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White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
From the Civil War to our combustible present, White Rage reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America--now in paperback with a new afterword by the author, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson.
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.
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.
304 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2016
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About the author
Carol Anderson
10 books854 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Carol Anderson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Professor Anderson’s research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States.
Carol Anderson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Professor Anderson’s research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States.
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June 17, 2020
"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."
April 5, 2017
I remember gratitude that Anderson used the phrase “white rage” in her column in ’14 that started to give the context expanded here after a police officer shot an unarmed Michael Brown six times in the middle of the street until he was dead. Still, I hate it that we Whites have to get schooled by POC instead of by ourselves, but that is part of the problem, as well. How do we learn to do effective White-on-White anti-racism work? We know that many White voters for Trump believe that racism exists primarily or even only from Blacks against White people and that Blacks are hurting each other much more than White racism hurts them. Anderson’s survey of the political, legal, social, civic, and educational history leads us to no other conclusion than Whites manufacture their right not to take responsibility for White racism, and that has to stop.
Anderson includes “flash points” we should, but don’t, know from history including the failures of both Reconstruction in the 19th C. and Civil Rights in the 20th C., neither at the hands of the Blacks, mind you. The Michael Brown case I’d paid long attention to, as I’d thought to consult a map, seeing that where Brown died in Ferguson was only about five miles from the middle school in East St. Louis so described in Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. After we read Kozol’s excerpt comparing a “best” E. St. Louis school for Blacks with an “average” NY school for Whites and I mention that geography about the “Ferguson Race Riots”, my students tend to fall silent in reflection. While Kozol’s observations were from the 80s, Anderson shares with us that the situation hadn’t changed, as Michael Brown’s school was on probation for 15 years for failure to meet minimal accreditation standards by the state. (Why would we tolerate a school not meeting standards for 15 years, and that is only as finally documented?)
Whites in the US, including many of our neighbors and particularly those with power - judges, politicians, business people, police, local, state, and federal government officials involved with housing and voting – all have practiced a sustained resistance pulling out all stops possible to hinder Black progress since the Civil War. That resistance often shot up in reaction to legal gains made, serving to beat back much potential for progress, and included actions by Presidents and our Supreme Court. Why? Anderson says it’s nothing more than Black success that triggers “white rage”. In one way, Anderson’s examples are overwhelming as they’re such a mash-up of all kinds of transgressions – from the shun of White neighbors and rocks thrown through windows, to denying various basic needs across Maslow’s hierarchy, to the actual killings of Blacks. Several times I wished she’d shared the clearest description of the way Blacks and Whites were concerned to live with each other post-slavery, which are the lists Gunnar Myrdal produced from surveys in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Vol. 1 in the 40s. Whites were most concerned, in rank order, with the personal and social rather than the economic and political: that Blacks didn’t date their daughters, didn’t live close to them, didn’t go to “their” stores or schools, then were less concerned if Blacks had access to employment, their own education, voting, or bank credit. The list of Black concerns of Whites was essentially the exact opposite. The responses by Whites showed our “dilemma” where we profess and codify values of human equality and liberty in the face of our “White rage” practices that suggest otherwise.
Many know a number of rationales are given for the Civil War, even if our textbooks speak only of our noble intentions to end slavery rather than various economic competitions (including with Europe mills). The end of slavery did not presume an acceptance by Whites that Blacks were here to stay, but Anderson reminds us that Lincoln was to convince Africans to move to Panama en masse. The actions of many Whites showed many had no intention of allowing Blacks to achieve or do much of anything, including owning land, holding a job, or getting some education for their children. After Dred Scott put the brakes on Blacks as voting citizens, it wasn’t until ‘65 that discrimination in voting on the basis of race was finally federally banned, and I’d add that discrimination in education on the basis of race wasn’t banned by the ’54 Brown decision but finally in ’64 by the Civil Rights Act. The rapid growth of White supremacy post-Civil War led to Black Codes that blocked Blacks from much of economic, political, and civic life that were codified into laws as Jim Crow. Anderson doesn’t mention, but surely she knows, that Jim Crow separatism came in part from the threat of poor White and recently-freed poor Black sharecroppers seeing their common interest and laws were needed to put an end to Blacks and Whites getting together to discuss possible common remedies to their plight.
Anderson includes a horrifying description of lynching and burning a pregnant Black woman, who dared to criticize the men who’d just lynched her husband. It reminded me I’d looked up the lynching chronology this last year (always up for fun!) and learned that the tradition lasted a full seven decades in the South until the 50s and ran about a thousand Blacks per decade hung up in trees at its height. Another map I saw showed a chilling if slight uptick of several lynchings a year during and after the 1960s Civil Rights movements, with the last race-related lynching (recorded as such) in 1968. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2.... Anderson understandably called Reconstruction just an “age of violence and terror” for Blacks.
Southern Whites tried more mightily than I’d realized to stop the Great Migration. She poignantly notes “migration is the story of America. It is foundational” with little right so coveted as “freedom of movement”, but Whites were eager to deny that to Blacks. She says that “not even the basic laws of capitalism was a match” for the “white rage” that didn’t want Blacks to escape the South. Again, I thought about Angela Davis in Women, Race, and Class that tells the story missing from our history books about the “race riots” in NY in the early 20th century, how it seemed that Whites and Blacks just naturally didn’t get along, yet it was deliberate actions of the early industrial capitalists who used trains to bring up Black men to be pitted against White workers as they garnered their own political strength and started to agitate in labor unions. We quickly realize that White workers standing on the picket line may want to rumble with the Black “scabs” who were marched in often under the protection of armed, local law to take over those jobs.
Anderson notes that some Southern towns simply refused to sell train tickets to Blacks once the fear of the economic collapse of the South would occur without the Black labor. Of course, Blacks weren’t welcome in northern cities with open arms, either, and neighbors fearful of Whites moving in had police on their side, with periodic killings of Blacks not uncommon in situations where they were simply pursuing human rights of housing, employment, and education. Some Blacks went along with this treatment. In the 50s, Moton, the director of the Tuskegee Institute, agreed with Jim Crow logic that “blacks would have to prove themselves worthy of rights.” Many Whites found Black dreams of progress uppity, and Anderson quotes a White Midwest woman in the 50s saying “Oh, they are so forward. If you give them your finger, they’ll take your hand.”
Nixon with his Southern Strategy obstructed implementation of Brown v. Board and the Voting Rights Act. Haldeman said Nixon knew “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key was to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Nixon made four Supreme Court appointments that repeatedly voted for cases that undermined Civil Rights, and helped stop most efforts for equal opportunities for Blacks and well as criminal justice decisions that filled our prisons with Black men. In the context of long stymied attempts at basic integration in society, Anderson saw the rise of the Black Panthers as a movement of “self-defense.”
Reagan also undermined Civil Rights legislation and by the mid-80s had made cuts to specific school nutrition and early education programs disproportionately serving Blacks at a time when Blacks were living more as a percentage below the poverty line than ever before. Severe cuts of federal jobs especially in DHHS and EEOC fired many Blacks in the DC area, as well as in those state and local offices across the US. Reagan’s decision to put the EEOC “on ice” showed the disdain and resistance to the very idea of Equal Employment, and he picked Clarence Thomas to head that agency who insisted no race discrimination existed as a group against women or people of color. The Reagan cuts were equally evident and long-lasting in education as I recall walking through still largely empty halls of the Office of Civil Rights in DC in ’90. Anderson discusses the corruption of Reagan’s administration in funded the Contras through the CIA by the profits of a greatly ratcheted up cocaine trade. The drugs poured into the US mostly directly into poor and minority neighborhoods, largely destroying them, leading to “crack” as the Black drug as cocaine became the drug of choice for Whites and the upper-class. Reagan equated “crack” with urban Blacks explicitly, and we all know our criminology (not mentioned by Anderson) that has long documented the race-based differences in punishments between crack and cocaine, where Whites with the latter get substantially lighter penalties including conviction rates and prison sentences. She also didn’t mention how Nancy Reagan helped her husband with the racist “war on drugs” with her “Just Say No” campaign (that I read led physicians to give less pain medication to patients in the hospital for over a decade, equating drugs with morality, as the Reagans did.) Anderson notes that the race bias of our drug courts leaves us many Black felons stripped for life of many civil rights and how drugs have greased the school-prison pipeline for Blacks.
We fast forward to how Obama’s win was believed a “stolen election” to those with “white rage” and how a Black man as potential president exploded the irrational fear of “voter fraud” in ’08 that has not abated. Conservative Whites still remember ACORN as a fake organization bent on fraud at the ballot box, and a series of Draconian laws were passed in a number of states to “protect the ballot box”. Anderson also shares Jelini Cobb’s “paradox of progress” and the despair that we achieved Obama yet Walking/Driving While Black in the US can still be fatal, as so many examples have shown. She notes that a month after Dylann Roof killed many Black worshippers at a church believing he had an obligation to start a Race War, Trump had his first big rally telling Whites “don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.” I agree that Obama was the “ultimate affront” to many Whites, similarly argued by Ta-Nehisi Coates that Trump was a reaction to Obama – more “white rage”.
I had my own moment of rage remembering how (even rightly) these “ballot box” issues including all those of access to voting by the poor and POC were the diversions that has kept us from a proper focus on Gerrymandering and redistricting that mostly helped Republicans by undermined the Voting Rights Act and hamstrung the potential that Black communities had to be an effective bloc in voting. (I highly recommend Burke's The Appearance of Equality: Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court as well as the wonderfully horrifying more recent treatment, Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy.)
Anderson traces a history where our political wing has undermined our legislative one by rendering impotent the 13th to 15th Amendments that were to help Blacks and lead to race integration, but I want to return to the thread of education throughout this work. I was drawn to look up and confirm for myself that many Black schools were simply shut down after ’54 Brown v. Board. Schools and teachers were lost and one “irony” of school desegregation was that Blacks sometimes had to go to inferior White schools. I appreciated learning that the famous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling included stunning wording that if “colored” people believed any of their separation from Whites unequal or inferior, that was separation they’d brought on themselves! Another 1899 Cummings v. Richmond decision confirmed the legality of shutting down Black schools if that was needed to keep White schools open. The idea that “education spoiled the slave” resulted in one Southern school in the 50s that had 350 Black students sharing 3 teachers. Neither Reconstruction nor Civil Rights changed the mindset of many Whites that Blacks shouldn’t be educated. Blacks were willing to risk moving to the North with hopes for schooling opportunities but Northern schools were regularly inhospitable to Blacks. The Black Codes of decades earlier that forbid literacy and punished attempts to read and write continued with no public schools open to Blacks in the south. However, Blacks pushed hard for education for their children as literacy was the “contradiction of oppression,” even if poor Whites in the late 50s wouldn’t attend new Southern schools build for “nigger programs”.
I’d forgotten the central role in Civil Rights struggles over equal educational opportunity held by the Prince Edwards County schools outside of Baltimore. In the early 50s, NAACP documented and presented in court that all Black schools there had only outdoor plumbing while all White schools had indoor. The NAACP had a noble fight for Brown but we can’t forget the predictable reaction by White society Anderson documents including Emmett Till, Central High in Little Rock, and Ruby Bridges. Georgia legislators responded by passing a resolution demanding the Federal government ban the 13th to 15th Amendments. In Prince Edward County a concerned White parent said he’d “rather his children be baked in an oven” than attend an integrated school, and “in five states NAACP members were banned from public employment.” Once I worked in Civil Rights in the 90s, Prince Edwards County schools were again in focus, as they’d piloted an early Big Data system that spit out numbers that showed exactly which White teachers flunked Black students at a higher rate than White students with a statistically significant difference. (The unions knocked on the door of the superintendent to make sure such data wasn’t shared or used with the teachers in question – a clear case of being careful what you wish to know in terms of data!)
As Sputnik and Eisenhower pushed states to equalize quality education among all students we couched the need for a highly and consistently educated populace as national “defense” (so named the act) but Blacks ended up being excluded so those efforts didn’t improve schooling for them or help open up higher education pipelines to Blacks. Achievement by Blacks at all levels of college including graduate school and STEM degrees remain low as we refuse to fully implement Brown and accept largely unequal educational opportunities and outcomes. I know of “alternative schools” in Southern cities that have 20% Black populations but house 80% of those Black students. (One principal called such schools “pre-prisons”.)
I was instructed to learn the history of Civil Rights laws when I worked in the field, and remember the importance of the 1973 San Antonio v. Rodriguez decision Anderson reviews. San Antonio argued that under the state funding model they couldn’t provide equal educational opportunities to their 96% population of Black and Hispanic students, even though the higher funding for the White, wealthy adjacent community schools was adequate. The US district court ruled in favor, noting that “education is a fundamental right”, but the Supremes overturned that noting to the contrary (and rightly, technically) that there exists “no fundamental right to education in the Constitution” (that right has only been deduced, sometimes with the stretch, from the “defense” need). Millikin v. Bradley, the next year, assured Whites across the US, not just in Chicago, that their children would not have to to go school with Blacks. Bakke in ’78 helped to get many Whites in a snit about “reverse discrimination” (that I noticed was often more of an outrage than the discrimination against POC to begin with) that added more “kindling” to our “white rage”. Reagan reversed race gains back several decades with his “scorched earth” policy against social programs including cuts in student aid that specifically hurt low socio-economic students, disproportionately of color, so little surprise that “Black enrollment in college went from 34 to 26 percent” during the Reagan years.
As a sociologist of education who is teased that my natural positive outlook is necessary to study the political economy of the institution, I was heartened by Anderson returns to a focus on the criminal-level inequality built into our system whereby “zip codes” determine decent schools and how basing school funding schemes on local property values brutally hurt and deny Blacks as well as all lower socio-economic citizens Equal Educational Opportunity as required by law. Our education funding locks in class-based disparities with testing scores that vary with the wealth of our communities. (As Alfie Kohn noted, standardized tests do have great predictive value – of the size of the homes around the schools!)
I wished she’d spent more time with the 1964 Civil Rights Act that should have served as one of her “flashpoints” in its own right with a sordid and under-reported story of the failure of race and Civil Rights in public education. We allowed the transfer of federal funding and initiative in face of the failed busing desegregation efforts in the 70s and 80s to the first “magnet” schools in the 90s that morphed into the “charter” school remedy in the 2000s, with both masquerading as Civil Rights desegregation. We also ending the state funding (token as it was) for the implementation and enforcement of the 1964 CRA in schools, with only remote “regional centers” funded for such purposes. Perhaps Anderson knows that schools are more segregated by race than at any time since 1977, according to Gary Marx at the Harvard Civil Rights Project. The failure of desegregation is part of the slippery slope towards privatizing the public good of quality education.
As a tired but still kicking White anti-racist activist, who now shuns the term “ally” as we really haven’t been so much or so well, I am grateful for this work for the bile it produced in me.
Anderson includes “flash points” we should, but don’t, know from history including the failures of both Reconstruction in the 19th C. and Civil Rights in the 20th C., neither at the hands of the Blacks, mind you. The Michael Brown case I’d paid long attention to, as I’d thought to consult a map, seeing that where Brown died in Ferguson was only about five miles from the middle school in East St. Louis so described in Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. After we read Kozol’s excerpt comparing a “best” E. St. Louis school for Blacks with an “average” NY school for Whites and I mention that geography about the “Ferguson Race Riots”, my students tend to fall silent in reflection. While Kozol’s observations were from the 80s, Anderson shares with us that the situation hadn’t changed, as Michael Brown’s school was on probation for 15 years for failure to meet minimal accreditation standards by the state. (Why would we tolerate a school not meeting standards for 15 years, and that is only as finally documented?)
Whites in the US, including many of our neighbors and particularly those with power - judges, politicians, business people, police, local, state, and federal government officials involved with housing and voting – all have practiced a sustained resistance pulling out all stops possible to hinder Black progress since the Civil War. That resistance often shot up in reaction to legal gains made, serving to beat back much potential for progress, and included actions by Presidents and our Supreme Court. Why? Anderson says it’s nothing more than Black success that triggers “white rage”. In one way, Anderson’s examples are overwhelming as they’re such a mash-up of all kinds of transgressions – from the shun of White neighbors and rocks thrown through windows, to denying various basic needs across Maslow’s hierarchy, to the actual killings of Blacks. Several times I wished she’d shared the clearest description of the way Blacks and Whites were concerned to live with each other post-slavery, which are the lists Gunnar Myrdal produced from surveys in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Vol. 1 in the 40s. Whites were most concerned, in rank order, with the personal and social rather than the economic and political: that Blacks didn’t date their daughters, didn’t live close to them, didn’t go to “their” stores or schools, then were less concerned if Blacks had access to employment, their own education, voting, or bank credit. The list of Black concerns of Whites was essentially the exact opposite. The responses by Whites showed our “dilemma” where we profess and codify values of human equality and liberty in the face of our “White rage” practices that suggest otherwise.
Many know a number of rationales are given for the Civil War, even if our textbooks speak only of our noble intentions to end slavery rather than various economic competitions (including with Europe mills). The end of slavery did not presume an acceptance by Whites that Blacks were here to stay, but Anderson reminds us that Lincoln was to convince Africans to move to Panama en masse. The actions of many Whites showed many had no intention of allowing Blacks to achieve or do much of anything, including owning land, holding a job, or getting some education for their children. After Dred Scott put the brakes on Blacks as voting citizens, it wasn’t until ‘65 that discrimination in voting on the basis of race was finally federally banned, and I’d add that discrimination in education on the basis of race wasn’t banned by the ’54 Brown decision but finally in ’64 by the Civil Rights Act. The rapid growth of White supremacy post-Civil War led to Black Codes that blocked Blacks from much of economic, political, and civic life that were codified into laws as Jim Crow. Anderson doesn’t mention, but surely she knows, that Jim Crow separatism came in part from the threat of poor White and recently-freed poor Black sharecroppers seeing their common interest and laws were needed to put an end to Blacks and Whites getting together to discuss possible common remedies to their plight.
Anderson includes a horrifying description of lynching and burning a pregnant Black woman, who dared to criticize the men who’d just lynched her husband. It reminded me I’d looked up the lynching chronology this last year (always up for fun!) and learned that the tradition lasted a full seven decades in the South until the 50s and ran about a thousand Blacks per decade hung up in trees at its height. Another map I saw showed a chilling if slight uptick of several lynchings a year during and after the 1960s Civil Rights movements, with the last race-related lynching (recorded as such) in 1968. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2.... Anderson understandably called Reconstruction just an “age of violence and terror” for Blacks.
Southern Whites tried more mightily than I’d realized to stop the Great Migration. She poignantly notes “migration is the story of America. It is foundational” with little right so coveted as “freedom of movement”, but Whites were eager to deny that to Blacks. She says that “not even the basic laws of capitalism was a match” for the “white rage” that didn’t want Blacks to escape the South. Again, I thought about Angela Davis in Women, Race, and Class that tells the story missing from our history books about the “race riots” in NY in the early 20th century, how it seemed that Whites and Blacks just naturally didn’t get along, yet it was deliberate actions of the early industrial capitalists who used trains to bring up Black men to be pitted against White workers as they garnered their own political strength and started to agitate in labor unions. We quickly realize that White workers standing on the picket line may want to rumble with the Black “scabs” who were marched in often under the protection of armed, local law to take over those jobs.
