Yet, the Black man had an affidavit that the tax collector had refused to accept his payment. The registrars, Hiram Reese and Matthew Foushee, refused to hand Garner a ballot because he had not paid a poll tax. “In Lexington, Kentucky, a black man, William Garner, had tried to vote. To me, this directly ties into the era of mass incarceration we’re in now – it reminded me of a lot of the ideas from the documentary, 13th. “In effect, Southern courts transferred full control of black people from the plantation owner to a carceral state.” Meanwhile, he cringed that the formerly enslaved would lease forty acres abandoned by those whom he had once called “traitors.” “While claiming that the government had never provided access to land for “hard toiling whites,” Johnson simply erased the nineteen years that he had worked for the passage of the Homestead Act to ensure that his constituency was given 160 acres wrested or browbeaten from Native Americans. I also didn’t know that Andrew Johnson had done so much to end reconstruction and stop the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau. “This bill, he was convinced, was designed to set up Black dependency on the federal government. “The government “never deemed itself authorized to expend the public money for the rent or purchase of homes for the thousands, not to say millions, of the white race who are honestly toiling from day to day for their subsistence,” so why would it do so for the freedmen? “The bottom line was that Black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required Black subordination.”Īnderson dives deep into reconstruction, and the lengths that white people in the south went to to stop reconstruction. So often when white people talk about racism, they will say racism=bad, and even oppose specific racist policies, without acknowledging who has been enacting and supporting those racist policies.

White Rage by Carol Anderson is an examination of racism in America through the perspective of the racist policies that were enacted by white Americans to keep Black Americans oppressed.

Dr carol anderson white rage