Carol Anderson > Quotes

“The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freedpeople—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education. Imagine”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve.9 And”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Black respectability or “appropriate” behavior doesn’t seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama’s presidency made that clear. Aspirations and the achievement of these aspirations provide no protection. Not even to the God-fearing. On”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The second key maneuver, which flowed naturally from the first, was to redefine racism itself. Confronted with civil rights headlines depicting unflattering portrayals of KKK rallies and jackbooted sheriffs, white authority transformed those damning images of white supremacy into the sole definition of racism. This simple but wickedly brilliant conceptual and linguistic shift served multiple purposes. First and foremost, it was conscience soothing. The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although 'resentful of black progress' and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the 'kind of upstanding white citizen(s)' who were 'positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan". The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional and pervasive.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The truth is, white rage has undermined democracy, warped the Constitution, weakened the nation’s ability to compete economically, squandered billions of dollars on baseless incarceration, rendered an entire region sick, poor, and woefully undereducated, and left cities nothing less than decimated. All this havoc has been wreaked simply because African Americans wanted to work, get an education, live in decent communities, raise their families, and vote. Because they were unwilling to take no for an answer.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fired up his “silent majority” audience of thousands in July 2015 with a macabre promise: “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”1”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.21 Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Sadly, the ascent of a black man to the presidency of the United States did not, despite all the talk of hope and a post-racial society, signal progress. Instead, it has led to a situation, not so unlike the era of Jim Crow, where a sense of physical vulnerability is shared across classes in the black community.86”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“What the paper failed to recognize was that black people’s willingness to work had never been the problem. Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“And so, at a December 1981 meeting, Contra leaders, whom Reagan referred to as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” floated the idea that trafficking cocaine into California would provide enough profits to arm and train the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.108 With most of the network already established, the plan was rather straightforward: There were the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia; the airports and money laundering in Panama run by President Manuel Noriega; the well-known lack of radar detection that made landing strips in Costa Rica prime transport depots; and weapons and drug warehouses at Ilopango air base outside San Salvador. The problem had been U.S. law enforcement guarding key entry points into a lucrative market. But with the CIA and the National Security Council now ready to run interference and keep the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service,”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The truth is that, despite all this, a black man was elected president of the United States: the ultimate advancement, and thus the ultimate affront. Perhaps not surprisingly, voting rights were severely curtailed, the federal government was shut down, and more than once the Office of the President was shockingly, openly, and publicly disrespected by other elected officials. And as the judicial system in state after state turned free those who had decided a neighborhood’s “safety” meant killing first and asking questions later, a very real warning was sent that black lives don’t matter.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Wisconsin took another tack when Republican governor Scott Walker championed a bill requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote, and then proceeded to close the Department of Motor Vehicles in areas with Democratic voters while simultaneously extending the hours in Republican strongholds.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.

White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.”
― Carol Anderson, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“A program that stops and frisks predominantly those who are the least likely to have illegal contraband is not law enforcement.80 A war on drugs that uses race and ethnicity as the litmus test for crime is not justice.81 Millions of black citizens recognize this and, therefore, question the very legitimacy of this key pillar in American democracy.82 Meanwhile, state budgets have cracked under the strain of bloated, unsustainable prison systems.83 Mayors worry that their cities will ignite when yet another black person, who is more likely than not unarmed, is killed by police.84 The costs of the continued misuse of the criminal justice system are more than the United States can bear—morally, politically, and financially. It is time to rethink America.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy. As”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as “many as 12 percent of eligible voters nationwide may not have government-issued photo ID,” and that “percentage is likely even higher for students, seniors and people of color.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Full voting rights for American citizens, funding and additional resources for quality schools, and policing and court systems in which racial bias is not sanctioned by law—all these are well within our grasp. Visionaries, activists, judges, and politicians before us saw what America could be and fought hard for that kind of nation. This is the moment now when all of us—black, white, Latino, Native American, Asian American—must step out of the shadow of white rage, deny its power, understand its unseemly goals, and refuse to be seduced by its buzzwords, dog whistles, and sophistry. This is when we choose a different future.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.”
― Carol Anderson, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

“The point, longtime aide John Ehrlichman explained, was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The Supreme Court thus identified states as the ultimate defenders of rights, although Southern states had repeatedly proven themselves the ultimate violators of those rights.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The truth is that when World War I provided the opportunity in the North for blacks to get jobs with unheard-of pay scales and, better yet, the chance for their children to finally have good schools, African Americans fled the oppressive conditions in the South.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“As in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order. Indeed, in the antebellum South, the enslaved were actively forbidden from learning to read and write. Many paid dearly for their literacy. One man “endured three brutal whippings to conceal his pursuit” of education. “In another instance a slave by the name of Scipio was put to death for teaching a slave child how to read and spell and the child was severely beaten to make him ‘forget what he had learned.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“Watching the Sweet case unfold, Walter White, assistant secretary of the NAACP, immediately recognized that “if the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle that ‘a man’s home is his castle’ were not made applicable to Negroes … we knew that other and even more determined attacks would be made upon the homes of Negroes throughout the country.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“to create the full-blown security apparatus to suppress what will eventually be the bulk of a nation’s population and to find a continuous substantial flow of foreign capital to offset the inordinate expense—means that it is destined to fail.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“There have been proven instances of vote fraud in the past, but those cases involved election officials’ wrongdoing or the manipulation of absentee ballots. The kind of voter registration fraud that seized the imagination of GOP activists, on the other hand, which is based on stealing someone’s identity or creating a fake persona to cast a ballot, thus altering the results of an election, is in fact very rare. The convoluted scheme is not used because “it is an exceedingly dumb strategy.”25 To have real impact would require an improbable conspiracy involving millions of people. Robert Brandon, president of the Fair Elections Legal Network, notes, “You can’t steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D.s won’t stop that.”26 Protecting”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.”
― Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide