“Black people are constantly lookin’ back at who they were, while constantly trying to look forward while navigating this fuckery that is white supremacy” André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. His scholarship examines racial representations in social media, videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, and technoculture, including […]

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Reconstructing Reconstruction Part 1

Homework

Page 9: Do some research to create a list of 5 historical examples in which the United States “signaled the power of racism over patriotism.”

Page 11: Based on the fact that 80% of the U.S.’s wealth, in 1860, was a direct result of the unpaid and forced labor of slaves, take some time and write out a case of reparations.

Page 18: “Black people have ‘no rights which the white man is bound to respect”, create a list of 5 examples, over the past 365 days, which demonstrate that this is still a fundamental belief in how systems are designed to function.

Transcription

00:10

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's Book Club episode. We're reading "White Rage." We're reading chapter one—this is episode two—but we're reading chapter one: "Reconstructing Reconstruction." And this book is far more complex, the chapters are more dense than the "How to be an Antiracist" because those were fairly shorter chapters, so I could do a chapter per episode, but this I won't be. Because of the way the chapters are set up, I'm gonna have to do—and I don't want the fact that I don't want these episodes to go over 30 minutes—we're gonna break the chapters down.

So today we're doing "Reconstructing Reconstruction": chapter one, pages—we're gonna work from pages 7 through 18, and then we're going to stop, and then we'll pick this up next time we do this show.

Also because of what I learned from doing "How to be an Antiracist," doing one of these episodes every week is just way too much mental exhaustion for me to have to read this history, to process this history, and then to go back into my role as an educator to come up with meaningful ways to engage you in questions and doing homework. So, we will be doing these every two weeks instead of every week.

01:34

So the first—I’m gonna start on page 7—in the first paragraph.

James Madison called it America's "original sin." Chattel slavery. Its horrors, Thomas Jefferson prophesied, would bring down a wrath of biblical proportions. "Indeed," Jefferson wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever."

And I wrote right at the top, "I think that this is a fascinating way to start this episode, because it highlights that whiteness has always been aware of the inherent evil and harm of white supremacy." Let me read that again, because I want to just start off the bat: we are not... whiteness is no... we're not doing the whiteness is hero or victim and never the villain. Whiteness is fully embracing its villainhood and always has been, and that's the perspective we're gonna talk about.

So again, I write, "I think that this is a fascinating way to start this episode, because it highlights that whiteness has always been aware of the inherent evil and harm of white supremacy, and made decisions and took actions to facilitate it."

So let's—again, let's—I want to make sure we understand this: whiteness has never been the hero or victim, it has always been the villain, and it's always been aware of that. So whether you have been able to articulate the things that you have been blinded to, that right there was an intentional ignorance that was designed into the system for you. And if you are now seeing the various ways that white supremacy allows you to, not only take advantage of, but actively harm other people without... little to no consequences, and you are not actively working to dismantle the system, you are complicit and you know what you're doing.

03:44 

Still on page 7:

In his second inaugural address, in 1865, Abraham Lincoln agonized that the carnage of this war was God's punishment for "all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil.

“When your rights are being dismantled and destroyed, and your personhood isn’t respected, you shouldn’t be civil. You should cause a scene.” Dr. Chris Gilliard is a writer, professor and speaker. His scholarship concentrates on digital privacy, and the intersections of race, class, and technology. He is an advocate for critical and equity-focused […]

“There’s still quite a few people who think that ADHD is itself a parenting problem. And that stigma most definitely is also applied to Black people at a far greater rate than it is to white people. Even if it were behavioral problems…you will still see more sympathy for white parents than you […]

Kindling

Homework

Page 3: Do some research in your home state to learn how public and private officials have handled the “separate but equal” issue of Brown vs Board of Education since 1954.

Page 4: List five current outcomes of weakened Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

Page 5: List three examples of white authorities being willing to undermine national security in order to ensure that Blacks did not advance.

Transcription

00:10

Hello. I want to take a moment to give you a reason why I chose this book at this time, because I was not planning on doing another book club selection, because "How to be an Antiracist" took so much out of me for... I was gonna take some time off. But the reason I chose to do this book at this time is a direct result of Super Tuesday election that happened in the U.S. this past week. And I am... I was disgusted. I was pissed a lot of the time. I was just fed up with hearing the narrative that Black Southern voters—who literally Joe Biden must owe his survival to—only voted for him because they are low information voters.

And I found myself for several days challenging that narrative. There are a lot of reasons why people voted for Biden that are their own. But collectively, as a community, older Black voters—and this is what pissed me off—is you were disrespecting people who have lived lives that your punk asses can never fathom or let alone survive.

And no one wants to talk about the white part of this equation. You're very comfortable with trying to dissect and understand the Black voter. Well, the Black voter didn't get us where we are with this president or anything else. It was not the Black voter. It is overwhelmingly the white voter. And these Black voters who have a history of—white people: understand!—and are very pragmatic and strategic in their voting. They sit back and watch white people go back and forth, talk about how progressive, talk about how conservative, talk about how liberal, talk about everything that centers whiteness. Because that is how we have to make decisions. They're not doing it. They did not vote out of fear. They voted out of understanding that you white people, you white people will not vote for any ideology, process, platform that means that other people benefit.

02:56

Let me say that again. We're reading this book because I need you to understand: your trying to dissect the Black vote is a waste of your fucking time. I need you to spend your time understanding that white people and white people alone got us where we are. White supremacy is why we're here. These Black voters made their choice based on understanding, fundamentally, although white people do not evaluate, investigate whiteness, everybody else does. Because we've learned, we know that our actions, what happens to us, are a direct result of the decisions that white people make.

So although you've never investigated, studied, evaluated whiteness, that's what we have learned to live with. And so we know you better than you know yourselves. And that's what pisses you off. We know you better than you know yourselves. I often tell the community, I should be a fortune teller, because something will happen and I will make a prediction—it's not even a prediction to me; it is just the obvious thing—and down the road you come to me and like, "Oh my god, Kim! You knew it."

Yeah, because I have the privilege, the benefit, the unfortunate benefit, of understanding whiteness better than you know yourselves. So this is why we're reading "White Rage". Because I need you to understand that I'm not buying—and many are not buying—the narrative of whiteness is always the hero or victim and never the villain. In this reading, you are the villain. And I need you to embrace, get uncomfortable with, in understanding and unpacking whiteness in such a way that...

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