including police officers, have attempted to run over demonstrators with their vehicles. The hostility of the “law and order” brigades, from the president on down, is apparent, and their embrace of authoritarianism has been laid bare for all to witness. Since June 2020, we have been in the midst of a full-scale rebellion, or what some have called a soft civil war. Not between North and South, or even black and white, but between those who believe in racial equity and pluralism and those who do not.
And into that breach, in late August, yet another black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back and killed on camera by an officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The rebellion that followed involved widespread property destruction by those frustrated with the lack of charges brought against the officer. This uprising was then countered by white vigilante violence, including the murder of two white antiracism activists by 17-year-old Trump supporter and police super-fan, Kyle Rittenhouse. The president, in keeping with his soft-pedaling of right-wing violence, not only refused to condemn Rittenhouse, but has justified his actions as self-defense, and continued to blame the black community and its supporters for the chaos.
This volume is divided into seven sections containing essays written from 2008 to the present. The first two chapters track, in chronological order, the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They seek to show both the continuity of race as the background noise of everything that happens in America, as well as the way that the nation can quickly careen from hope and optimism around race to the depths of cynicism. The third section looks specifically at this unique moment in our history, and the way in which both COVID and the current uprising for black lives have rendered 2020 a year that few others can match for historical significance. Sections four through six contain essays that speak to three broad themes: white denial about the reality of racism in the United States, historical memory and the way our tendency to misremember our past contributes to racial strife, and the propensity of the nation’s right wing to rely on faulty data to craft their narratives in opposition to racial justice efforts. The final section seeks to provide some direction for antiracism work, activism, and advocacy, both for individuals and for institutions, moving forward.
There is one thing, however, that binds these chapters together: They all speak to the core crisis at the heart of this nation. Because however unprecedented this moment may be in our lives, in some ways what it reveals is as old as the country itself. Some lives matter more than others in America. It was true at the founding. It remains true today. It will remain true forever, unless and until we decide we have had enough.
A few words about citations and sourcing of fact claims in this volume: Because this is an essay collection, I have opted to forego formal footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical citations within the body of the work itself. To insert such notes would have proved visually distracting in short pieces, and would have increased the size of the book to an unwieldy length. However, because it is important to make citations available, especially for references, data, or historical materials that are not widely known or understood, City Lights and I will be posting references on their website, www.citylights.com. These notes will be textual, meaning they will be broken down by chapter, and then reference particular page numbers, with a few words of the text cited so as to orient the reader to what is being referenced. These will then be followed by formal citations. I hope this will satisfy the aesthetics best for most readers while also meeting the needs for scholarly legitimacy desired by those seeking truth in these dangerous (and often surreal) times.
NASHVILLE, OCTOBER 2020
INTRODUCTION
AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR
SITTING IN THE hotel restaurant on the second day of our family reunion in Memphis, my great-aunt wore a somber look on her face, not unlike that of a graveside mourner. She pulled her chair close to mine and leaned in. “So, Tim,” she began, in a syrupy drawl, made raspy by years of smoking, and so indelibly Southern that it always managed to turn my name into a two-syllable word. “Do you think we’re ever going to have a race war?”
Hmm, I thought to myself, hadn’t seen that one coming. I had been working as an antiracism activist and educator for four years since graduating from college, so at least the question was in my professional wheelhouse. Still, it was odd and made me more than a bit uncomfortable. After all, this was a reunion of my mother’s side of the family—her father’s people—and they were not the relations with whom I would normally talk about politics or anything substantive. Far better for the 25-year-old me to keep my thoughts close to the vest at times like this. Smile, make small talk, and drink heavily—no need to venture into weightier territory than that.
The question also threw me because of what I felt sure had motivated her to ask it. Something about her tone had given it away. Within a couple of years, two books would be written that predicted a likely racial conflagration in America and used that same term, race war, in their titles. The first would be penned by journalist Carl Rowan, and the second by Richard Delgado, a critical race theorist. But it seemed clear that when my great-aunt had asked me about these prospects, she had not meant it in the way they would. For those two, the possibilities of a race war were being driven skyward by white reactionaries, afraid of losing power, or of merely having to share it in an increasingly multiracial nation. My Aunt Jean, I’m confident, was not thinking of white supremacists as the instigators of the coming conflict. I doubt she was envisioning terrorists like Dylann Roof, who would walk into a Charleston church in 2015 and massacre nine black worshippers because he had become convinced they were “taking over” his white country.
No, when my aunt asked the question, it was apparent that the race war she wondered about—the one she feared—would be initiated by black people, angry over some longstanding grievance, the legitimacy of which she couldn’t quite bring herself to acknowledge. Don’t get me wrong; my Aunt Jean was a lovely person and one of the people I most looked forward to seeing at these reunions. She was also, for what it’s worth, a lifelong Democrat in the mold of FDR. But as with many white Southerners who had embraced the New Deal and the benefits it brought our region, her views on race remained stuck in an earlier time. She was no bigot, yet she had increasingly come to view her neighbors—mostly black, in a part of Birmingham that had, as they say, changed—with deepening trepidation.
I wasn’t sure what she expected me to say, and even less what she was hoping to hear. Furthermore, I wasn’t certain how deeply I wanted to get into all this. Earlier in the day, my mother and I had sojourned to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the site where Dr. King had been assassinated twenty-six years earlier. It had been a powerful and gut-wrenching afternoon, and I was emotionally spent. The tour ends at the balcony where King had fallen, and no one warned us as we turned a final corner, only to find ourselves in a cut-out alcove between the two rooms his group had rented that night. We had not been prepared. To go from that sacred ground to a discussion of a possible race war—especially one that would be the fault of black people—seemed profane. But she had asked, and I was of a mind to answer, though I was under no illusion she would be satisfied with my reply.
I proceeded to explain that if she meant what I thought she did—a race war in which marauding bands of black people decided to seek revenge on whitey for years of mistreatment—the answer was no. I did not expect that such a thing would happen. I could almost assure her it would not. If black folks were that given to payback, little of the United States would still be standing, and surely the place where we were speaking wouldn’t be: an Embassy Suites on the border of Germantown, the very white and affluent Memphis suburb. Trust me, I noted, only half in jest, this entire zip code would have been torched a long time ago.
But, I explained, the bigger problem with the question was that it presupposed such a war was not already under way. It suggested that we were currently reveling in some melodious racial harmony and that only somewhere down the line might things get dicey. And
