Emory University professor and author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” Carol Anderson addressed the current white backlash stemming from President Barack Obama’s election and the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a recent appearance on “Democracy Now,” Anderson points out the historical patterns of racist retaliation after periods of “increased” rights granted to Black people. In this segment from the Nov. 1 episode, host Amy Goodman talks about Democrats filing a lawsuit in four battleground states — Ohio, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The lawsuit claims that Donald Trump’s campaign is encouraging voter intimidation. In addition, it cites the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act as examples of voter suppression.
“… When African Americans advance, when they gain access to their citizenship rights, you see a wave of policies emanate out of Congress, out of the White House, to knock back those gains, those advancements. [For instance] we saw that after the Civil War with Reconstruction,” Anderson explains.
The author adds that the Trump campaign is using “vintage” methods to intimidate voters.
“… Part of what we’re seeing now is the backlash to Obama’s election. And so, we saw a wave of voter suppression laws come up. And when you look at these key battleground states and the things that they’re doing, they’re vintage. They go back to the era of Jim Crow … When the point was: How do we intimidate these newly freed people who now have their citizenship rights? How do we strip them of their citizenship rights? One was massive voter intimidation, being at the polls with rifles. It is then a series of laws coming on, from literacy tests and grandfather clauses and poll taxes — all of those things for disfranchisement. “
