Of white racism against africanamericans in this country. Up now Carol Anderson, author of white rage. I think will go ahead and get started. Hello and welcome to Left Bank Books for our event with Carol Anderson. This is of course not Left Bank Books. Imd event host for Left Bank Books and i would like to thank our cosponsor for the evening, the Ferguson Public Library library. Their work and their activism is incredible and inspiring. They are a wonderful partner to have for such an event like this Left Bank Books hosts over 300 author events each year end it is with your help that we continue bringing in your favorite authors. When you support us, you are reinvesting in your community because your tax dollars are going into your schools, parks, streets, libraries and Community Projects at an incredibly higher rate. We give back by partnering with Many Charities and organizations and also we are doing our fundraising for Readers Program and we have brochures at the back. The river city readers serves st. Louis Public School children by building their own home library and encouraging literacy. The students get to keep five books each year end meet the authors of culturally relevant new books. I would like to ask you to make a donation tonight of any amount you can do so at the sales table or you can ask me about sponsoring a child. This program is near injured my heart and it is wonderful and i will tell you all about it if you would like to hear. I would like to thank all of you for your continued support for us. For information about our Upcoming Events and information about our reading group, ferguson reads and much more please visit our website, grab a newsletter newsletter at the back and definitely get signed up for our mailing list. I am very proud to introduce Carol Anderson for Left Bank Books. As ferguson interrupted and commentators referred to the angry response of africanamericans as black rage, anderson wrote a remarkable oped in the Washington Post showing that this was instead white rage at work. It was countered by deliberate and crafted deliberation, white white rage pulls back the veil that was made in the name of protecting democracy. One said few historians right with the great clarity and intellectual that she summons in this book. There are a handful of riders whose work i can consider indispensable. Professor anderson is high up on that list. The editor of white rage also says this is one of the most important books that he has worked on. Carol anderson is professor of afghan american studies at emory university. She the author of many books including bourgeois radicals, there naacp and the struggle for colonial and numerous articles. Her article from the Washington Post will appear in the fire this time, a new generation speaks about race. Its edited by National Book award winner which comes out in august and i highly recommend that book as well. That article shaped and help define this book and a movement. White rage is inspiring, maddening and necessary. From the epilogue, imagine, it is time to diffuse the power of white rage. It is time to finally truly move into the future. Tonight carol will be discussing white rage, the unspoken unspoken truth of our racial divide, answering your questions and signing copies of her book available for purchase from Left Bank Books. Would you please help me in welcoming Carol Anderson. [applause] thank you. Thank you for coming out on ,comma what day is this i really truly appreciate it. I appreciate what Ferguson Public Library has done and is for this community. Thank you. I appreciate Left Bank Books as well. Thank you. I wanted to spend some time First Talking about how i got to white rage ,comma what white rage is and then to move into several excerpts from the book and then open it up for q a. When i first began to wrestle with the concept of white rage, it wasnt ferguson. It was in fact, in february 1999 when a black man in new york city stepped out on his doorstep after a long hard days work to go get something to eat. He was greeted with 41 bullets. Nineteen hit him. His was gunned down by the nypd. He was unarmed. That was bad enough, but as we know from these killings, it is the response that begins to tell you whats happening in society and so, im sitting there and im listening to mayor Rudy Giuliani in an interview with ted koppel on nightline and ted koppel is talking about the nypd, the killing, hes talking about 41 bullets, hes talking about stop and frisk, hes talking about Police Brutality and Rudy Giuliani says i have the most restraint and best behave police force you can imagine. Okay i had one of those scooby doo moments. And then he began to talk about how his policies were working, that what he has put in place in new york city has brought down crime. New york city is a safer place because of his policies and he has flow charts and graphs and bars, everything, and what you dont hear is that an unarmed black man stepped out on his porch and was gunned down. Im sitting there going something is fundamentally wrong , structurally wrong. I didnt know what to call it. I didnt know what to label it, but i knew something was going on and i continued working and thinking and working and thinking and then august 2014 the television is on and im watching and i see ferguson in flames and then i hear the pundits talking and what they were talking about was black rage. Why are black people burning up where they live. What is wrong with black people must mark how could they burn up where they live. You know theres