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Coming six months after last summers George Floyd protests, the Capitol Riot was utterly predictable, according to anti-racism advocate and educator Tim Wise. The white Tennessean has spent a quarter-century studying how American racism pollutes our politics, criminal justice and policing, health care, immigration, and everyday interactions. His latest collection of essays, Dispatches From the Race War, offers unflinching assessments of the culpability of white Americans for these crises and relentless indignities. Since June 2020, he writes, we have been in the midst of a full-scale rebellion, or what some have called a soft civil war.

The American Prospect spoke to Wise about where he sees the country headed after the attack on the Capitol by white supremacists. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Gabrielle Gurley: 2020 was even more tumultuous than 1968, but many Republicans are wedded to Trumpism despite the pandemic, summer protests, and the Capitol Riot. Why?

Tim Wise: Youre absolutely right, and I say that as someone who spent most of 1968 in my mothers womb, and so I think I inherited the trauma. For some Republicans, theres this pose of unity, cant-we-all-get-along self-preservation, because they realized that they stoked the fires that burn, metaphorically, and, perhaps, literally on the sixth. Some of them have to make the calls for unity because they worry about their future if they remain tied to the craziness. Others like Marjorie Taylor Greene embrace the craziness; some of them are just that far gone.

Others are intensely political animals like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, who want to distance themselves from the lunacy of January 6, but not on principle, just for preservation. Theyre sticking to the script, trying to govern as the minority, at least from a position as responsible stewards of good government, but their side just tried to overthrow the government. To me, its a very hard sell.

Gurley: How do you assess the response of white America to all of this?

Wise: It was heartening to see so many white folks getting to see what Black and brown folk have been trying to get us to see for a long time. Part of what allowed a lot of white folks to have their eyes open in this moment, where Eric Garner or Tamir Rice didnt, was the pandemic moment. If theyd been going about the hustle and bustle of their daily lives, they could have just hit the snooze button like they have been for generations.

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What we see now was utterly predictable. Its what Carol Anderson at Emory University talks about in her book, White Rage, this backlash that happens throughout American history. There is a perception on the part of a certain segment of white America that Black folks have either made significant inroads and progress or are in the process of organizing for that purpose. So since abolition there has been this rageful response.

All Trump really offered was an excuse for their anxiety, a psychological balm, an enemies list, and an ability to say, I hate who you hate. I will feed you your hatred back to you as a substitute for a truly improved life.

Gurley: What did Trump offer his white supporters, especially the wealthy white conservatives, who did not take to the streets but accepted the white supremacist trappings?

Wise: It says a lot about how that group, even the ones that arent overt racists, sexists, and bigots, that theyre willing to embrace someone who was all of those things for the sake of their bank accounts. It really wasnt the hardcore white working classif you look at the median income of Trump supporters, its like $78,000, which is above the national median for what we consider working-class levels of income and occupational status.

Who are those folks? Theyre the anxious, white middle class. That anxious middle is not rich enough to be completely comfortable, but close enough to the better-off to think, Well, if I could just put some distance between me and these Black and brown people. Theyre always looking backward at whos gaining on them. They must know after four years that they didnt benefit economically.

All Trump really offered to them was an excuse for their anxiety, a psychological balm, an enemies list, and an ability to say, I hate who you hate. I will feed you your hatred back to you as a substitute for a truly improved life. A lot of people didnt care that the jobs didnt come back because at least hes standing up to those awful Black ballplayers.

Gurley: What did you take away from the 2020 Georgia Senate contest: Is it a cautionary tale perhaps, because the conditions that produced Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff may not continue to exist?

Wise: We do need to be careful with the assumption that Georgia is now this permanently blue state. It is a very divided state. In the 2018 gubernatorial election, Stacey Abrams lost 78 percent of white women, which was actually higher than the percentage of white men, 75 percent. Thanks to Abrams, and the folks that shes helped to mobilize, they have obviously made a difference in just a few years. But if we were not in an election cycle where the head of the party has basically said, its all rigged against you, theres no point in even voting, Im not sure that we get these outcomes. White turnout would have been higher, and we would not be sitting here talking about Georgia the way we are now.

The good news is one of those seats is safe for six years, and the other will be for a couple of years. The six-year seat, that is enough time, at least in theory, for the Democrats to continue to register folks. If people take [New York Times columnist] Charles Blows article and his new book [The Devil You Know] seriously, he tells Black folks to move to the South, a revolutionary strategy that is actually very interesting. I dont disagree.

There are real power bases that are being built, both politically and economically, in places like Atlanta and Charlotte. But its going to require ongoing work, because its certainly not a settled proposition. Something is coming in response, its just a question of whether or not progressive folks will be prepared for it.