Anderson notes that some Southern towns simply refused to sell train tickets to Blacks once the fear of the economic collapse of the South would occur without the Black labor. Of course, Blacks weren’t welcome in northern cities with open arms, either, and neighbors fearful of Whites moving in had police on their side, with periodic killings of Blacks not uncommon in situations where they were simply pursuing human rights of housing, employment, and education. Some Blacks went along with this treatment. In the 50s, Moton, the director of the Tuskegee Institute, agreed with Jim Crow logic that “blacks would have to prove themselves worthy of rights.” Many Whites found Black dreams of progress uppity, and Anderson quotes a White Midwest woman in the 50s saying “Oh, they are so forward. If you give them your finger, they’ll take your hand.”
Nixon with his Southern Strategy obstructed implementation of Brown v. Board and the Voting Rights Act. Haldeman said Nixon knew “you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key was to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Nixon made four Supreme Court appointments that repeatedly voted for cases that undermined Civil Rights, and helped stop most efforts for equal opportunities for Blacks and well as criminal justice decisions that filled our prisons with Black men. In the context of long stymied attempts at basic integration in society, Anderson saw the rise of the Black Panthers as a movement of “self-defense.”
Reagan also undermined Civil Rights legislation and by the mid-80s had made cuts to specific school nutrition and early education programs disproportionately serving Blacks at a time when Blacks were living more as a percentage below the poverty line than ever before. Severe cuts of federal jobs especially in DHHS and EEOC fired many Blacks in the DC area, as well as in those state and local offices across the US. Reagan’s decision to put the EEOC “on ice” showed the disdain and resistance to the very idea of Equal Employment, and he picked Clarence Thomas to head that agency who insisted no race discrimination existed as a group against women or people of color. The Reagan cuts were equally evident and long-lasting in education as I recall walking through still largely empty halls of the Office of Civil Rights in DC in ’90. Anderson discusses the corruption of Reagan’s administration in funded the Contras through the CIA by the profits of a greatly ratcheted up cocaine trade. The drugs poured into the US mostly directly into poor and minority neighborhoods, largely destroying them, leading to “crack” as the Black drug as cocaine became the drug of choice for Whites and the upper-class. Reagan equated “crack” with urban Blacks explicitly, and we all know our criminology (not mentioned by Anderson) that has long documented the race-based differences in punishments between crack and cocaine, where Whites with the latter get substantially lighter penalties including conviction rates and prison sentences. She also didn’t mention how Nancy Reagan helped her husband with the racist “war on drugs” with her “Just Say No” campaign (that I read led physicians to give less pain medication to patients in the hospital for over a decade, equating drugs with morality, as the Reagans did.) Anderson notes that the race bias of our drug courts leaves us many Black felons stripped for life of many civil rights and how drugs have greased the school-prison pipeline for Blacks.
We fast forward to how Obama’s win was believed a “stolen election” to those with “white rage” and how a Black man as potential president exploded the irrational fear of “voter fraud” in ’08 that has not abated. Conservative Whites still remember ACORN as a fake organization bent on fraud at the ballot box, and a series of Draconian laws were passed in a number of states to “protect the ballot box”. Anderson also shares Jelini Cobb’s “paradox of progress” and the despair that we achieved Obama yet Walking/Driving While Black in the US can still be fatal, as so many examples have shown. She notes that a month after Dylann Roof killed many Black worshippers at a church believing he had an obligation to start a Race War, Trump had his first big rally telling Whites “don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.” I agree that Obama was the “ultimate affront” to many Whites, similarly argued by Ta-Nehisi Coates that Trump was a reaction to Obama – more “white rage”.
I had my own moment of rage remembering how (even rightly) these “ballot box” issues including all those of access to voting by the poor and POC were the diversions that has kept us from a proper focus on Gerrymandering and redistricting that mostly helped Republicans by undermined the Voting Rights Act and hamstrung the potential that Black communities had to be an effective bloc in voting. (I highly recommend Burke's The Appearance of Equality: Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court as well as the wonderfully horrifying more recent treatment, Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy.)
Anderson traces a history where our political wing has undermined our legislative one by rendering impotent the 13th to 15th Amendments that were to help Blacks and lead to race integration, but I want to return to the thread of education throughout this work. I was drawn to look up and confirm for myself that many Black schools were simply shut down after ’54 Brown v. Board. Schools and teachers were lost and one “irony” of school desegregation was that Blacks sometimes had to go to inferior White schools. I appreciated learning that the famous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling included stunning wording that if “colored” people believed any of their separation from Whites unequal or inferior, that was separation they’d brought on themselves! Another 1899 Cummings v. Richmond decision confirmed the legality of shutting down Black schools if that was needed to keep White schools open. The idea that “education spoiled the slave” resulted in one Southern school in the 50s that had 350 Black students sharing 3 teachers. Neither Reconstruction nor Civil Rights changed the mindset of many Whites that Blacks shouldn’t be educated. Blacks were willing to risk moving to the North with hopes for schooling opportunities but Northern schools were regularly inhospitable to Blacks. The Black Codes of decades earlier that forbid literacy and punished attempts to read and write continued with no public schools open to Blacks in the south. However, Blacks pushed hard for education for their children as literacy was the “contradiction of oppression,” even if poor Whites in the late 50s wouldn’t attend new Southern schools build for “nigger programs”.
I’d forgotten the central role in Civil Rights struggles over equal educational opportunity held by the Prince Edwards County schools outside of Baltimore. In the early 50s, NAACP documented and presented in court that all Black schools there had only outdoor plumbing while all White schools had indoor. The NAACP had a noble fight for Brown but we can’t forget the predictable reaction by White society Anderson documents including Emmett Till, Central High in Little Rock, and Ruby Bridges. Georgia legislators responded by passing a resolution demanding the Federal government ban the 13th to 15th Amendments. In Prince Edward County a concerned White parent said he’d “rather his children be baked in an oven” than attend an integrated school, and “in five states NAACP members were banned from public employment.” Once I worked in Civil Rights in the 90s, Prince Edwards County schools were again in focus, as they’d piloted an early Big Data system that spit out numbers that showed exactly which White teachers flunked Black students at a higher rate than White students with a statistically significant difference. (The unions knocked on the door of the superintendent to make sure such data wasn’t shared or used with the teachers in question – a clear case of being careful what you wish to know in terms of data!)
As Sputnik and Eisenhower pushed states to equalize quality education among all students we couched the need for a highly and consistently educated populace as national “defense” (so named the act) but Blacks ended up being excluded so those efforts didn’t improve schooling for them or help open up higher education pipelines to Blacks. Achievement by Blacks at all levels of college including graduate school and STEM degrees remain low as we refuse to fully implement Brown and accept largely unequal educational opportunities and outcomes. I know of “alternative schools” in Southern cities that have 20% Black populations but house 80% of those Black students. (One principal called such schools “pre-prisons”.)
I was instructed to learn the history of Civil Rights laws when I worked in the field, and remember the importance of the 1973 San Antonio v. Rodriguez decision Anderson reviews. San Antonio argued that under the state funding model they couldn’t provide equal educational opportunities to their 96% population of Black and Hispanic students, even though the higher funding for the White, wealthy adjacent community schools was adequate. The US district court ruled in favor, noting that “education is a fundamental right”, but the Supremes overturned that noting to the contrary (and rightly, technically) that there exists “no fundamental right to education in the Constitution” (that right has only been deduced, sometimes with the stretch, from the “defense” need). Millikin v. Bradley, the next year, assured Whites across the US, not just in Chicago, that their children would not have to to go school with Blacks. Bakke in ’78 helped to get many Whites in a snit about “reverse discrimination” (that I noticed was often more of an outrage than the discrimination against POC to begin with) that added more “kindling” to our “white rage”. Reagan reversed race gains back several decades with his “scorched earth” policy against social programs including cuts in student aid that specifically hurt low socio-economic students, disproportionately of color, so little surprise that “Black enrollment in college went from 34 to 26 percent” during the Reagan years.
As a sociologist of education who is teased that my natural positive outlook is necessary to study the political economy of the institution, I was heartened by Anderson returns to a focus on the criminal-level inequality built into our system whereby “zip codes” determine decent schools and how basing school funding schemes on local property values brutally hurt and deny Blacks as well as all lower socio-economic citizens Equal Educational Opportunity as required by law. Our education funding locks in class-based disparities with testing scores that vary with the wealth of our communities. (As Alfie Kohn noted, standardized tests do have great predictive value – of the size of the homes around the schools!)
I wished she’d spent more time with the 1964 Civil Rights Act that should have served as one of her “flashpoints” in its own right with a sordid and under-reported story of the failure of race and Civil Rights in public education. We allowed the transfer of federal funding and initiative in face of the failed busing desegregation efforts in the 70s and 80s to the first “magnet” schools in the 90s that morphed into the “charter” school remedy in the 2000s, with both masquerading as Civil Rights desegregation. We also ending the state funding (token as it was) for the implementation and enforcement of the 1964 CRA in schools, with only remote “regional centers” funded for such purposes. Perhaps Anderson knows that schools are more segregated by race than at any time since 1977, according to Gary Marx at the Harvard Civil Rights Project. The failure of desegregation is part of the slippery slope towards privatizing the public good of quality education.
As a tired but still kicking White anti-racist activist, who now shuns the term “ally” as we really haven’t been so much or so well, I am grateful for this work for the bile it produced in me.
April 28, 2017
A high 4 stars! For some reason, I suspect that many may resist reading this book because of the title “White Rage” -- it has a sensationalistic connotation that may be a bit of a turn off. But if you’re one of those people, don’t be deterred. The content of White Rage is the opposite of sensationalistic. In a relatively short and powerful narrative, Carol Anderson carefully and methodically documents the pervasiveness of racism in the US following the end of slavery. She focuses primarily on voting rights, education, employment opportunities, policing and the justice system. She reviews laws, legal decisions, policies and political statements since the late 19th century up to 2015, and she convincingly argues that there has been a concerted effort to curtail the possibility of true equality. This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the pervasiveness of racism and inequality, and the state of current American politics . Anderson ends her book with a message of hope – or at least a positive call to action. Her message is simple. The end of slavery was an opportunity to move toward equality, and for all of the US to benefit tremendously from the potential economic and intellectual contributions of African Americans. The opportunity has been consistently and systematically thwarted, but it still remains. As I say, the title doesn’t necessarily do this book any favours. It belies its intellectual depth and its forward looking message. An important read. Highly recommended.
I listened to this one as an audio. The narration was excellent, and really brought to life the importance of Anderson’s text.
I listened to this one as an audio. The narration was excellent, and really brought to life the importance of Anderson’s text.
July 13, 2018
This book is incredibly powerful. And incredibly depressing, and frustrating.
When I took US History in school, the evils of Reconstruction and Jim Crow were mentioned, but they were also a bit glossed over, partly because the next chapter tended to be “and then we had the Civil Rights movement and everything changed for the better, the end.”
This book covers the entire 150 years since slavery was ended, outlining in detail how hard it’s been for black Americans to be treated as full US citizens, merely enjoying the rights everyone in this country is supposedly guaranteed by our Constitution.
This was a tough book to read, and is a tough book to review. The hatred and scorn held by a significant subset of whites for black Americans just rolls off the pages, and it’s ugly and painful to confront. Worse is how the Supreme Court over much of that time has upheld that the Constitution somehow okays the denial of basic rights to millions of Americans.
Era by era since the end of the Civil War, the author shows how Reconstruction allowed blacks to be essentially put back into slavery in all but name; how whites prevented blacks from leaving the south for paying jobs and better equality in the north; how whites everywhere in the USA, including places you might not guess (Detroit!) ganged up violently to keep blacks from buying houses in ‘good’ (white) neighborhoods; how hard whites fought to prevent black children from benefitting from public education (“I will make sure no child in this state gets a public education before I allow black children to attend our schools,” declares one man); how the “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” mentality has encouraged people to view all black males as criminals; how upset many whites have been by Obama’s presidency and their determination to prove him somehow illegitimate; and how the very recent efforts to target “voter fraud” (a non-existent problem) disenfranchise blacks once again. It’s appalling.
I’ve found myself trying to imagine what it’s like to hate an entire group of people just for existing, and really struggling with it. Hating individuals for their beliefs or behavior -- I can manage that. But randomly hating and resenting black people because their ancestors didn’t walk out of Africa 70,000 years ago? Because their ancestors were unfortunate enough to be trapped and sold into slavery so whites could make money growing cotton and sugar cane without having to do hard work themselves? And going to such huge and ugly efforts to “keep those people in their place”? Honestly, I hope I never understand feeling like that.
I think this book would be eye-opening for anyone who really thinks that we live in a post-racial/racist society in America (harder to maintain that with the Trump movement making people feel free to express their racism, but a lot of white people still seem to find it comforting to believe this). With so much deliberate and legal (!) undermining of opportunities and basic rights for black Americans, it’s hard to defend the assertion that there is a “level playing field” and that blacks as a group “should have” caught up to white folks by now.
When I took US History in school, the evils of Reconstruction and Jim Crow were mentioned, but they were also a bit glossed over, partly because the next chapter tended to be “and then we had the Civil Rights movement and everything changed for the better, the end.”
This book covers the entire 150 years since slavery was ended, outlining in detail how hard it’s been for black Americans to be treated as full US citizens, merely enjoying the rights everyone in this country is supposedly guaranteed by our Constitution.
This was a tough book to read, and is a tough book to review. The hatred and scorn held by a significant subset of whites for black Americans just rolls off the pages, and it’s ugly and painful to confront. Worse is how the Supreme Court over much of that time has upheld that the Constitution somehow okays the denial of basic rights to millions of Americans.
Era by era since the end of the Civil War, the author shows how Reconstruction allowed blacks to be essentially put back into slavery in all but name; how whites prevented blacks from leaving the south for paying jobs and better equality in the north; how whites everywhere in the USA, including places you might not guess (Detroit!) ganged up violently to keep blacks from buying houses in ‘good’ (white) neighborhoods; how hard whites fought to prevent black children from benefitting from public education (“I will make sure no child in this state gets a public education before I allow black children to attend our schools,” declares one man); how the “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” mentality has encouraged people to view all black males as criminals; how upset many whites have been by Obama’s presidency and their determination to prove him somehow illegitimate; and how the very recent efforts to target “voter fraud” (a non-existent problem) disenfranchise blacks once again. It’s appalling.
I’ve found myself trying to imagine what it’s like to hate an entire group of people just for existing, and really struggling with it. Hating individuals for their beliefs or behavior -- I can manage that. But randomly hating and resenting black people because their ancestors didn’t walk out of Africa 70,000 years ago? Because their ancestors were unfortunate enough to be trapped and sold into slavery so whites could make money growing cotton and sugar cane without having to do hard work themselves? And going to such huge and ugly efforts to “keep those people in their place”? Honestly, I hope I never understand feeling like that.
I think this book would be eye-opening for anyone who really thinks that we live in a post-racial/racist society in America (harder to maintain that with the Trump movement making people feel free to express their racism, but a lot of white people still seem to find it comforting to believe this). With so much deliberate and legal (!) undermining of opportunities and basic rights for black Americans, it’s hard to defend the assertion that there is a “level playing field” and that blacks as a group “should have” caught up to white folks by now.
March 18, 2018
As I pondered this book, Nina Simone kept popping into my head.
White Rage is ostensibly a book about anger. An anger that everybody knows about and often ignores. Outrage. Indignity. Disrespect. Resentment. Disgust. Injustice. Viciousness. Cruelty. Subjugation. I spend a considerable amount of time in my life with simmering resentment, frustration, irritation; I was semi-numb to the ire this book. I think it's because I've come to the conclusion that bigotry, injustice, unfairness, discrimination are tools in a bigger game which is about the maintenance of privilege and wealth. And maybe instead of calling it rage, we should call it desperation. And the problem is that as a people/culture, we live in a world that has gotten used to forgetting.
Anderson has compiled a historical retrospective that focuses on the backlash that accompanies any advances in civil rights and equality in the United States. Her book specifically examines the African American experience Having come off of just reading a much more rigorous book of history of 20th century civil rights struggles of African Americans (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration), Anderson's book is a series of 5 essays about specific periods of time rather than a historical analysis. Almost Cliff Notes…albeit very intense and very well focused Cliff Notes.
I found her writings for the earlier periods of history (reconstruction, Jim Crow South, pre and post-Brown vs Board of Education) more enlightening than the later (post Voting Rights Act and rise of Obama) chapters which for me felt under-cooked, unfinished. Perhaps because I lived through that time frame and was/am politically engaged, it felt like it barely touched the surface. And so it goes.
I guess what enrages me more than the discrimination, injustice, unfairness of it all is that again this focuses on the African American experience when I know today that similar assaults and tactics legislatively are being waged against immigrants, Muslims, women, the disabled, the poor, LGBT, guns, reproductive rights, clean energy, climate change, the environment, agriculture, trade wars, education, healthcare etc. It's as if the people in power are waging a war on so many fronts and asking folks to choose a side. What issue do you want to fall on your sword for? This has been going on forever. Divide and conquer. And the question is why do we have to choose? It's a false choice. It's all bad and needs reform. All of it. And no I'm not saying they are all equally important or relevant. Of course they aren't. But we shouldn't have to choose. Everybody knows about the issues in this book. Bah! What I've learned is that all of these divisive choices are tools of oppression. Tools used to divert eyes away from what is really happening. Keep us divided. Maintain status quo. A status quo of injustice, inequality, unfairness, bigotry, and most importantly rigged systemic structures and policies firmly in place. We can replace "Mississippi" with Stonewall, or Newtown, or San Bernardino, or ICE raids or Keystone pipeline, or Paris, or Palestinians, or the Sudan, or North Carolina, or Flint, or… As Nina Simone would say, "Everybody knows about [sic] G*ddam!"
About the book: it was well written, well researched, well organized and brilliant…but it's only part of the picture. And yes it succeeded in making me furious.
4+ Stars
Note: My review of this book is not meant to imply that Anderson should have covered anything more or that it should have been done differently. The book is excellent. I am outraged, but I recognize that my outrage these days goes well beyond the part of my self-identity as an African American woman (and frankly my outrage at the ugly history of the US with regard to African Americans alone is enough for a lifetime). There is so much more wrong that needs fixing "in addition to", not "instead of" or "ahead of" my African American existence.
Read on my kindle.
