BLACK SUCCESS, WHITE BACKLASH

Black prosperity has provoked white resentment that can make life exhausting for people of color-and it has led to the undoing of policies that have nurtured Black advancement

- ELIJAH ANDERSON

For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for over­ stepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the con­ sequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal.