Backlash - seems to happen every time.

[qwlauren35]

How White Backlash Controls American Progress



I started reading this article because the title intrigued me, but then I realized that there was very little in it that I didn't already know, and that seeing it in writing was horrifically depressing. IF you don't know about white backlash, go ahead and read it. If you're black, you probably won't be surprised by anything in the article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/white-backlash-nothing-new/611914/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cr&utm_campaign=WITHIN_Prospecting_ContentDPA&utm_term=WITHIN_LaL&utm_content=050621_PAM_Carousel_DPA_ProductName-NewMiss_PDP&fbclid=IwAR3p3j8zXnQsjIYsQ1aizJNyBsBVMpDuV-5xFnLGxbSjr3uYA0vTWRxipMU

Backlash, as the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, “is nothing more nor less than white resentment of Negroes.”

And the backlashes are powerful not only for the fury they represent, but in the fear they instill in political leaders, even progressives, who hesitate to push things “too far.”

During Reconstruction, opponents of the black-freedom struggle deployed preemptive, apocalyptic, slippery-slope arguments that have remained enduring features of backlash politics up to the present. They treated federal support for African American civil rights, economic and social equality—however delayed, reluctant, underfunded, and incomplete it may have been—as a cataclysmic overreaction and framed it as a far more dangerous threat to liberty than the injustice it was designed to address.

What one reporter called “white panic” was driven by fears of “favoritism” and “special privileges” for African Americans—that white “workers would be forced out of their jobs to make way for Negroes,” as one article put it that year, when Jim Crow still prevailed. “Many of my people think the Negroes want to take over the country,” a midwestern Republican politician said in a Wall Street Journal article published on April 10 of the following year, still months before the Act’s passage. “They think there are things in the bill that just aren’t there, like forced sales of housing to Negroes and stuff like that.” White backlashers imagined coercion where it did not exist. They embraced a lexicon and posture of victimization that hearkened back to the era of Reconstruction and anticipated the deceiving, self-pitying MAGA discourse that drives reactionary politics in Donald Trump’s America.

Reporting on the “hate vote” in The Saturday Evening Post, in October 1964, one month before the presidential election, Ben H. Bagdikian highlighted the “churning, emotional conflict within each voter,” by which he meant white people. He noted that the backlashers “are not against a better life for the Negro, but they are strongly against this being achieved at the cost of white tranquility.” The elevation of “tranquility” over equal justice for all was a hallmark of backlash discourse, which ranked white feelings over black rights.

[elleng]

1. 'New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote'

[Groundhawg]

2. Every position has backlash from nearly half the population. It's the world we live in.