White fear has always driven elimination of black people, not repair of injustice

Evidence

But neither fear of divine retribution nor of black revenge was sufficient motivation to treat black people justly or to reimagine American democracy apart from white supremacy. Jefferson talked and wrote eloquently about democracy and the moral cost of bondage and, with rational efficiency, managed his slaves at Monticello. Lincoln denounced slavery, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and considered the reasonableness of emigration/colonization schemes to rid the country of its black problem. For both, the presence of black people threatened the moral standing of the country and the moral character of its most valued asset—white Americans. White fear has never motivated people to look for solutions that would involve ameliorating the deep conditions that produced the fear in the first place. Instead, the response has been to eliminate the fear by eliminating black people. Either we needed to get rid of black folk physically or just make the whole damn country color-blind. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 240

Categorization

• XREF: This extends the white-fear causal claim the reader has been tracking across chapters; ties to the value gap thesis and the trap-of-election-politics argument.