Gurley: Black candidates lost decisively in other Senate races in the South. To the degree that you can generalize across states, what do you extrapolate about whites in the rest of the South?

Wise: As a lifelong Southerner, Ive known for a very long time that there are multiple Souths. I grew up at a time when Tennessee was a solid Democratic state. I certainly wouldnt say it was a progressive state, but by comparison, we always had Democratic governors, Democratic statehouses, Democratic senators. Now, its essentially Nashville and Memphis versus the rest of the state, and maybe Chattanooga, increasingly, as a tech hub.

What weve seen in the last 20 years in Tennessee, and you see this in a few other states as well, is the depths of the culture war and the depths of the urban-rural divide are very, very deep. There isnt a sufficient number of Black folk, a Black political power base here, compared to Georgia and North Carolina, that can compete with these exurban and rural power bases of reactionary, Christian white folks. Honestly, Mississippi and South Carolina would be far more likely to turn purple/blue before Tennessee. Those states that have larger percentages of Black folks and a more developed political power base that tends to compensate for the conservative cultural bent of white folks in the region.

But the Tennessee Democratic Party has been very slow to embrace the metropolitan nature of its power base. Its not just Black folks, its white folks who dont mind living in Nashville and Memphis and their first-ring suburbs, or in the heart of Chattanooga. That is what has happened in Georgia, and with the North Carolina Democratic Party. They built a base in Charlotte within the Research Triangle. Are they always successful? No, they win some, they lose some.

But in Tennessee, we just keep losing. The state Democratic Party hasnt been willing to say, this is who we are, and thats OK, because if it werent for Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga, we would have no economic growth at all in this stateand we dont mind being the party associated with that economic engine. Yall can thank us later.

Gurley: Why has race drowned out solutions to the historic pandemic?

Wise: Its not really shocking to me that the politicization happened. Weve now lost 400,000 people, and a good 230,000 of those have been white. The death rate may be higher for Black, Latinx, and indigenous folk, but you just buried your grandma because you decided that [the pandemic] wasnt really a big deal. It plays into that narrative of the undeserving being catered to, and the hard-working, deserving people being punished. These folks viewed social distancing and masking as almost like a redistribution scheme in a weird way. Its just very revealing because what it says is that even when faced with ones own mortality, one will in many cases opt for the baubles of caste over the actual needs of your own life and that of your family. You literally will put the gun to the head of grandma in order to remind everybody directly or indirectly that, by God, Im white and you will not tell me what to do.

I dont think Black and brown folks have the job of helping young white people figure it out.

Gurley: Youve pointed to the conversations about diversity and institutional and structural racism that are happening now. Whats to be done when, confronted about privilege, white people become defensive and angry?

Wise: We now live in a culture that has made just enough progress, culturally speaking, where people know theyre not supposed to be racist and act on these views. But the problem with that progress is that it creates a huge incentive to portray oneself as much more ecumenical and progressive than one is. To be confronted with the evidence, whether its implicit bias, or explicit bias, or unearned privilege, is to say to that white person who, unlike their grandparents, is very invested their fair-mindedness: Well, youre not quite the person that you think you are. You have some stake in this system of inequality, even if you didnt mean to, you have benefited in some way from the harm done to othersconfronted with the evidence, well, its hard.

The second reason is much more cynical: Some people know full damn well that they have privilege and just dont want to give it up.

Gurley: In the essay If Its a Civil War, Pick a Side, you ask, So, which direction now white folks? What is the answer?

Wise: White America is fracturing in a way that the country fractured at the time of the Civil War. Its split between those white folks who embrace the new America, which is much more multicultural, multiracial, and pluralistic, and those who are deathly afraid of that and wish to hold on to the old order. Some of it is playing out geographically, but not north and south so much as urban and metropolitan versus rural and small-town.

If a white person grows up in the South, and nonetheless ends up progressive and on the left, I can almost always guarantee you that that person came to their progressivism through the crucible of race. Because there is no way or very little chance for someone whos white and grows up in the South not to realize that race is the background noise of everything that happens here and has been for a long time, if for no other reason that Yankee folk wont let us forget. But the problem is that white folks outside of the Southif you grew up in the Midwest, on the West Coast, Vermont, or even in New Yorkyou dont necessarily have to engage with race if you dont want to.

Theres a good base to work with among younger white folks, but its going to require those who believe in racial justice to really nurture that part of white America and build upon its consciousness so that it doesnt become complacent and embrace a colorblindness that leaves it unwilling or unable to understand power differentials and the ongoing inequities.

But I dont think Black and brown folks have the job of helping young white people figure it out. Thats my job and the job of other white elders. If white folks are going to move forward on this issue, theyre going to need to study the history of white internal resistance to white supremacy.

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Which Direction Now, White Folks? - The American Prospect