Author of Civil Rights Baby Offers a Prescription for Racial Healing: R-R-R

PARIS, Aug. 17, 2017 /PRNewswire/ The United States needs to undertake R-R-R, a concept for acceptance and cohesive living together, said professor and author Nita Wiggins, in the wake of the clashes between white supremacists and citizens in two cities this week. Wiggins, who lived in both Charlottesville, Va., and Seattle, Wash., the sites of the violence and at least one death said the seeds of the conflicts took root decades earlier but became more venomous after the last three presidential cycles.

"We need Race Relations Reconstruction, what I call R-R-R, to build our some kind of national unity after the elections in 2008, 2012, and 2016," said Wiggins, a former broadcast journalist and author of the upcoming book Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism.

"It is a very ugly thought, but there are some Americans who feel a black man should not be able to do something that a white man cannot do, politically speaking or otherwise. I believe that Donald Trump is someone who believes that. We all know that a black man succeeded in defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. I feel that's a part of why Donald Trump called on the basest of ideas in his campaignto set people on fire with emotion."

Wiggins continued, "We saw the response from the portion of Donald Trump's supporters who do not want a country in which a black man did something that a white man wanted to do but could not do. More plainly, if my baseball team defeats a certain baseball team, then at all costs, your team better defeat the same team to prove that it is just as good. It's a supremacy issue."

Wiggins said we need to address how significant and negative it is for people to have that view. She said it very much is the politics of hate and it leads to domestic terrorism.

"It's as if when we, black Americans, try to live fully under the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we anger people who do not want minorities to benefit from the laws of the land."

In addition to Seattle and Charlottesville, Wiggins previously lived in Memphis, Tenn., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and in Dallas, Texas, where President Kennedy was killed in the midst of formulating the Civil Rights Act.

Wiggins is a journalism professor at ESJ-Paris (l'Ecole Suprieure de Journalisme de Paris in France). She is writing the story of her 20 years on American television and will release Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism in the fall. She can be followed on Twitter at @EducatingMsNita.

For more information, contact Nita Wiggins at (646) 460-5430 or 172444@email4pr.com.

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