Back in the late 1980s, many AIDS activists decided that the only way the country was going to become concerned about the growing human toll that HIV was claiming was to cause disruption. He turned to his challengers and shook his finger at them: "You will never learn anything when you're talking." He was, in effect, telling them they were being uncivil.īut sometimes being uncivil is what gets the job done. "I listened to them," he told the Hillary Clinton supporters, "and they don't wanna listen to me." "Black anger, black rage, black distress over injustice is seen as, one, unreasonable and outsized and, two, as a thing that must be neutralized and contained quickly." Cooper says this often takes the form of whites "preaching at black people about how they're bad and how they're ungrateful for being angry."įormer President Bill Clinton illustrated this during a Philadelphia campaign event for his wife, Hillary, in 2016.Īs he talked about the ways in which the criminal justice system has evolved in recent years, his recitation was challenged by Black Lives Matter activists. Since the Black Lives Matter movement blossomed, Cooper says, the mere fact that blacks are protesting affects how white society sees those protests. Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper writes about white reaction to black anger in her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. And there are always higher standards expected of those people pushing back. "It's always been a situation where people assume that civility is something that's sort of God ordained," Johnson says.Ĭivility Wars In These Divided Times, Is Civility Under Siege?Īnd so, pushing back against the status quo will be seen as inherently uncivil by the people who want to maintain it. They allowed white citizens to, in effect, civilize people they considered less than.Īnd many assumed that this civilizing mission came from a higher authority.
Such laws and ordinances were designed to contain communities of color, says Gaye Theresa Johnson, who studies the intersection of civility and race at the University of California, Los Angeles. Those laws that keep them up keep us down!"Ī "God-ordained" right to civilize others "We are neither morally or legally confined to those laws.
"We did not make the laws in this country," he insisted. Rap Brown told black Americans that they could ignore laws that were never meant to include them. James Forman, a principal organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had famously promised the people who wanted to go slow on integration that if blacks didn't have a seat at democracy's table soon, the entire table would be tossed.Ī few years later, as the Black Power movement gathered steam, activist H. George Wallace could proclaim, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!"Įven after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, some white people were still pushing back against demands for equality from black and brown communities.
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