Addendum: Watch and Listen as Nina Simone sing about civil rights . Tell me if she doesn't capture all of the frustration/struggles here yesterday and today about everything. Mississippi G*ddam
"Alabama's gotten me so upsetOr perhaps James Baldwin articulated the condition that Simone sang about
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi G*ddam"
“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”
White Rage is ostensibly a book about anger. An anger that everybody knows about and often ignores. Outrage. Indignity. Disrespect. Resentment. Disgust. Injustice. Viciousness. Cruelty. Subjugation. I spend a considerable amount of time in my life with simmering resentment, frustration, irritation; I was semi-numb to the ire this book. I think it's because I've come to the conclusion that bigotry, injustice, unfairness, discrimination are tools in a bigger game which is about the maintenance of privilege and wealth. And maybe instead of calling it rage, we should call it desperation. And the problem is that as a people/culture, we live in a world that has gotten used to forgetting.
Anderson has compiled a historical retrospective that focuses on the backlash that accompanies any advances in civil rights and equality in the United States. Her book specifically examines the African American experience Having come off of just reading a much more rigorous book of history of 20th century civil rights struggles of African Americans (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration), Anderson's book is a series of 5 essays about specific periods of time rather than a historical analysis. Almost Cliff Notes…albeit very intense and very well focused Cliff Notes.
I found her writings for the earlier periods of history (reconstruction, Jim Crow South, pre and post-Brown vs Board of Education) more enlightening than the later (post Voting Rights Act and rise of Obama) chapters which for me felt under-cooked, unfinished. Perhaps because I lived through that time frame and was/am politically engaged, it felt like it barely touched the surface. And so it goes.
I guess what enrages me more than the discrimination, injustice, unfairness of it all is that again this focuses on the African American experience when I know today that similar assaults and tactics legislatively are being waged against immigrants, Muslims, women, the disabled, the poor, LGBT, guns, reproductive rights, clean energy, climate change, the environment, agriculture, trade wars, education, healthcare etc. It's as if the people in power are waging a war on so many fronts and asking folks to choose a side. What issue do you want to fall on your sword for? This has been going on forever. Divide and conquer. And the question is why do we have to choose? It's a false choice. It's all bad and needs reform. All of it. And no I'm not saying they are all equally important or relevant. Of course they aren't. But we shouldn't have to choose. Everybody knows about the issues in this book. Bah! What I've learned is that all of these divisive choices are tools of oppression. Tools used to divert eyes away from what is really happening. Keep us divided. Maintain status quo. A status quo of injustice, inequality, unfairness, bigotry, and most importantly rigged systemic structures and policies firmly in place. We can replace "Mississippi" with Stonewall, or Newtown, or San Bernardino, or ICE raids or Keystone pipeline, or Paris, or Palestinians, or the Sudan, or North Carolina, or Flint, or… As Nina Simone would say, "Everybody knows about [sic] G*ddam!"
About the book: it was well written, well researched, well organized and brilliant…but it's only part of the picture. And yes it succeeded in making me furious.
4+ Stars
Note: My review of this book is not meant to imply that Anderson should have covered anything more or that it should have been done differently. The book is excellent. I am outraged, but I recognize that my outrage these days goes well beyond the part of my self-identity as an African American woman (and frankly my outrage at the ugly history of the US with regard to African Americans alone is enough for a lifetime). There is so much more wrong that needs fixing "in addition to", not "instead of" or "ahead of" my African American existence.
Read on my kindle.
Addendum: Watch and Listen as Nina Simone sing about civil rights . Tell me if she doesn't capture all of the frustration/struggles here yesterday and today about everything. Mississippi G*ddam
June 19, 2020
A Complex Read
It was more than interesting to finish up this book right after reading White Fragility. While that book focuses on encouraging White people to recognize and dismantle their own biases, White Rage delves heavily into how overt racism has turned into political strategies and policies utilized to keep Black people enslaved to an unfair system.
I’m not sure that Anderson covered much information that I wasn’t already aware of but there were some sections that gave me new insight to how the American government functions. For example, I was aware of the tactics and tools used during the Great Migration to keep Blacks in the South but I was not aware of how crack cocaine was introduced to the Black community. It never ceases to amaze me how much of American history is white washed to appease the masses. Every time I was taught about the Iran-Contra Affair the teachers and texts always focused on the arms deals but never discussed how the “war on drugs” was a war that only existed because of the American government.
Anderson’s main purpose of this book was to illustrate that it’s not just the existence of Black people that angers some White people. It is our ambition, our advancement that scares them. It’s the fear and anger of Black people taking over. It is White Fragility in the form of losing that oppressive power. I think if people want to learn more about the historical context of the suppression of Black people then this is a good place to start. The text is dense and may take some time to work though but it’s definitely worth a read.
It was more than interesting to finish up this book right after reading White Fragility. While that book focuses on encouraging White people to recognize and dismantle their own biases, White Rage delves heavily into how overt racism has turned into political strategies and policies utilized to keep Black people enslaved to an unfair system.
I’m not sure that Anderson covered much information that I wasn’t already aware of but there were some sections that gave me new insight to how the American government functions. For example, I was aware of the tactics and tools used during the Great Migration to keep Blacks in the South but I was not aware of how crack cocaine was introduced to the Black community. It never ceases to amaze me how much of American history is white washed to appease the masses. Every time I was taught about the Iran-Contra Affair the teachers and texts always focused on the arms deals but never discussed how the “war on drugs” was a war that only existed because of the American government.
Anderson’s main purpose of this book was to illustrate that it’s not just the existence of Black people that angers some White people. It is our ambition, our advancement that scares them. It’s the fear and anger of Black people taking over. It is White Fragility in the form of losing that oppressive power. I think if people want to learn more about the historical context of the suppression of Black people then this is a good place to start. The text is dense and may take some time to work though but it’s definitely worth a read.
July 10, 2020
A book that puts the racial divide in a new and powerful perspective. Reconstruction and its failure, the means and ways it failed, along with the whys and how it became a battleground for horrific violence. Hard to read but this part is mostly a summary, albeit a well told one.
When it came to voter supression, I received quite a surprise. I had heard of gerrymandering, but not all the other ways used to make black votes not count. Plus, it's still going on today. In many places, in many ways. The Obama Presidency, all the threats his family received, unprecedented in an election, appalling and heartbreaking. Things done and undone.
This is a relatively short book in page numbers, but well researched and presented. A worthy book, especially now, with all the racial unrest in our country. Will we ever learn? Are we even capable of changing? I certainly hope so.
When it came to voter supression, I received quite a surprise. I had heard of gerrymandering, but not all the other ways used to make black votes not count. Plus, it's still going on today. In many places, in many ways. The Obama Presidency, all the threats his family received, unprecedented in an election, appalling and heartbreaking. Things done and undone.
This is a relatively short book in page numbers, but well researched and presented. A worthy book, especially now, with all the racial unrest in our country. Will we ever learn? Are we even capable of changing? I certainly hope so.
April 4, 2017
This is a completely enraging book. Anderson basically fits her material into five chapters, beginning with the aftermath of the Civil War through President Obama’s presidency. She is pointing out the ways that America has been granting rights to all its citizens with one hand while taking away the rights of some with the other. She has it all copiously documented, which is useful because she tells us some frankly unbelievable things: did you know 1) in the early part of the 20th Century black folk were arrested and prevented from leaving the South when they faced discrimination in work and housing because they constituted the “workforce”; and 2) in the 1980s two L.A. gangs, the Blood and the Crips, were sold drugs and weaponry by anti-Sandinista forces funded by our own C.I.A., beginning the massive drug war the country has been struggling with since.
These are just two examples in a book entirely filled with examples of the way rights for blacks have been curtailed in the United States, since its founding. And it continues to this day, with new abridgments to rights granted under the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby vs. Holder that states with the longest histories of voting discrimination no longer need to have the federal government approve voting changes made prior to elections. Since then, seventeen states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time for the 2016 presidential elections, including strict requirements for government-issued I.D.s, cutbacks on early voting, and new difficulties in registering to vote or being removed from the voting rolls without notification.
Besides all that, the disparity in funding for public schools means that districts with primarily black populations have less, sometimes far less, funding than schools in districts with primarily white populations, all perfectly "legal" when school districts are funded by taxes. Discriminate on lower education, higher education, wages, and housing and yes, black districts will have fewer taxes, and the cycle is perpetuated. I am just understanding the pervasiveness of “racism with plausible deniability.” Anderson’s persistent and careful documentation of the continual challenges the states put in the way of implementing the Supreme Court decision Brown vs the Board of Education show us the way laws can be undermined by new oral argument, written decisions, and execution.
When growing up I was not always aware of the sometimes subtle ways—and even sometimes big, national, loud judicial and congressional decisions—that constrained African Americans, preventing them from realizing their full potential, but I knew enough to be shocked when President Obama was elected. Even without the consciousness I should have had, I knew enough about America’s racism to find it extremely unlikely that people would put aside their prejudices long enough to elect a bi-racial man, even if he did graduate from Harvard Law School. I am happy to be proved wrong on those two elections, but I am not so happy as I continue to learn the ways one’s rights can be infringed regardless of how we vote and the ways the attacks on rights just never ends.
This is an important, even necessary book. For those without the background in the ways black lives have struggled, it is eye-opening. For those who already know the background, it has lots of references altogether in one place, and an extensive bibliography. This is another one of those recent books that seems like it should have been written fifty years ago. It probably was, with a different title. This has been going on an awfully long time, at least 350 years, though a book written earlier wouldn’t have had all the examples of how abrogation of the rights of African Americans is happening right now. This may go on until the end of time, so there is still a undeniable need for you to learn about it and work to stop it.
