Any Progress We Make As African-Americans Is 'Too Much'

Two things that CNN camerawoman Patrica Carroll said in her interview discussing the ugly incident that happened at the recently RNC convention resonated with me. 

"This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South ... You come to places like this you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do." 

She also said, "People think we're gone further than we have." .

Sadly it's a recurring theme in our four centuries of being Africans in America.   We African-Americans make any minor, major or groundbreaking progress and it's 'too much ' for whites and whiteness to handle.

After it occurs, you have the inevitable panicked rush of white supremacists to roll back that progress or work to create barriers to prevent further advancement for my people while stirring up resentment in the huddled masses of low and middle income white people.   When we overcome that latest created barrier or painfully get back to the previous point we were at evolutionary wise in terms of our development as African-Americans, the rush by whiteness to create a new way to roll our progress back begins anew.

We've definitely seen that distressing pattern play itself out over the last 150 years of American history.  After the spectacular progress freedmen made after emancipation from slavery in which they went from a 15% literacy rate to over 70% by the 1900's combined with an explosion of African-American elected officials, community building based on a solid educational foundation, entrepreneurial spirit and hard work, fearful and jealous whites began working to roll back that progress.

Klan terrorist attacks, mob violence, the shady 1876 presidential election that resulted in the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction, restrictive voter laws, boycotts, Jim Crow segregation and conservative Supreme Court rulings combined to shut down the first Reconstruction and our political participation in American society to the point in which we had zero members of Congress by the dawn of the 20th century.  We were knocked out of many professions we'd managed to enter or were dominant in such as the horse racing industry and recurring riots destroyed much of what we had painstakingly managed to build. 

It took decades of effort from a phalanx of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, visionary leaders such as W.E.B DuBois, A Philip Randolph, Dorothy Height, Bayard Rustin, the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.and the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's before we could overcome Jim Crow segregation and jump off another period of spectacular progress for African-Americans which by 1980 was 'too much' for white people. 

The forces of whiteness and white resentment have reacted to the Second Reconstruction the same way they did to the first one in terms of flocking to elect conservative Republican politicians who pimped a message of racial resentment for electoral success in the once Solid Democratic South.   They combined it with a conservative Supreme Court, a phalanx of shadowy conservative organizations working behind the scenes such as ALEC, right wing conservative Christians and  in conjunction with the national and state level Republican Party orgs designing laws to retard or erect new barriers for us..
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The fact you have people of color routinely doing things 'they' don't think we should be doing such as running Fortune 500 corporations, winning Nobel Prizes, walking fashion runways, winning major golf or tennis tournaments, being the governor of a state or living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue along with the news that whites will be a minority population in the United States by 2040 has made whiteness uneasy. 

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 has sent the bigots into a frothing at the mouth frenzy and doubled down on pimping the dog whistle message of GOP=white leadership.  When the GOP gained control of several state legislatures in the wake of the 2010 midterm elections one of the first things those Republican legislatures did was pass voter suppression laws designed to depress the turnout of African-American voters in the runup to this 2012 presidential election..

And the irrationality of the Massive Resistance 2.0 strategy the Republican party has deployed in order to deny him a second term speaks volumes to the level of racism in the GOP.  They are willing to bankrupt and destroy this country just to oust one Black man and his family out of the house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave my people built with their unpaid labor.

So yeah, any progress we make as African-Americans always seems to be 'too much' for whiteness and white supremacy, and that pattern is played out.