to burger king, but on the flipside, as you were talking about orlando casteel, an african-american man doing everything lawfully, with a weapon and as soon as a weapon gets entered into the discussion with a white police officer, they gun him down, and they just gunned this young boy down, shot him 60 times. you are fantastic. host: thank you. prof. anderson: thank you. this is what i'm talking about here. with the book, the second. you look at amir locke, a young man up in minneapolis who was in his apartment, and the police first through in basically a no-knock warrant, and he has a gun by him as he is asleep on the couch. they see the gun, they say threat and they shoot him dead within 10 seconds. that sense of the castle doctrine. this is what breonna taylor supposedly had and now she is dead. this is what catherine johnston had, and now she is dead. the ability to protect your home from an invasion? no. and then jayland walker. i'm reading through that story. the last time i read someone gunned down was the quadruple lynching in 1946 in georgia, where two men and two women, two black men and women, basically executed in a hail of bullets. the corners report described 60 bullets in each of their bodies. the kind of fear that has to generate, to create that depth of violence against that young man. when you think about it, the guy who shot up the movie theater in colorado, he was taken alive in the parking lot. i think 12 dead? 70 wounded, something to that effect. dylan roof, guns down nine folk in church during bible study, and he is taken alive. that is what i mean by white is not the threat, black is the default threat in american society. armed black is an exponential threat. this is why during the late 1960's, in california, you solve the passage of what was called the mulford act. that was because the black panthers were openly carrying arms to police the police, because police were ringing down violence on that black community. there was no public entity that was willing to do a thing about it. so the black panthers said we will police the police. they knew the laws about open carrying. they knew the laws about what kind of guns they could have. they knew the laws about how far they had to stand away from the police. the police hated it, from the depths and the heights that their soul shall reach, they hated it. they ran to don mulford, a conservative assemblyman in the california legislature and said you've got to help us, you've got to find a way to make what they are doing illegal because every time we pull them over, we can't arrest them because they are not doing anything illegal. mulford writes the law with the help of the nra, and eagerly signed by republican governor ronald reagan, to ban the kind of open carry that the black panthers were doing, so you don't even have to come up with a hypothetical that if black folks are carrying guns you will see some gun regulations happening. we've got a history of that. host: denise, jacksonville, florida. caller: good afternoon. i love c-span and when i found out that dr. anderson was going to be on this show, i set my tv up so i can watch it. i just want to thank miss anderson for the books that she has written. i did not realize that i did not know much about black history in america, until i started reading your book, white rage. i was shocked. i thank you so much. i'm going to buy the other three books that you have out there, because i have decided i wanted to invest in myself to learn critical race theory, after 2019 when the black lives matter movement went on. i did not realize how much i did not know. i just wanted to thank you for that. host: can you tell us a little bit about yourself? caller: i will be 55 this year. i live in jacksonville. i became interested in politics when i started learning corporate finance at the university for my undergrad degree. when i start looking at politics, and seeing all the different things going on and could not really relate to it or could not give an educated conversation with ed, that is when i started investing in myself to learn these things. i was shocked. i never knew about a black code after the emancipation of the slaves. i did know about -- i did not know myself but somebody else brought it to my attention -- about rosewood, florida, tuscaloosa, oklahoma. i always say, white people say black people will tear up stuff, but where did they learn it from? every time a black person would be successful, white people would get jealous and try to destroy that. now a lot of things that did not make sense to me, it makes sense now, when i go to work and i see people acting certain ways or you can't advance on a certain job regardless of education or experience. now it makes sense to me. host: thank you. we will leave it there. professor? prof. anderson: this is why i write these books. my first two books were academic books. eyes off the prize and bush while radicals. they were for an academic audience. my writing style is very accessible. it translates really well into being able to provide these rich histories, well-documented rich histories for a broader public because there is so much we are not taught in schools, and we are seeing that push again. in florida, there is the push not to have the kinds of history that can talk about rosewood, that can talk about 1920, where you basically had ethnic cleansing because black folks dared to try to vote, and whites burned down the black part of town, ran black folks out and for the next five decades, there were no black people in a kobe, florida -- ocoee, florida. we don't know that history if we are not taught, if it is not made italy available to us. that is what -- not made readily available to us. host: you mentioned that bourgeois radicals was more of a scholarly book. i want to read a quote and have you explain it. "the semantic rabbit hole that made the naacp a standardbearer for imperialism and the soviet union synonymous with anti-colonialism greased the way into a wonderland where the association disappeared like the cheshire cat from the histories of colonial liberation struggles." prof. anderson: yeah. [laughter] host: that is quite a sentence. prof. anderson: thank you. what i was dealing with was that since 1971, and this book came out in 2015 or so. since 1971, the histories that have been written about decolonization struggles, the role of african-americans in these decolonization struggles, the dismantling of these empires in africa and asia, they fall championed the left -- they have all championed the left, the black left and the role of the left itself. they have treated the nde -- the naacp basically as water boys for truman and imperialism and colonialism. they basically said the naacp turned its back in 1947 with the rise of the cold war, turned its back on the struggles and basically left it to the left. i was finishing up eyes off the prize. one last sweep through the archives because there could be that one document that blows your whole book apart. i'm going through the naacp papers, and i find this letter from the somali youth league in 1949, two years after the naacp sensibly turned its back and it says thank you so much for all of your help in the u.n., in keeping the italians off of us. i went what is this? excuse me? you know you have hit something, and that became the foundation for boudoir radicals -- bourgeois radicals. the naacp took on south africa, they took on the dutch in indonesia. they took on the italians for some aliyah, libya -- for somalia, libya. i figured out that what they were doing was dismantling the norms that made colonialism and imperialism acceptable. they took on the white man's burden. the european powders would walk into meetings and say my empire is so big, bigger than your empire. they made to being an imperial power not a badge of honor but a scarlet letter. watching how the naacp was instrumental in reshaping the norms of colonial empires, of imperialism. when we only have a narrative about the power of the left in doing this work, we don't understand how changes made. -- change is made. i wanted to be able to excavate that narrative because having the soviets as the avatar of all that is good and just and right in the world? no. there is just a longer history. i wanted to make sure that was clear. having the naacp basically denigrated as a toady, that is not what the historical records show. host: teaching, writing books, you also do public speaking as well. you get invited to quite a few places. prof. anderson: yes i do. host: at what point is everything too much? prof. anderson: we have a documentary coming out soon. that is a great question that i am asking myself. there is just so much work to do. when we started this conversation, this democracy is in trouble. it is under a full-blown assault. to just gold or, i'm tired doesn't sit with but -- just go lord, i'm tired, does not sit with my sense of the girl who kicked the hornets nest. it does not sit with my sense of right and wrong. and knowing that the vision that the right has for this nation is a vision that will send us hurtling back to a place where we may never recover. we've got to fight. host: keith, middletown, connecticut. caller: thank you for taking my call. i appreciate listening to professor anderson. like many of your previous callers, i was happy when i learned that she was going to be on your "in depth" show. i just wanted to make a couple comments and then get her thoughts about them. regarding gun rights versus voting rights, if i'm not mistaken, i believe there are four constitutional amendments that deal with voting rights, and it seems like we have numerous states that are trying to put up barriers and make it difficult for people to vote. yet when we talk about the second amendment and people's rights to keep and bear arms, people are aghast when anyone tries to put any type of regulation or requirement, and just within the past week or two, i think it was very sad when the supreme court ruled against the new york law that required people to show a cause for carrying a weapon outside the home. it seems like a bit of a partner see -- a bit of hypocrisy that we cannot put any regulation on the second amendment, yet we have tons of states that are trying to restrict people's rights to vote. i would like to get the professors thoughts. prof. anderson: thank you for that. i had a student write a paper on that very dichotomy. one of the things that you see here is because the 15th amendment and the 19th amendment and the amendment that bans the poll tax and the amendment that lowers the voting age to 18, all of those had been under assault, absolute assault. we see that for instance, in the ways that you have states removing polling places off of college campuses, the way in north carolina where they divided one university between two separate congressional districts, as a way to dilute the voting power of that hbc. the way that they had fewer early voting days for prairie view, and am in texas than they have in surrounding wallin county. we see this consistently, in terms of the banning of the poll tax, where you had in florida, when amendment four came through , that re-enfranchised those who had felony convictions, and you had the courts rule after the state legislature came through and said, they were scared about that ballot admission coming through. after it won, the state wrote in line saying you have to pay all fines, fees and restitution's in order for your sentence to be complete. the federal courts ruled that is not a poll tax, except i don't have to pay my income tax to vote. i don't have to pay my property tax devote, but here is a payment that i have to make in order to be able to vote. even worse, the horrors of the literacy test, where in the previous literacy test, the questions were things like how many bubbles and a bar of soap? how high is up? here the court ruled that florida does not have to tell folks how much they owe. so florida can require that you make payment, but it doesn't have to tell you how much that payment has to be. yeah. host: text message,. "hi, dr. anderson, i am from springfield, missouri. my question is, what would you believe is the most important message that ministers should speak to in our world today?" prof. anderson: that message -- i love that question. that message is what i am hearing from reverend william barber. this is a god and a jesus of all of us. that we are here to help all of us. that we have to heal the sick. we have to feed the hungry. we have to clothe the unshod. we have to do that work. that there is a greater humanity at stake. when we in fact use -- the question we earlier received about the role of white evangelical christianity is that this is where i talk about folks putting their hands on god and using the power of god to put forth their own agenda, instead of letting god put their hands on them. and then moving in that way, for a better world, for a safer, a kinder, a much more humane world. that, i think is the most powerful message. getting your folks out there, registered to vote in getting them to the polls, because that political realm is so important in terms of being able to create a much kinder, gentler america. host: the next call is lou, in las vegas. thank you for holding. caller: you guys are knocking me out. i have loved everything i've heard. thank you for taking the call. i grew up in los angeles. i grew up -- i'm 71, and i grew up with kids who had never heard of john holt franklin. my earliest memory was of mccarthy hearings even though i didn't know what they were. i just heard my grandfather and my father crying because of what joe walsh was saying. i.r. number my mother going nuts -- i remember my mother going nuts when louis armstrong called out ike and said you've got to do something and then ike sent the airborne down south. as time went on, i realized, i'm old and i'm still hearing the same stories and the same battles. like the guy that was beating ahead -- beating his head against the wall in israel and they asked what he is doing and he said i'm praying for peace in the middle east and for people to get along. like here, 17 different lynchings and he said how do you feel and he said i feel like i'm beating my head against the wall. 60 years later, and i'm thinking nothing has really changed except awareness and knowledge and people knowing about books. right now i'm reading, again, one of james baldwin's great books, the devil's fine work, which takes him back to the 1930's and looking at -- now here we are and we still judge people by their looks, how beautiful or ugly they are, and yet we still have this other thing going. host: we are going to leave it there and see if professor anderson has anything she would like to add. prof. anderson: part of what voter suppression and oppression is designed to do is to make you think that there is no hope, that it is always going to be this, it has always been this and it is never going to get any better, why bother to beat your head against the wall? the thing is -- the reason why we are still in this struggle is because we are still fighting. we are still fighting an oppressive force and because we refuse to give up. we refuse to accept our subjugation. that is so important. we refused to seed our power, because it is in that fight, it is in that struggle, where we continue to move forward, where we continue to be able to create the knowledge, where we continue to be able to protect our communities. where we don't struggle, when we think, this stuff is just messed up, then all of our protections are dissolved. that is why we fight. that is why we have to know what the game is. host: text message. please ask dr. anderson if she is familiar with the work of professor john lott who has taught at el law school and his book, more guns, less crime. prof. anderson: i am vaguely familiar with john lott. john lott is one of the heroes of the kind of second amendment school of individual rights, of guns, guns everywhere kind of deal, of being against gun safety regulations. as i had mentioned earlier, i haven't been pro-gun, anti-gun, but what i have been is for reasonable gun safety laws, such as there is no reason to have semiautomatic weapons in the hands of civilians on our city -- so it is being commonsense about it and not doctrinaire. host: david in tennessee, text message. "i agree with what i believe is your critique of our racist and violent society, but we have created a collateral, parasitic layer of well compensated, commentators and helpers, many of them ensconced in universities, a critical foundation of the system, who appeared to be neutralized by the dominant culture." comment? prof. anderson: ok. i thought i knew where that was headed, then it veered in another way. i think part of what you are laying out here is that there are scholars who feed on the kind of ills in american society and to provide cover for that. and this is why having freedom within the university, the freedom of exchange of ideas within the university, are so important. because what that does, when you have evidence-based scholarship, you are allowing that evidence-based scholarship to do the heavy lifting of democracy and you are able to discern the difference between that evidence-based scholarship and the ideologues. host: what do you think about some reports that the academia has been overtaken by the left? prof. anderson: ha! i'm sorry. host: i guess you don't agree with those reports. prof. anderson: oh