Taking America Back
In a foreword to We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden, Nic Stone (Dear Martin) writes of her Indian American high school US history teacher, a Mr. Tripathi and how remarkable it was that he, an immigrant, was teaching US History in one of the most racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools in the state of Georgia. Yet they never talked about the fact that they were the only two brown-skinned people in that classroom. It wasn't something you did, back then.
We Are Not Yet Equal is all about talking plainly of what has remained unmentionable for too many years. It's a YA adaptation of Emory University professor Carol Anderson's White Rage in which she laid out the patterns of advancement and retreat from ideals of equality and away from the deep injustices of centuries of slavery.The Anderson and Bolden adaptation employs historical narrative to shed light on the measures taken for generations by white people, from assaults upon progressive policy to the most utterly absurd legal contortions, to keep Black resolve from succeeding and Black aspirations from being realized. The book pulls no punches—accounts of Mary Turner’s 1918 lynching in Georgia and Ossian Sweet’s 1925 ordeal when trying to move into a white neighborhood in Detroit (and his subsequent suicide in 1960) are just a couple of examples. They're unflinching in both their clarity and their compassion toward the victims of these crimes.Some young readers may be shocked to learn that Mississippi didn't ratify the 13th amendment until 2013. That narratives of white innocence were rampant in the Nixon election campaign! That lack of equal access to education held back American technological advancement. And so much more.The book ends on the fringes of the present time with Dylan Roof’s murder of nine black people in Emmanuel AME Church and Donald Trump’s 2015 electoral promise to “take America back.” It urges us to imagine a different future, one that really looks forward, takes the opportunity to defuse white rage.