Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

Short Review: This isn't a perfect book, but what book really is. This is however a well documented book about a period of racial history that most do not know anything about and that is yet one more example of how African Americans have had to pay for the sins of white supremecy.

Forsyth County, a county near where I currently live, drove out all of the African American in 1912. From that time until the late 1980s, there were almost no African Americans that even set foot in the county. It was complete racial segregation.

In the 1980s there was a shooting of a Black man on a work picnic at Lake Lanier and several demonstrations around civil rights. But even so it took about 20 years after that until the county, primarily because of demographic pressures of becoming a bedroom community of Atlanta more than anything else, did the African American population start to grow. Today around 3 percent of the 220,000 people in Forsyth County are African American (the state as a whole is about 30%.). But there still hasn't really been a reckoning of the harm.

Oprah, within six months of the start of her show went to Forsyth County to interview residents. One of them said that they thought it was their right to choose who to live around. And while they didn't have anything in particular against Black people, they didn't want to live near them. That sentiment is really what is at heart the problem of standard white racism. In Forsyth, a local and state government that were supportive of segregation allowed this reign of terror to keep African Americans out of Forsyth until other pressures and the delusion of historic population of the county dropped with a very quick population increase from other parts of the country.

But this is a good local example of why there are a variety of examples of why it is not simply good enough to say, African Americans should be doing better. Historic reasons, like being pushed off of their land and being terrorized contribute to the lack of equity today. This is about a very particular local story. But it is an example where the details change, but the result is similar. White racism robs African Americans and other minorities of the fruits of their labor while giving ignorant whites the cover of not understanding the history.

My full, nearly 1000 word description and review of Blood at the Root is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/blood-at-the-root/