something wrong with black people. Why are they burning up, and it didnt matter what ideological stripe. It was all censured. The the baseline, the starting point was black rage. I found myself in this moment shaking my head. You know that moment when youre shaking your head because somethings going on and you dont even realize. Youre just gone thats not right and thats when it hit me and i thought what were really seeing is white rage. But we are really seeing is that we been so focused in on the flames that weve missed the kindling. We have missed what has stoked this fire. We have missed, for instance, distant disenfranchisement of the black community in ferguson that through all kinds of such shenanigans and rigmarole had created, where in the 2013 municipal election, in election, in a population that is 67 of ferguson population you have a 6 black voter turnout. Youve gotta work really hard to make that happen we missed in ferguson schools that had been on probation for 15 years. Where a state has an Accounting System of accreditation of 140 points and ferguson Public Schools were getting ten points a year. We had allowed that to happen for 15 years. We have allowed an entire generation of students to go through kindergarten to graduati with a school in the School System that we notice at work, kindling. We have a police force thator didnt see that its role was to protect and serve, but saw African Americans as a Revenue Generating source that could provide 27 of the citys t budget, kindling. What all of this kindling does and i started wrestling with white range and began to understand what we are really looking at are the policies. We are so drawn to the spectacular. We are so drawn to what we can see that we miss those tectonic plates that are actually moving. White rage moves subtly, almost imperceptibly, corrosive league through the courts, legislaturer , government for accuracy, white house, congress and it reeks have ached subtly so its hard to discern what is the source of what you are seeing and so i set out to make white rage visible because the first thing you got to do is see the rage. Be the trigger for white rage is black advancement. Its not the mere presence of black people that is the catalyst, but black ambition, blackness with drive, purpose, aspiration with the demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to give up and threw rage, policy of salts, legal maneuvering white rage consistently publishes black resilience and black resolve. How else can we reasonably explain why government after government. Hard to keep black children from getting an education. We sought after the civil war. We thought all the way through the brown decision. We see it now. Why is it so difficult to educate black children . Educ why do we have this even when at least since 1957 when the us said we have a National Security crisis, we must educate as many of our citizens as we can to be able to effectively wage the cold war, but brown was not going to get implemented, so even in the face of a national secured a crisis, even in the face when we say this is what our nation needs, white rage says i dont think so. Why would this nation design a war on drugs that incarcerates those who sell and do drugs the least, why . Y, particularly with the tribes and successes of the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Voting Rights act of 1965, why would we incarcerate . Why would we overwhelm state budget . Why would we destabilize families . Why would we do this to those who arent the primary users or sellers of narcotics . Why . Why would state after state develop cruise after bruce to keep american citizens from being able to vote and to have a say in their own and democracy . When we say we value democracy, when we say this is why we fight , then why would we have such massive Voter Suppression . Understand that thats none of this was done with a mere clan across. There wasnt any cross burning that made all of this happened. All of this was then coolly, methodically, systematically and so in my new book white rage i trace this historical pattern with signposts, reconstruction, the great migration, the brown decision. The Civil Rights Movement and the election of barack obama and i also trace it through three key sectors, education, criminal Justice System and the right to vote, so now i want to eat read some excerpts. As you know, in 1954 the Us Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal was unconstitutional, overturned the plessy decision and said we must integrate. Jim crow was no longer the law of the land. The south rose up and said with massive resistance and said no, and used a series of ruses that impact dragged this process out for a long long time. In 1973, the Court Battles are still going on. In 1973, there was an area in san antonio called the edgewood district and in the edgewood neighborhood it was 96 mexicanamerican and africanamerican. Was it was the poorest neighborhood in san antonio with the loading lowest Median Income and lowest property valut they taxed themselves at the highest rate in order to try to fund their childrens education. By taxing themselves at thees highest rate they garnered 21 for capital. Meanwhile, alamo high, which was a predominantly white neighborhood in san antonio taxed themselves at a much lower rate. They garnished over 300 per student. Lower rate, 1500 more in funding. Down, what we know is that Property Values have a lot to do with public policy. Where governments choose to say put the landfill. L where they