lord. [laughter] sorry. i think that is also part of the smoke and mirrors that is out there, that is designed to denigrate the incredible work coming out of these colleges and universities in terms of that scholarship. if you can denigrate that scholarship, then you are able to create a new truth, a truth that is not fact-based, that is not evidence-based. and we see that happening a lot. this is wes and the left -- i've got the saying, when you talk to black scholars who are in the academy, they are not seeing this incredible left that has taken over. they are looking at the kinds of entrenchment of power and working through that in order to do this work. host: next call comes from carol in greensburg, cap -- greensburg, pennsylvania. caller: i have a question whether any research has been done to compare, the laws have changed so significantly over the years for the disabled. i am 86 and in a wheelchair and i worked as a vision therapist for years but i also ran a program from 1958 to 1968 that was 49% black and 51% white. i have a lot positive things to say about the black community. and a local back author -- black author convinced me to but a book, and i'm not a writer. but i would love to see more research that can prove that laws can change people's lives. and i don't think there has been anything done in comparison between race and the disabled that i can find. and i am very interested in your opinion on that. host: carol, i apologize, we are going to leave it at that first question. there's a lot there. we will see if dr. anderson has a response. thank you for calling in. prof. anderson: the role of disability laws and disability policies are absolutely essential. it is one of the key movements forward that made this nation much more humane. then seeing the way that race works in those disability policies is also essential. there is some work done, i have seen some of it, i cannot recall the names off the top of my head right now. basically, doing library searches, a search on your local library, finding the books that are there and if you have access to a university library that can get you what is called j store so you can see the articles that have been produced that is doing this work, that will give you the kind of foundation you need to see what is out there and where your intervention would be important. host: juanita, cincinnati, good afternoon. caller: i used to be a librarian . what she could also try is the library association, it can help you with that. also the national library of medicine. but the reason i called is i like dr. anderson and i am 71. i would grow up and see mr. rogers when i was a little girl. in our basement [indiscernible] my question is i was taken aback by a comment made earlier -- i'm not angry with her. i was wondering, how can we talk to young people and let them know, this is not history, this is life, this is what we live? how can we show young people, this is not history, this is a continuum? thank you. prof. anderson: thank you. the question is, how do we -- we consistently are stunned by the lack of knowledge about tulsa. how many folks, until they saw watchmen, did not even know that tulsa happened? when i'm teaching the civil rights movement, i start off my class going, you know, how many have heard that the civil rights movement is rosa sactown, martin stood up, he had a dream, and we all overcame? so when you get that incredible movement reduced to rosa and martin and overcome, then what we lose is the massive local organizing that happened. when we don't have that history, we have this sense that, this should happen quickly and all you have to have is a leader -- no. it takes a lot of folks. a lot of hours. a lot of commitment. it is knowing that history. how do we do this? so one of the things is i do have on the emory website, five-minute histories called the hidden histories of civil rights where i provided it in those soundbites that allows teachers to be able to use that in their classrooms as a foundation for greater discussion, for greater knowledge. there are also some incredible websites. the guilder lemons institute. i am blinking right now. the civil rights movement veterans website, that have the documents in the narratives that really can provide access to the knowledge, and that is what we really have to begin -- facing history, facing ourselves. those entities have provided much broader access to this history that helps us understand. this is one of the things about one person, no vote, white rage, and the second, i tighten where we are now -- tie in where we are now with what happened then so we can see the through line. was it falconer? the pass is not the past -- no, the past is not over, it is not even the past. i am blowing that line but it is something like that. the past is still with us. we are still living at. host: tweet from stuart. "your books are essential to understanding the need for our complete history. after the backlash against nickel hannah jones 6019 project, do you know of an organized effort by the academic community to preserve our un-diluted u.s. history?" prof. anderson: so what i see is , through the american historical association, through the american -- the association for the study of african-american life and history, i am seeing that those organizations are really doing the work of ensuring that our history is taught, that it is preserved. i am seeing this in archives, the archives are working overtime to make sure that the original documents and the original artifacts are still there, so that we can see them. at emory, we have our stuart rose library, and in there, we have the sclc papers and we have the signs, the street signs from resurrection city, which was the poor people's campaign in 1968 that continued on after the assassination of martin luther king. so you see archives, you see