Jeremy Hogan/Sipa via AP Images
The U.S. Capitol at sunrise after the January 6 insurrection and the inauguration of President Biden, January 23, 2021
Coming six months after last summer’s George Floyd protests, the Capitol Riot was “utterly predictable,” according to anti-racism advocate and educator Tim Wise. The white Tennessean has spent a quarter-century studying how American racism pollutes our politics, criminal justice and policing, health care, immigration, and everyday interactions. His latest collection of essays, Dispatches From the Race War, offers unflinching assessments of the culpability of white Americans for these crises and relentless indignities. “Since June 2020,” he writes, “we have been in the midst of a full-scale rebellion, or what some have called a soft civil war.”
The American Prospect spoke to Wise about where he sees the country headed after the attack on the Capitol by white supremacists. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Gabrielle Gurley: 2020 was even more tumultuous than 1968, but many Republicans are wedded to Trumpism despite the pandemic, summer protests, and the Capitol Riot. Why?
Tim Wise: You’re absolutely right, and I say that as someone who spent most of 1968 in my mother’s womb, and so I think I inherited the trauma. For some Republicans, there’s this pose of unity, can’t-we-all-get-along self-preservation, because they realized that they stoked the fires that burn, metaphorically, and, perhaps, literally on the sixth. Some of them have to make the calls for unity because they worry about their future if they remain tied to the craziness. Others like Marjorie Taylor Greene embrace the craziness; some of them are just that far gone.
Others are intensely political animals like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, who want to distance themselves from the lunacy of January 6, but not on principle, just for preservation. They’re sticking to the script, trying to govern as the minority, at least from a position as responsible stewards of good government, but their side just tried to overthrow the government. To me, it’s a very hard sell.
Gurley: How do you assess the response of white America to all of this?
Wise: It was heartening to see so many white folks getting to see what Black and brown folk have been trying to get us to see for a long time. Part of what allowed a lot of white folks to have their eyes open in this moment, where Eric Garner or Tamir Rice didn’t, was the pandemic moment. If they’d been going about the hustle and bustle of their daily lives, they could have just hit the snooze button like they have been for generations.
What we see now was utterly predictable. It’s what Carol Anderson at Emory University talks about in her book, White Rage, this backlash that happens throughout American history. There is a perception on the part of a certain segment of white America that Black folks have either made significant inroads and progress or are in the process of organizing for that purpose. So since abolition there has been this rageful response.
All Trump really offered was an excuse for their anxiety, a psychological balm, an enemies list, and an ability to say, “I hate who you hate. I will feed you your hatred back to you as a substitute for a truly improved life.”
Gurley: What did Trump offer his white supporters, especially the wealthy white conservatives, who did not take to the streets but accepted the white supremacist trappings?
Wise: It says a lot about how that group, even the ones that aren’t overt racists, sexists, and bigots, that they’re willing to embrace someone who was all of those things for the sake of their bank accounts. It really wasn’t the hardcore white working class—if you look at the median income of Trump supporters, it’s like $78,000, which is above the national median for what we consider working-class levels of income and occupational status.
Who are those folks? They’re the anxious, white middle class. That anxious middle is not rich enough to be completely comfortable, but close enough to the better-off to think, “Well, if I could just put some distance between me and these Black and brown people.” They’re always looking backward at who’s gaining on them. They must know after four years that they didn’t benefit economically.
All Trump really offered to them was an excuse for their anxiety, a psychological balm, an enemies list, and an ability to say, “I hate who you hate. I will feed you your hatred back to you as a substitute for a truly improved life.” A lot of people didn’t care that the jobs didn’t come back because at least he’s standing up to those awful Black ballplayers.
Gurley: What did you take away from the 2020 Georgia Senate contest: Is it a cautionary tale perhaps, because the conditions that produced Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff may not continue to exist?
Wise: We do need to be careful with the assumption that Georgia is now this permanently blue state. It is a very divided state. In the 2018 gubernatorial election, Stacey Abrams lost 78 percent of white women, which was actually higher than the percentage of white men, 75 percent. Thanks to Abrams, and the folks that she’s helped to mobilize, they have obviously made a difference in just a few years. But if we were not in an election cycle where the head of the party has basically said, it’s all rigged against you, there’s no point in even voting, I’m not sure that we get these outcomes. White turnout would have been higher, and we would not be sitting here talking about Georgia the way we are now.
The good news is one of those seats is safe for six years, and the other will be for a couple of years. The six-year seat, that is enough time, at least in theory, for the Democrats to continue to register folks. If people take [New York Times columnist] Charles Blow’s article and his new book [The Devil You Know] seriously, he tells Black folks to move to the South, a revolutionary strategy that is actually very interesting. I don’t disagree.
There are real power bases that are being built, both politically and economically, in places like Atlanta and Charlotte. But it’s going to require ongoing work, because it’s certainly not a settled proposition. Something is coming in response, it’s just a question of whether or not progressive folks will be prepared for it.
Gurley: Black candidates lost decisively in other Senate races in the South. To the degree that you can generalize across states, what do you extrapolate about whites in the rest of the South?
Wise: As a lifelong Southerner, I’ve known for a very long time that there are multiple Souths. I grew up at a time when Tennessee was a solid Democratic state. I certainly wouldn’t say it was a progressive state, but by comparison, we always had Democratic governors, Democratic statehouses, Democratic senators. Now, it’s essentially Nashville and Memphis versus the rest of the state, and maybe Chattanooga, increasingly, as a tech hub.
What we’ve seen in the last 20 years in Tennessee, and you see this in a few other states as well, is the depths of the culture war and the depths of the urban-rural divide are very, very deep. There isn’t a sufficient number of Black folk, a Black political power base here, compared to Georgia and North Carolina, that can compete with these exurban and rural power bases of reactionary, Christian white folks. Honestly, Mississippi and South Carolina would be far more likely to turn purple/blue before Tennessee. Those states that have larger percentages of Black folks and a more developed political power base that tends to compensate for the conservative cultural bent of white folks in the region.
But the Tennessee Democratic Party has been very slow to embrace the metropolitan nature of its power base. It’s not just Black folks, it’s white folks who don’t mind living in Nashville and Memphis and their first-ring suburbs, or in the heart of Chattanooga. That is what has happened in Georgia, and with the North Carolina Democratic Party. They built a base in Charlotte within the Research Triangle. Are they always successful? No, they win some, they lose some.
But in Tennessee, we just keep losing. The state Democratic Party hasn’t been willing to say, this is who we are, and that’s OK, because if it weren’t for Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga, we would have no economic growth at all in this state—and we don’t mind being the party associated with that economic engine. Y’all can thank us later.
Gurley: Why has race drowned out solutions to the historic pandemic?
Wise: It’s not really shocking to me that the politicization happened. We’ve now lost 400,000 people, and a good 230,000 of those have been white. The death rate may be higher for Black, Latinx, and indigenous folk, but you just buried your grandma because you decided that [the pandemic] wasn’t really a big deal. It plays into that narrative of the undeserving being catered to, and the hard-working, deserving people being punished. These folks viewed social distancing and masking as almost like a redistribution scheme in a weird way. It’s just very revealing because what it says is that even when faced with one’s own mortality, one will in many cases opt for the baubles of caste over the actual needs of your own life and that of your family. You literally will put the gun to the head of grandma in order to remind everybody directly or indirectly that, by God, I’m white and you will not tell me what to do.
I don’t think Black and brown folks have the job of helping young white people figure it out.
Gurley: You’ve pointed to the conversations about diversity and institutional and structural racism that are happening now. What’s to be done when, confronted about privilege, white people become defensive and angry?
Wise: We now live in a culture that has made just enough progress, culturally speaking, where people know they’re not supposed to be racist and act on these views. But the problem with that progress is that it creates a huge incentive to portray oneself as much more ecumenical and progressive than one is. To be confronted with the evidence, whether it’s implicit bias, or explicit bias, or unearned privilege, is to say to that white person who, unlike their grandparents, is very invested their fair-mindedness: Well, you’re not quite the person that you think you are. You have some stake in this system of inequality, even if you didn’t mean to, you have benefited in some way from the harm done to others—confronted with the evidence, well, it’s hard.
The second reason is much more cynical: Some people know full damn well that they have privilege and just don’t want to give it up.
Gurley: In the essay “If It’s a Civil War, Pick a Side,” you ask, “So, which direction now white folks?” What is the answer?
Wise: White America is fracturing in a way that the country fractured at the time of the Civil War. It’s split between those white folks who embrace the new America, which is much more multicultural, multiracial, and pluralistic, and those who are deathly afraid of that and wish to hold on to the old order. Some of it is playing out geographically, but not north and south so much as urban and metropolitan versus rural and small-town.
If a white person grows up in the South, and nonetheless ends up progressive and on the left, I can almost always guarantee you that that person came to their progressivism through the crucible of race. Because there is no way or very little chance for someone who’s white and grows up in the South not to realize that race is the background noise of everything that happens here and has been for a long time, if for no other reason that Yankee folk won’t let us forget. But the problem is that white folks outside of the South—if you grew up in the Midwest, on the West Coast, Vermont, or even in New York—you don’t necessarily have to engage with race if you don’t want to.
There’s a good base to work with among younger white folks, but it’s going to require those who believe in racial justice to really nurture that part of white America and build upon its consciousness so that it doesn’t become complacent and embrace a colorblindness that leaves it unwilling or unable to understand power differentials and the ongoing inequities.
But I don’t think Black and brown folks have the job of helping young white people figure it out. That’s my job and the job of other white elders. If white folks are going to move forward on this issue, they’re going to need to study the history of white internal resistance to white supremacy.
