Toure: Obama Makes White People Violent

Toure: Obama Makes White People Violent: Toure, the self-proclaimed racial expert, has a new column at Time today in which he explains that the election of Barack Obama has made white people violently mad. “Historically,” he writes, “after a surge in black power there is a retort, a reassertion of white power. After emancipation and Reconstruction came Jim Crow. After the Civil Rights Movement came the rise of mass incarceration, which Professor Michelle Alexander calls ‘the New Jim Crow’ because legalized discrimination against ex-convicts means that they lose all the rights won in the Civil Rights Movement.”

So far, so stupid. Toure’s right that after emancipation and Reconstruction, the South was largely left to its own devices, and quickly instituted Jim Crow. But that was a reaction not to increased black power but to the North’s failure to carry forward Reconstruction.

See original work for more on this and other stories.