So my father seemed angry some days, gloomy, most days. As a teenager, what did I know about a grown black man thinking he never left the Jim Crow South, never left the plantation where he picked cotton?
Everyone, writes Anderson, focuses on the "flames," that is, Black anger. Black anger is put in a spotlight and surrounded by a narrative that speaks of violence. Paint the color of this violence black. Draw attention to the pathology of black people. Note the outrage of predators and rapists, there in the black community. Who takes note of the "logs, kindling," writes Anderson, the "invisible violence" that is the white rage, the rage creating such a mythical narrative? How much of the power my father's boss yield derived from his belief that black men had to be subdued by working them until they were useless?
This "visible violence," Anderson explains, "works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies." White rage "doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets." White rage's trigger, Anderson argues, is "black advancement." Desire freedom from tyranny and run afoul of systemic racism.
White rage was visible to my father when he muttered, white folks, white folks.
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For two days in November, 1938, the Nazis terrorized the Jewish people in Germany. Synagogues and Jewish businesses were set ablaze while SS soldiers looted homes. Kristallnacht was Hitler's idea, his response to the shooting of a German diplomat by a Jewish student in Paris. As James Q. Whitman explains in Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Nazis noted how America, at the "forefront in the creation of forms of de jure and de facto second-class citizenship for blacks, Filipinos, Chinese, and others", was "a beacon of anti-miscegenation law." Under Nazi rule, Germany, in turn, could begin litigation requiring the separation of Jews from Aryans.
It seemed that only the Jews and other designated "enemies" in Germany noticed let alone experienced the terror.
Hitler wrote, writes Whitman, of that "beacon of anti-miscegenation law," of white supremacy, "there is currently one state that has made at least the weak beginnings of a better order."
In his late teens, a "better order" wasn't evident for my father and other black people trying to survive white supremacy in the South. In Germany, the Jews were not only assimilated, but made up only five percent of the total population. In the US, black Americans, the exploited labor of enslaved black people contributed to the Jeffersonian notion of "an 'empire for liberty,'" which had embedded in it, writes Walter Johnson in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, "a theory of space." Imagine, as Jefferson did, the space for white people to advance in the Americas!
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