choose to put the highway. Where they choose to zone certain types of businesses and not others has a lot to do with property value, so the parents and in the edgewood district took texas to court and said this is violate our childrens amendment right to have equal protection under the law. It violates brown. The Us Supreme Court ruled in a fivefour decision, four of the justices were appointed by Richard Nixon and one was appointed by eisenhower, dwight eisenhower. Thats quote there is no fundamental right to education in the constitution. They said that the state funding scheme did not systematically discriminate against all poor people in texas and thats because districts across the United States use property taxes , that this method was not so irrational as to be invidiously discriminatory. Disc Thurgood Marshall, his dissent and thats what im going to read. Fully recognizing the implications of rodriguez, than in the case, Justice Thurgood marshall was more than 40 of black children, 14 and under live with family below the poverty line as compared with about 10 of white children. Under those circumstances, marshall feared,e africanamerican children would not stand a chance. The decision he wrote in his dissent could only be seen as a retreat from a commitment to equality of Educational Opportunities as well as an unsupportable capitulation to a system which deprives children of a chance to reach their full potential as citizens. He was simply dumbfounded that the majority would acknowledge the existence of district funding for schools across texas, but then instead of focusing on the cause of that disparity clumsily pirouettes c throughout the states supposed efforts to close the gaps. The issue, marshall explained is not whether texas is doing its best to delete the worst features of a discriminatory t scheme, but rather whether its the scheme itself is in fact unconstitutionallyitself discriminatory. Moreover, he founded the height of absurdity that texas could actually argue that there was no correlation between funding and school equality. You cant make this up. Then, from that faulty premiset deduced that there were no discriminatory consequences for the children of the disadvantaged district. He was equally unimpressed with texas tendency to pray before the justices the stories of children who had expelled despite living in under resourced district as some sort of proof that funding was irrelevant, that child could excel even when forced to attend an underfunded school with poor physical proof facilities, less experienced teachers,an larger classrooms and another at number of other deficits compared to a school with substantially more funds. Its the credit of the child, not the state, but rodriguez played on the backs of the most vulnerable while walling off access to the necessary resources for quality education and played beautifully into the colorblind post civil rights language as substituting economics for race yet achieving a similar result. The simple truth was that i virtue of the sheer demographics of poverty rodriguez would have not only eight desperate impact on children, but also a disastrous one. I know, sobering. Bering. I then move into the war on drugs because it has so warped American Society in ways that are so profound and so i walk us through how the war on drugs emerge. K i then walk us through the court cases, the Supreme Court decision that Rachelle Alexander in the new jim crow so beautifully laid out and then iu lay out some of the consequences and as i go through the court cases it i then say taken together those rulings allow indeed encourage the criminal Justice System to run racially amuck and thats exactly what happened on july 23, 1999, in tulia, texas. In the dead of night local police launched a massive grade and busted a major cocaine trafficking ring. At least thats how it was billed by the local media with after being tipped off lined up to get the best most humiliating photographs of 46 of the towns 5000 residents handcuffed in pajamas, underwear and uncombed bed hair paraded into the jail for booking. The local newspaper ran the headline tulia streets clear garbage. The editorial praised Law Enforcement for reading tulia of the scumbags. The raid was the result of an 18 month investigation by a man who will be named by Texas Attorney general as outstanding law man of the year, attached to the federally funded Panhandle Regional Narcotics Task force based in our marilla, aboutor 50 miles away from toll yet. Tom coleman did not a team of investigators, instead he singlehandedly identified each member of this massive cooking operation and made more than 100 undercover drug purchases. He was hailed as a hero and his testimony immediately led to 38 of the 46 being convicted. The other cases were just waiting to get into the core system. One was sentenced to 99 years were selling 200 worth of cocaine to the undercover narcotics agent. Kesey white, received 25 years while her husband, william, landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine. Well, the case began to unravel, however, when kinseys assister tawny went to trial. He swore she had sold him drugs. Tawny however had video proof that she was at a bank in oklahoma city, 300 miles away cashing a check at the very moment he claims to have bought cocaine from her. C then another defendant, billy john wafer headed timesheets and his bosses eyewitness testimony thats a wafer was at work and not out selling drugs to coleman when the outstanding lawman of the year swore under oa