These are just two examples in a book entirely filled with examples of the way rights for blacks have been curtailed in the United States, since its founding. And it continues to this day, with new abridgments to rights granted under the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby vs. Holder that states with the longest histories of voting discrimination no longer need to have the federal government approve voting changes made prior to elections. Since then, seventeen states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time for the 2016 presidential elections, including strict requirements for government-issued I.D.s, cutbacks on early voting, and new difficulties in registering to vote or being removed from the voting rolls without notification.
Besides all that, the disparity in funding for public schools means that districts with primarily black populations have less, sometimes far less, funding than schools in districts with primarily white populations, all perfectly "legal" when school districts are funded by taxes. Discriminate on lower education, higher education, wages, and housing and yes, black districts will have fewer taxes, and the cycle is perpetuated. I am just understanding the pervasiveness of “racism with plausible deniability.” Anderson’s persistent and careful documentation of the continual challenges the states put in the way of implementing the Supreme Court decision Brown vs the Board of Education show us the way laws can be undermined by new oral argument, written decisions, and execution.
When growing up I was not always aware of the sometimes subtle ways—and even sometimes big, national, loud judicial and congressional decisions—that constrained African Americans, preventing them from realizing their full potential, but I knew enough to be shocked when President Obama was elected. Even without the consciousness I should have had, I knew enough about America’s racism to find it extremely unlikely that people would put aside their prejudices long enough to elect a bi-racial man, even if he did graduate from Harvard Law School. I am happy to be proved wrong on those two elections, but I am not so happy as I continue to learn the ways one’s rights can be infringed regardless of how we vote and the ways the attacks on rights just never ends.
This is an important, even necessary book. For those without the background in the ways black lives have struggled, it is eye-opening. For those who already know the background, it has lots of references altogether in one place, and an extensive bibliography. This is another one of those recent books that seems like it should have been written fifty years ago. It probably was, with a different title. This has been going on an awfully long time, at least 350 years, though a book written earlier wouldn’t have had all the examples of how abrogation of the rights of African Americans is happening right now. This may go on until the end of time, so there is still a undeniable need for you to learn about it and work to stop it.
January 10, 2021
“This is … a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”
Quoted in the 1800s by Andrew Johnson and still relevant now.
My energy has depleted. My general disposition of being a pessimist person increases tenfold when I’m listening to or reading anti-racist literature.
It’s the same battle that has been fought and is still being fought. The American government has gotten real creative with their racism. But then that’s giving them too much credit? It would mean they possess some semblance of intellect.
Aren’t they exhausted of having to put so much effort and money into hindering Black progress?
Anyway, this book brings a much needed historical narrative and catalogs why ‘America’ is the way that it is, highlighting how racism has seeped and cemented into their ’courts, legislators and government bureaucracies’ and their legacy. How the sole purpose is to still chain African Americans to a slave system.
This is why it baffles me when we have leaders and ‘patriots’ cry that they want to make America great again. What’re they basing their fragile pride on?
The whole narrative is tragic and unjust and still manages to shock you as to how blatant and hidden their agenda was to uphold a system that would not result in equality. With no accountability in sight.
It’s a book that needs to be taught everywhere.
Quoted in the 1800s by Andrew Johnson and still relevant now.
My energy has depleted. My general disposition of being a pessimist person increases tenfold when I’m listening to or reading anti-racist literature.
It’s the same battle that has been fought and is still being fought. The American government has gotten real creative with their racism. But then that’s giving them too much credit? It would mean they possess some semblance of intellect.
Aren’t they exhausted of having to put so much effort and money into hindering Black progress?
Anyway, this book brings a much needed historical narrative and catalogs why ‘America’ is the way that it is, highlighting how racism has seeped and cemented into their ’courts, legislators and government bureaucracies’ and their legacy. How the sole purpose is to still chain African Americans to a slave system.
This is why it baffles me when we have leaders and ‘patriots’ cry that they want to make America great again. What’re they basing their fragile pride on?
The whole narrative is tragic and unjust and still manages to shock you as to how blatant and hidden their agenda was to uphold a system that would not result in equality. With no accountability in sight.
It’s a book that needs to be taught everywhere.
June 25, 2017
Holy cow is this an important book that I think everyone should read.
First of all, the amount of research Anderson has done, even in a relatively short book, is staggering. Almost half the pages in my Kindle version were taken up by endnotes—there are multiple sources cited on every page. I’ve read books by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mychal Denzel Smith that are more subjective, narrative-style reflections on life as a black person in America, and they taught me a lot—in fact, if I compiled a list of books I’d most like fellow white people to read, they’d be in the top five. But Anderson’s project here is more academic, and thus convincing in a different way. She builds her case almost entirely through historical data, which is hard to argue with even in this Orwellian age of “alternate facts.”
What was most useful about White Rage to me is how it traces the systematic oppression of black people throughout our American history. It exposes the patterns that have repeated over and over since before our country was a country. The day-to-day news stories don’t give us the big picture; they can’t contextualize the forces behind the headlines. Without context, a police officer murdering an unarmed black man (or child) can seem like an isolated incident, when it is anything but. This book helped me see the collective resentment many white people have towards black people, and how it has been passed down like a legacy to each new generation. I have seen evidence of this resentment in my life, but as it’s often veiled in neutral-sounding language, I didn’t know what to call it and couldn’t necessarily articulate why it made me feel squicky when I encountered it.
A recurring thought I had as I read: “How did I not know about this?!” Anderson repeatedly drives the point home that my history education was totally inadequate. It seems that American history classes always take a chronological tack, so that students end up inundated with stories of the American Revolution while anything past World War II gets shoved to the wayside. Thus it is possible for a well-meaning suburban white girl like myself to grow up thinking that sure, slavery was bad, but it’s over now and everyone gets along, right? “I don’t even see skin color!”
Because yeah, those white men in power we’ve collectively put on a pedestal as super-principled, good-hearted allies to the people our country enslaved for generations? They weren’t as saintly as I thought they were. Abraham Lincoln was not out banging the drum for integrating former slaves into society and granting them full rights of citizenship and a voice in government.
And the stuff about Reagan? I still don’t know what to say about it or where to start. I knew Reagan was a bad president whose heartless policies hurt a lot of people, but OH MY GOSH the depth of depravity and the utter brazenness of the Contra situation…I’m staggered. It weighs on me that I had never bothered to read and learn about this part of our relatively recent history. How discouraging to realize the power and reach a bad president has, and how the effects of his time in office stretch on long past his tenure. The Supreme Court justices appointed by Reagan and the subsequent decisions outlined in the book…the impact on people’s lives is unconscionable. It makes me tremble for our future, now that we have an even looser cannon in the White House and an attorney general who wants to bring back Reagan’s hypocritical, self-created War on Drugs.
Speaking of elected leaders, my mind was totally boggled by the creativity of white men in power to find ways to keep black people down. When one method was thwarted, they’d come up with another, and in recent years have learned to disguise their tactics with innocuous language. No more slavery? Fine, we’ll make sure black citizens can’t own property or vote. Blacks leaving the South in droves for better-paying jobs up North? Fine, we’ll stop the trains or jail them for vagrancy. Unprecedented numbers of minority and low-income voters showing up to the polls to elect Barack Obama? No problem, we’ll require government-issued ID to vote and then make sure the offices issuing those IDs are only open one day a month (and we’ll call it “preventing voter fraud” to hide our racist objective). Dear Lord. Imagine if all that energy were spent on creating good policy that helps citizens!
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
First of all, the amount of research Anderson has done, even in a relatively short book, is staggering. Almost half the pages in my Kindle version were taken up by endnotes—there are multiple sources cited on every page. I’ve read books by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mychal Denzel Smith that are more subjective, narrative-style reflections on life as a black person in America, and they taught me a lot—in fact, if I compiled a list of books I’d most like fellow white people to read, they’d be in the top five. But Anderson’s project here is more academic, and thus convincing in a different way. She builds her case almost entirely through historical data, which is hard to argue with even in this Orwellian age of “alternate facts.”
What was most useful about White Rage to me is how it traces the systematic oppression of black people throughout our American history. It exposes the patterns that have repeated over and over since before our country was a country. The day-to-day news stories don’t give us the big picture; they can’t contextualize the forces behind the headlines. Without context, a police officer murdering an unarmed black man (or child) can seem like an isolated incident, when it is anything but. This book helped me see the collective resentment many white people have towards black people, and how it has been passed down like a legacy to each new generation. I have seen evidence of this resentment in my life, but as it’s often veiled in neutral-sounding language, I didn’t know what to call it and couldn’t necessarily articulate why it made me feel squicky when I encountered it.
A recurring thought I had as I read: “How did I not know about this?!” Anderson repeatedly drives the point home that my history education was totally inadequate. It seems that American history classes always take a chronological tack, so that students end up inundated with stories of the American Revolution while anything past World War II gets shoved to the wayside. Thus it is possible for a well-meaning suburban white girl like myself to grow up thinking that sure, slavery was bad, but it’s over now and everyone gets along, right? “I don’t even see skin color!”
Because yeah, those white men in power we’ve collectively put on a pedestal as super-principled, good-hearted allies to the people our country enslaved for generations? They weren’t as saintly as I thought they were. Abraham Lincoln was not out banging the drum for integrating former slaves into society and granting them full rights of citizenship and a voice in government.
And the stuff about Reagan? I still don’t know what to say about it or where to start. I knew Reagan was a bad president whose heartless policies hurt a lot of people, but OH MY GOSH the depth of depravity and the utter brazenness of the Contra situation…I’m staggered. It weighs on me that I had never bothered to read and learn about this part of our relatively recent history. How discouraging to realize the power and reach a bad president has, and how the effects of his time in office stretch on long past his tenure. The Supreme Court justices appointed by Reagan and the subsequent decisions outlined in the book…the impact on people’s lives is unconscionable. It makes me tremble for our future, now that we have an even looser cannon in the White House and an attorney general who wants to bring back Reagan’s hypocritical, self-created War on Drugs.