historical organizations, associations really doing this work. but it behooves all of us, then you have the school boards flooded with angry parents -- and i put that in quotes because sometimes those folks don't even have children in those schools -- it behooves us to pay attention to that and to participate in that process, so that the backlash from teaching divisive history and history that meets our children feel uncomfortable is, in fact, being pushed back saying, we must know this history. we cannot be the nation that we can be if we keep telling lies about ourselves. if we don't understand how we got here. host: about 15 minutes left with our guest, carol anderson. the next call comes from frank in west palm beach. caller: hey, good afternoon. i wanted to say the show is excellent and the professor is very good. i disagree with almost everything she says, but that being said, my question is, can she explain why the crime rate, especially murder, in the black communities in major cities is so out of control? is that a white issue or is that totally a black issue? host: before we let you go, why do you disagree with professor anderson? caller: well, because i'm on the right, i guess. that is my best way of putting it. some of the things that i hear, i just disagree with. that is all i can say. host: do you consider yourself to be a racist? caller: never have. that being said, somebody might look me in the face and say i was, but i never have, i don't believe i am. host: thank you. prof. anderson: the framing of that question, i thought, was quintessential. why do we have all of this murder happening in the black community? remember earlier when i said, 80% of african-americans, over 80% of african americans killed by african-americans. and over 80% of whites are killed by whites. what we don't get when we are talking about all of this black crime, that is the narrative of black pathology, that is the notice of antiblackness that i laid out in the second, because what it is saying is blacks are inherently violent, they are inherently criminal, so therefore we must have, we being the white community, must have protection against this source of incredible instability and violence in american society. now, but we don't get to are those issues of watching what happens when our schools are devalued and defunded, what happens when jobs go away, what happens when we have this massive, massive discrimination happening in our employment processes, and there's incredible research out there that shows that, if you have a racially identifiable name, but the qualifications are the same as someone who does not have a racially identifiable name, for instance, cindy, jackson has a -- sheniqua jackson has a resume at a city jones has a resume, sheniqua will have to send in multiple resumes and letters to get the interview as opposed to jennifer jones, because of the inherent racial discrimination. when we are looking at the kinds of biases that are in american society that limit access to jobs, limit access to housing, we have incredible studies about what that means in terms of the discrimination in housing. the discrimination in health care. the discrimination in policing. when we are looking at all of this -- we were asking about black folks killing black folks and we are not looking at whites who kill whites and we are not looking at the kinds of structural inequalities that are there in american society, we are not asking for a real answer, we are asking that kind of soundbite answer. host: what to do think of frank saying i like everything you're saying, i'm loving the show, and i disagree with everything? i think i saw you smile. prof. anderson: i smiled because i have had that before. and i'm like, great, come with the evidence, come with the facts, come with the historical documentation, calm with the valid research studies. i just know does not work. but this is what i mean about the kind of undermining of academia, because what it does is it undermines the rigors of the research, the rigors of the analysis to make how i feel on par with that, and to make how i feel become part of policy, instead of the rigors of the work. host: cheryl lynn, tallahassee. caller: hello, good afternoon. thank you, dr. anderson, for your work. my question has to do with whether or not dr. anderson can address what appears to be a lot of -- i hate to use a lot of -- but how other populations in this country that are nonwhite -- they are not black, seem to pile on and promote or perpetuate stereotypes or biases against the black race, and if there is any comments you can make towards that, and also, if you have a book that addresses how we as a people, black people, can utilize the capitalistic ideas in this country to kind of better our position and have a better impact on the economy and the country. i hope that makes sense. host: thank you. prof. anderson: one of the things -- there was a book -- i'm going to deal with two books. one is how the irish became white. when the irish immigrants were here, they were treated horrifically. i mean, bottom of the barrel, or close to bottom of the barrel. what he documents is that what they began to learn in american society is the way into whiteness is antiblackness. when you are talking about the piling on, this is what you are laying out. i'm sorry i cannot remember the author's name right now, but the other dealt with how japanese-americans and chinese-americans became the model minority, and that happened in the 1960's. while you are having the civil rights movement happening, while you are having this force saying america must become america, you have this backlash that puts up asian americans as the model minorities, as opposed to these black folk. and what she lays out here, because she asks, how do we go from the chinese exclusion act and the -- i hate