White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Carol Anderson

May 2016 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
New York Times Bestseller
USA Today Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016
A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016

From the Civil War to our combustible present, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America.

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she argued, "everyone had ignored the kindling."

Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.

Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

Ratings and reviews

I say we give every race that has recieved mistreatment and or been enforced into slavery reprecutions. Oh wait.. That's all of them? Jewish people in egypt/germany. Europeons to romans, africans and middle easterns. Africans to themselves and to half the world. Tibet/taiwan to china... The list goes on. How about instead of focusing on single narratives of racism we look at the big picture. Every race, nation, or gender has been mistreated or enslaved by another. Even to this day women (and some men) are mistreated and sold into the sex trade. Let's not focus on the past in where we can find examples everywhere. But on the present problems that are more prominent. When was the last time someome was openly killed for their skin and proclaimed to be from that. The world isnt what it was. Even if you go back 50 years to segregation. But people want to focus on the past and "rectifying" it instead of realizing that even in this era there are much more dangerous problems then "racism".

facts may be unpleasant, but that doesn't render them less true. the low-star ratings here are from people whose own incredible fragility clouds their judgement & ability to accept reality for what it is. we cannot change or fix what we are unwilling to accept or even acknowledge. sadly, based on the majority of readers' ratings here, white supremacy & fragility will keep the States ever in the dark ages of civilisation, & its inevitable hard fall is going to be tragically self-inflicted. 'White Rage' is written by an actual PhD. this widespread denial of her expertise & hours of research is proof of her premise: that Black advancement is what whites really fear most & will stop at nothing to prevent. how bloody sad that such an excellent, eye-opening, important book should be so maligned.

A clear effort to deflect blame upon white people for the actions of black people. Trying to say when black people burn and riot in their own neighborhoods its somehow white racism at play. Lol its like saying black on black crime is the fault of white people ridiculous. The author seems to be chasing ghosts. While also for whatever reason attempting to mash linear time in order to create some false equivilances.

About the author

Carol Anderson, PhD, is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bourgeois Radicals, and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.