Why Didn't We Riot?: A Black Man in Trumpland

In these impassioned, powerful essays, an award-winning journalist deals forthrightly with what it means to be Black in an America that still supports Trump.

South Carolina–based journalist Issac J. Bailey reflects on a wide range of complex, divisive topics—from police brutality and Confederate symbols to respectability politics and white discomfort—which have taken on a fresh urgency with the protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing. Bailey has been honing his views on these issues for the past quarter of a century in his professional and private life, which included an eighteen-year stint as a member of a mostly white Evangelical Christian church.
 
Why Didn’t We Riot? speaks to and for the millions of Black and Brown people throughout the United States who were effectively pushed back to the back of the bus in the Trump era by a media that prioritized the concerns and feelings of the white working class and an administration that made white supremacists giddy, and explains why the country’s fate in 2020 and beyond is largely in their hands. It will be an invaluable resource for the everyday reader, as well as political analysts, college professors and students, and political consultants and campaigns vying for high office.

Issac J. Bailey is an award-winning journalist and the James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy at Davidson College. He has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, Politico Magazine, Time, and many more, and has appeared on NPR, CNN, and MSNBC. Bailey was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught journalism and applied ethics at Coastal Carolina University. His memoir, My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South, was published by Other Press in 2018. He currently lives in Myrtle Beach with his wife and two children.