Speaking of elected leaders, my mind was totally boggled by the creativity of white men in power to find ways to keep black people down. When one method was thwarted, they’d come up with another, and in recent years have learned to disguise their tactics with innocuous language. No more slavery? Fine, we’ll make sure black citizens can’t own property or vote. Blacks leaving the South in droves for better-paying jobs up North? Fine, we’ll stop the trains or jail them for vagrancy. Unprecedented numbers of minority and low-income voters showing up to the polls to elect Barack Obama? No problem, we’ll require government-issued ID to vote and then make sure the offices issuing those IDs are only open one day a month (and we’ll call it “preventing voter fraud” to hide our racist objective). Dear Lord. Imagine if all that energy were spent on creating good policy that helps citizens!
More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com
Read
August 2, 2020A very important and informative book that I think is needed to be read by everyone. I didn’t rate it because I feel odd about rating non fiction books that examine historical events. I think people can learn a lot from this book. I certainly did!
August 3, 2022
This book is a virtual catalog of repeated historical instances of backlash that occurred after there has been an advance in racial equality. Author Carol Anderson labels this predictable backlash as "white rage." Use of this term is intended to hold a mirror up to what political commentators have referred to as "black rage" when violence breaks out in response to racial incidents. Anderson shows that white rage causes violence in its own way except that it's done under the orderly facade of respectability and legality.
White backlash following black progress is a social and political pattern that is as old as the nation itself. Over time this has manifest itself as the use of state power to engineer preferential treatment for whites and deliberately impose cumulative disadvantage on blacks. Its persistence has survived into the current era of professed colorblindness.
The following is my very rough outline of historical examples that demonstrate the swings from progress to backlash in American civil rights.
Advance:
After the Civil War, from 1865 to 1869, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are passed which ends slavery, provides equal protection under the law, and provides the right to vote (limited to men).
Backlash:
Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, ends Reconstruction—the South returns to white supremacy; Ku Klux Klan formed; over 3,446 extralegal lynchings of African Americans between 1882 to 1968; repeated denial of relief by Supreme Court by ratifying the legal apartheid know as Jim Crow (e.g. Plessy v.Ferguson decision of 1896 legalized separate but equal).
Advance:
Job opportunities in the north beginning during WWI lure many African Americans to move to northern cities.
Backlash:
African Americans are confined to ghettos and subjected to occasional violence. Southern states try to stem loss of farm labor with laws criminalizing enticement of people to move north.
Advance:
1954 Brown v. Board of Education ends practice of separate public schools for blacks.
Backlash:
States and school districts are slow to change and in some places close public schools and pay for private schools for white students. Then racial patterns of residential housing combined with strategically drawn school district lines combine to drive toward resegregation
Advance:
Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws racial discrimination in public accommodations.
Backlash:
Discriminatory enforcement of drug laws increased incarceration rates for black males to be nearly seven fold greater that that for whites, even though studies have shown that drug usage rates are about equal. Supreme Court rulings have allowed racial profiling in application of arbitrary searches by police and made it impossible to prove discrimination based on racial outcome statistics.
Advance:
Obama is elected president in 2008.
Backlash:
Trump is elected president in 2016.
The above cursory summary doesn't do justice to the subject. This book is full of page after page of explicit examples of the workings of white backlash.
The following excerpt contains a good description of "dog whistle" politics:
The following is a link to a G.R. friend's notes with numerous excerpts from this book:
https://www.goodreads.com/notes/30190...
White backlash following black progress is a social and political pattern that is as old as the nation itself. Over time this has manifest itself as the use of state power to engineer preferential treatment for whites and deliberately impose cumulative disadvantage on blacks. Its persistence has survived into the current era of professed colorblindness.
The following is my very rough outline of historical examples that demonstrate the swings from progress to backlash in American civil rights.
Advance:
After the Civil War, from 1865 to 1869, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are passed which ends slavery, provides equal protection under the law, and provides the right to vote (limited to men).
Backlash:
Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, ends Reconstruction—the South returns to white supremacy; Ku Klux Klan formed; over 3,446 extralegal lynchings of African Americans between 1882 to 1968; repeated denial of relief by Supreme Court by ratifying the legal apartheid know as Jim Crow (e.g. Plessy v.Ferguson decision of 1896 legalized separate but equal).
Advance:
Job opportunities in the north beginning during WWI lure many African Americans to move to northern cities.
Backlash:
African Americans are confined to ghettos and subjected to occasional violence. Southern states try to stem loss of farm labor with laws criminalizing enticement of people to move north.
Advance:
1954 Brown v. Board of Education ends practice of separate public schools for blacks.
Backlash:
States and school districts are slow to change and in some places close public schools and pay for private schools for white students. Then racial patterns of residential housing combined with strategically drawn school district lines combine to drive toward resegregation
Advance:
Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws racial discrimination in public accommodations.
Backlash:
Discriminatory enforcement of drug laws increased incarceration rates for black males to be nearly seven fold greater that that for whites, even though studies have shown that drug usage rates are about equal. Supreme Court rulings have allowed racial profiling in application of arbitrary searches by police and made it impossible to prove discrimination based on racial outcome statistics.
Advance:
Obama is elected president in 2008.
Backlash:
Trump is elected president in 2016.
The above cursory summary doesn't do justice to the subject. This book is full of page after page of explicit examples of the workings of white backlash.
The following excerpt contains a good description of "dog whistle" politics:
… Richard Nixon tapped into this general resentment. The "Southern Strategy," as his campaign handlers call it, was designed to pull into the GOP not only white Democratic voters from below the Mason-Dixon Line but also those aggrieved whites who lived in northern working-class neighborhoods. Using strategic dog-whistle appeals—crime, welfare, neighborhood schools—to trigger Pavlovian anti-black responses, Nixon succeeded in defining and maligning the Democrats as the party of African Americans, without once having to actually say the words.It's difficult to muster optimism regarding American politics after finishing this book.
The following is a link to a G.R. friend's notes with numerous excerpts from this book:
https://www.goodreads.com/notes/30190...
May 18, 2016
Many whites are only now becoming familiar with the term Institutional Racism, and how we benefit in this society merely by being born white. Maybe you've read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and you're ready to read more about race in America. Carol Anderson marvelously lays out every step forward for African-Americans reaching for equitable footing, only to have those rights systematically stripped away by the states. This is the ugly history that they don't teach us in public schools, but that we should all be aware of. White Rage already has a spot secured in my top ten books of 2016. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Read
April 11, 2017Heart-breaking, infuriating, and absolutely essential, this book delves into the history of systemic racism in American since the post-Civil War period. Anderson shows who again and again, when black Americans make gains in freedom and prosperity, white Americans come along to tear those gains down. It’s a short book, with extensive notes, but it took me a while to read because I had to stop frequently to sit in my anger and frustration at this terrible history. And Trump’s proposed investigation into voting and DeVos’s declaration that education issues should be left to the states become all the more chilling when you know this history. Read this.
–Teresa Preston
from The Best Books We Read In January 2017: http://bookriot.com/2017/02/01/riot-r...
–Teresa Preston
from The Best Books We Read In January 2017: http://bookriot.com/2017/02/01/riot-r...
June 15, 2020
“even where the wound is not fatal, it is grievous.”
an unflinching account of all the ways in which the advancement and progress of black people in the united states of america was and is deliberately opposed, barred, and violently stamped out.
it showcases not only the overt, violently racist individual -- the klan member, the mob leader, the murderer who got away -- but how the entire societal system of the usa has been built on racist laws, legislation, assumption, and policy. and not even unconsciously so: no, these are barriers that were purposefully drawn up.
and that is where the titular white rage reveals itself: the vicious, almost instinctual reaction of white people when faced with black people simply trying to live their lives in a way they have the right to.
“whiteness defends itself. against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, and against its own laws and customs.”this is a hard book to read and an even more difficult book to review. it is enraging; it is frustrating. but it taught me a tremendous amount of things and provided me with the historical knowledge necessary to fully understand the racist society we live in today.
caveat: i am not black, nor am i a united states citizen. what i learned about us history, slavery, and racism in high school was wrapped up in biased history books. the gist of it boiled down to this: “slavery was bad, but then lincoln came in and abolished it. the civil rights movement + MLK dealt with the aftermath and it was all equal from then on in!”
to say that would be an incorrect and harmful narrative is an understatement. but thanks to the works of brilliant black activists, authors, and academics, we can educate ourselves on the true realities of the civil rights movement and the experiences of black folks in america.
and this particular book gave me exactly what its subtitle promises: the unspoken truth of our racial divide. anderson has written a comprehensive, compact historical narrative from civil war to our current age, detailing every step along the way with painful accuracy.
very few layers of society remain untouched as anderson dives into this unspoken truth. she examines law and legislation in a lot of detail, showcasing their impact economically, financially, and politically. this wide focus allows you to grasp the full breadth of just how terribly rigged the system is.
particularly insidious are the moments in history where open, overt racism was no longer considered ‘acceptable’, and people of power turned to different means to keep a system of white supremacy in place. anderson pulls off the mask of many well-known historical figures (including many presidents) and show the loopholes they devised, the excuses they created, and the frameworks of lies they set up to invoke racist policy and violence -- while pretending it was for the greater good rather than to hold black people back (or hold onto their free labor force after the civil war).
and closer to our current age, anderson unveils how systems of crime & punishment, particularly prisons, exist as a fucked-up derivative of entrapping and criminalizing black people as has happened for hundreds of years before.
this is a well-researched, incredibly insightful, and revealing academic work.
the way i see it, history is often taught to us in increments. we learn of big historical events that we commit to memory by remembering their date and the main parties involved. their impact is often wonkily presented depending on who is teaching the history. and it is also terribly easy to start viewing events in isolation of each other, and in isolation of the rest of the world.
this book does away with that by giving its readers a holistic picture of a long stretch of history, painting a united states of america that is stack upon stack made out of terrible, racist decisions over the course of more than a hundred years. and we’re still not done.
obviously, this one comes highly recommended for anyone trying to educate themselves on american history re: racism and anti-blackness. plenty of sources and resources in it, as well. i’ve seen people complain about the main title not fully reflecting this as the academic, historical work it truly is, but i felt it a very apt descriptor once i closed it and let its contents sink in properly.
pick it up if you can.