it when my brain five like that -- and the internment of the japanese and the internment of the japanese in the 1940's, how do we go from that and the banning of all asian immigration in the 1924 national origins act, how do we go from that kind of policy to model minority in the 1960's? and what she laid out was that asian americans went from being not white in the 1890's, 1920's, 1940's to being not black in the 1960's, when you are having the civil rights movement and the black power movement. so that kind of linguistic turn that elevates -- see, they believe in family. asians believe in education, they believe in hard work, they are not looking for a government handout, so you get these kinds of tropes that attach to model minority as a way to help create the fissures. in communities of color. but one of the things we are seeing is that, as powerful as that is -- that is like an old british colonialism thing, divide and conquer. one of the things you are seeing -- this is why i love human rights. on a human rights frame, we all are in this together. we all work together. we see this with a coalition of immokalee workers in florida that deals with tomato growers, and in this organization, in this mobilization of workers, you saw on a human rights frame, where you had african-americans, you had latinos, you had asian americans, you had whites all working together to improve the quality of life and the working conditions in the tomato fields in florida. so when folks would try to split them apart, they are like, no. that is what becomes essential. this is where i go back to william barbour. the movement he is creating is multiracial, ethnic, multireligious. because that is for the part of that is where the power lies. host: darrell is calling from the virgin islands. caller: good afternoon. i have a question and a concern. i am studying from the early 1900s after the 1970's. are you familiar with hubert harrison and the negro movement and his work? your book about bourgeoisie radicals, i thought the naacp had dropped the ball in their work in our time, but when you explain the work they have done for people of color and oppressed people outside the u.s., at inside the u.s., it gave me another perspective on them, but i think currently, in my opinion, they have dropped the ball in their efforts in being able to affect real change for people of color in america. host: we are going to leave it there but i did want to ask you, is your research personal or professional? caller: personal right now. i wish i had a teacher like her. i went to morgan state and i wish -- oregon state and i wish i had a teacher like her. host: thank you for calling. prof. anderson: yes, kind of sort of, too big for me to be specific -- vague for me to be specific. i focused on the 1940's and taking it through to the 1960's. so where the focus of my work looked at, for instance, the naacp, the civil rights congress, the national negro congress, the council on african affairs, those were the organizations following through in my work. american committee on africa. so seeing those organizations and how they were deploying their strengths, how they were succumbing to their weaknesses was essential for me in terms of laying out how this struggle for decolonization worked. host: six books down. is there another in the works? prof. anderson: there is one in my head. host: do you want to share with us? and we will do a little group therapy with you? prof. anderson: ok. [laughter] what i'm thinking about is a book i am entitling, the ties that bind in silence. african-american response to political violence in haiti, congo, and nigeria, 1960 to 1970. in my initial research, one of the things i found -- ok, let me give you a broader concept. what i am intrigued by our organizations that say they are there for the people, to protect the people, and then they don't. what are the forces that create that? and what are the forces that create them to move? what i saw in haiti and congo -- i'm looking at five different organizations, five liberal organizations, black liberal organizations, and i'm not seeing them really engage with the violence raining down in haiti and congo. why? when they had been so involved in providing resources to those nations, in fighting those nations and arguing in the state department and the white house for those nations, at the u.n., why the silence? when black folks are getting slaughtered. host: where did you get that idea? prof. anderson: it was me being stunned at the silence, because at the same time, when haiti is erupting, but papa dr. valieva is erupting in this violence, i am seeing very little, but what i am seeing is a short bill in south africa is happening and these groups are all over south africa for the violence in the massacre that it rained down. and i went, so they get the protection of black folk, they get how they've got a bloody pulpit to fight for this. why not here? then i see them really getting engaged in the civil war in nigeria. then my question is, why, within the same decade, what was it that changed that cause this level of engagement? host: the last two hours, our test has been carol anderson. three of her most recent books include white rage, one person, no vote, and her most recent book, the second. thank you for your time onmy na. and we have gathered here to celebrate the publication of judge, victoria pratt's important book. the power of dignity how transforming justice can heal our communities i'm a member of the library board of trustees. and i i was going to introduce a few people who i don't see in the room so you'll have to stay tuned for that. i would like to welcome the chief judge of the newark municipal court who's with us this evening. dionne williams thank you. how proud we all are at the

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