The fabricated Black terror threat contrasted with real white violence against civil rights workers

Evidence

The opposite, of course, was the case. In sweltering Mississippi, three young civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—had gone missing. They had long since been murdered, although their bodies would not be found for several more weeks. On a hot Thursday afternoon, July 16, a fifteen-year-old Black youth, James Powell, was fatally shot by an off-duty, out-of-uniform white police officer in front of the largely white high school where the teenager was taking a remedial reading course—the incident precipitated when an irate white building superintendent turned a water hose on a group of mildly obstreperous Black students. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 544

Categorization

• XREF: The inverted threat perception — officials conjuring Black terror while Mississippi whites murdered activists — fits the reader’s test case of how dominant culture projects its own violence onto the subordinate. — connects to: Racial humiliation is recast as fiscal and security threat language. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1758; Conspiracy believers recast documented abuse as establishment revenge on black power — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 185; Top officials treated black racial-identity activism as threatening while ignoring white supremacists — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 207