Rethinking America: It Didn’t Have to Be This Way

Rethinking America: It Didn’t Have to Be This Way

By lwilliams@semourbanvoices.com - July 25, 2025

Inspired by the work of Dr. Carol Anderson, author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

America didn’t have to turn out this way. It wasn’t fate. It wasn’t chance. It was a series of missed opportunities—decisions made at critical turning points that chose fear over fairness, resentment over responsibility.

As we look around today—at underfunded schools, crumbling neighborhoods, the criminalization of poverty, and an electoral system that still suppresses the Black vote—we must confront the truth: these outcomes are not broken systems. They are the systems working exactly as they were designed to. And at every step, white rage—the backlash to Black advancement—has been the driving force, just as Dr. Carol Anderson so clearly outlined in White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

We’ve seen it time and again.

After slavery, Reconstruction offered the chance to build a new South where all people—Black and white—could thrive. Instead, we got Black Codes, racial terror, and Jim Crow.

When Brown v. Board declared segregated schools unconstitutional, instead of equal education, we got decades of foot-dragging, redlining, and a public education system that still leaves our children behind based on zip code.

When civil rights laws passed in the 1960s, America could have doubled down on equality. Instead, we got the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and disinvestment in Black neighborhoods.

And even the historic election of our first Black president didn’t deliver the shift we hoped for. Instead, it triggered a wave of racist backlash, conspiracy theories, and obstruction that eventually gave way to a presidency built on grievance and exclusion.

These are not isolated incidents. They are patterns—patterns of retreat and repression every time Black communities move forward.

But Urban Voices is not here to dwell on despair. We are here to raise the call to action.

This moment—right now—is another crossroads. The forces of white rage are still loud, still dangerous, still working overtime to distract, divide, and dismantle the progress so many fought and died for. But we are not powerless.

We know what a better future looks like. It’s one where voting is free, fair, and fully protected—not restricted by confusing ID laws and voter roll purges. It’s a future where public schools serve every child with dignity, not just those in wealthy districts. It’s a future where we stop spending billions on prisons and start investing in community-based mental health care, youth development, and real public safety.

It’s a future where no child has to imagine their way into opportunity—it’s built into the very fabric of their city, their schools, their society.

And we’ve seen glimpses of that future, thanks to visionaries and freedom fighters who came before us. But glimpses aren’t enough. This is the moment we must decide: will we keep reacting to white rage, or will we finally chart our own course forward?

We know the answer must be the latter.

Close up of the Constitution of the United States of America with quil feather pen

This country can no longer afford to ignore its truth. We must name what’s held us back and call forward what can lift us all. Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native—we have the numbers. We have the vision. What we need now is the will.

We must reject the fear-based politics that divide us and invest in a future rooted in justice, equity, and shared power. The blueprint is already written. Let’s finally build what we’ve been denied for too long.

America must be rethought—not just for the sake of the past, but for the future we still have a chance to create.

Urban Voices is here to highlight stories and strategies for racial equity, justice, and collective power. This commentary was inspired by White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Dr. Carol Anderson (Bloomsbury, 2016).