✎ 5.0 stars.
June 14, 2020
“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.”
I learnt so much from this, especially as a person who didn't grow up in America and hardly learnt anything about North American history in my school years. It was an extremely difficult and confronting read, but one that I think is so necessary. It's sad that it ended on a hopeful note (this was published in 2016), with no knowing of what was to come :(
I learnt so much from this, especially as a person who didn't grow up in America and hardly learnt anything about North American history in my school years. It was an extremely difficult and confronting read, but one that I think is so necessary. It's sad that it ended on a hopeful note (this was published in 2016), with no knowing of what was to come :(
June 25, 2020
Educational and very interesting. Would definitely recommend.
August 1, 2021
“The southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow, so that when he had no money for food, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”
-Martin Luther King
==================
“The U.S. demographics are sliding away from white conservatives and they are very aware of this. It has yet to change structures of power¬–-at least not as much as it should have had- --but when you’ve swum in privilege your whole life, equality feels like oppression.”
― Nocturnalux (GR member)
=================
Brilliant investigative piece, with video, showing the violence of Black Shirt cops in the streets of the U.S.
https://projects.propublica.org/prote...
=========
“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
===============
Add this to the historical tragic violence against black people....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/l...
----------------------------------
“I hate who I have wronged” (Tacitus)
This is the essence of what this book is about as it documents the hatred of the very Trump-like Andrew Johnson supporting, at every turn, a push of supposedly emancipated slaves back into Jim Crow servitude. Escaping to the North only meant more violence against black people.
And the intended benefits of the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision being thwarted at every turn. The accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement rolled back by Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton alike.
And the conclusion of Barack Obama’s election?
Voter suppression.
Why is this?
When we do something very bad to a human being, or a group of human beings, we have two fundamental choices, own up and fix it or double-down on the hatred. We have been doubling-down on the hatred over and over.
Most people probably don’t realize that the Nazi Reich considered the U.S. a role model in such behavior.
In the 1920s, Nazis looked to the American eugenics movement (led by the President of Stanford, David Starr Jordan) to support their own phony “race science.” And Hitler took American westward expansion, with its destruction of Native peoples, as the template for the eastward expansion in Europe that Hitler said was needed to provide Germans with Lebensraum—room to live.
However, even Nazi jurists found American racial policies too harsh to apply in Germany, and replaced the infamous “one drop of blood” model, by which American law determined race, with more lenient criteria, allowing Germans possessing but one Jewish grandparent to count as citizens.
Of the many shocking accounts in the book of attacks on black citizens, this paragraph in the epilogue seems to capture the brutal essence of where we are now…..
“A woman driving to her new job at a Texas college is pulled over for not using a turn signal, jailed, and then found dead in her cell. A former college football player is injured in a car accident, seeks help, and is shot dead by the police. A high school boy goes out of his house to purchase Skittles and iced tea, only to be stalked through the neighborhood by a man with a criminal record who is carrying a loaded weapon. The unarmed child ends up dead, while the grown man is acquitted. A twelve-year-old is playing in the park with a toy gun; police kill him within two seconds of their arrival. A man merely makes eye contact with a police officer, and by the time he arrives at the jail, is nearly dead, neck broken. A twenty-two-year-old woman is out with some friends when an off-duty police officer, thinking he sees something suspicious, fires into the crowd. The bullet slams into her skull and she dies. He is later acquitted.”
----------------------
How it all started. "Drawing the Color Line," divide and conquer......
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defco...
================
The unwelcome return of “racial science,” the ultimate rationalization….
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018...
---------------
The return of the "Southern Strategy"....
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/st...
-Martin Luther King
==================
“The U.S. demographics are sliding away from white conservatives and they are very aware of this. It has yet to change structures of power¬–-at least not as much as it should have had- --but when you’ve swum in privilege your whole life, equality feels like oppression.”
― Nocturnalux (GR member)
=================
Brilliant investigative piece, with video, showing the violence of Black Shirt cops in the streets of the U.S.
https://projects.propublica.org/prote...
=========
“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
===============
Add this to the historical tragic violence against black people....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/l...
----------------------------------
“I hate who I have wronged” (Tacitus)
This is the essence of what this book is about as it documents the hatred of the very Trump-like Andrew Johnson supporting, at every turn, a push of supposedly emancipated slaves back into Jim Crow servitude. Escaping to the North only meant more violence against black people.
And the intended benefits of the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision being thwarted at every turn. The accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement rolled back by Nixon, Reagan, and Bill Clinton alike.
And the conclusion of Barack Obama’s election?
Voter suppression.
Why is this?
When we do something very bad to a human being, or a group of human beings, we have two fundamental choices, own up and fix it or double-down on the hatred. We have been doubling-down on the hatred over and over.
Most people probably don’t realize that the Nazi Reich considered the U.S. a role model in such behavior.
In the 1920s, Nazis looked to the American eugenics movement (led by the President of Stanford, David Starr Jordan) to support their own phony “race science.” And Hitler took American westward expansion, with its destruction of Native peoples, as the template for the eastward expansion in Europe that Hitler said was needed to provide Germans with Lebensraum—room to live.
However, even Nazi jurists found American racial policies too harsh to apply in Germany, and replaced the infamous “one drop of blood” model, by which American law determined race, with more lenient criteria, allowing Germans possessing but one Jewish grandparent to count as citizens.
Of the many shocking accounts in the book of attacks on black citizens, this paragraph in the epilogue seems to capture the brutal essence of where we are now…..
“A woman driving to her new job at a Texas college is pulled over for not using a turn signal, jailed, and then found dead in her cell. A former college football player is injured in a car accident, seeks help, and is shot dead by the police. A high school boy goes out of his house to purchase Skittles and iced tea, only to be stalked through the neighborhood by a man with a criminal record who is carrying a loaded weapon. The unarmed child ends up dead, while the grown man is acquitted. A twelve-year-old is playing in the park with a toy gun; police kill him within two seconds of their arrival. A man merely makes eye contact with a police officer, and by the time he arrives at the jail, is nearly dead, neck broken. A twenty-two-year-old woman is out with some friends when an off-duty police officer, thinking he sees something suspicious, fires into the crowd. The bullet slams into her skull and she dies. He is later acquitted.”
----------------------
How it all started. "Drawing the Color Line," divide and conquer......
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defco...
================
The unwelcome return of “racial science,” the ultimate rationalization….
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018...
---------------
The return of the "Southern Strategy"....
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/st...
June 24, 2020
I listened to this audiobook for Books With Shae's Blackout Buddy Read. I would highly recommend watching the live show discussion about this book and White Fragility on her YouTube channel.
This book is essential education. I listened to it over two days, so I did not absorb everything that was written in this book. It is a reference, and should be revisited. It reads almost like a textbook at times, but that was the most effective way for the author to get her points across. I am someone who likes to understand the Why's and How's. I think it's important to look toward the future, and hopefully toward change, but I also believe in the importance of understanding how the past has shaped our current country.
This book is essential education. I listened to it over two days, so I did not absorb everything that was written in this book. It is a reference, and should be revisited. It reads almost like a textbook at times, but that was the most effective way for the author to get her points across. I am someone who likes to understand the Why's and How's. I think it's important to look toward the future, and hopefully toward change, but I also believe in the importance of understanding how the past has shaped our current country.
February 6, 2017
This is an quick read, and describes US history from prior to the Civil War to Barack Obama's presidency. This is a powerful book. Carol Anderson lays out the way racism has been baked into America's laws at the federal and state levels, and into America's attitudes for many years. She describes egregious practices and, at times, horrific violence, occurring whenever African Americans have gained rights, with a steady erosion of these rights since Reconstruction to attacks on the Voting Rights Act.
August 6, 2017
White people are so scared of black people
they bulldoze out to the country
and put houses on little loop-dee-loop streets
and while America gets its heart cut right of its chest
the Berlin wall still runs down main street
separating east side from west----“Subdivision,” Ani Difranco
Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide is an extremely difficult book to read. In 164 pages, she lays out the case that America is a country built on racism and white anger towards African Americans and completely dispels any feel-good notions we may have that America is in a post-racial society. We are not. This book is an excellent companion to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. While the latter book covers similar ground, it focuses on the mass incarceration of African Americans. White Rage covers more in depth specific historical moments leading up to the current day, the 2016 election and Trump’s threatening campaign promise to “take America back.”
As with The New Jim Crow, I cannot and will not discuss in depth everything that Anderson covers in her book. She begins with slavery and completely corrects any fantasy you may have regarding Abraham Lincoln as a friend of African Americans. I never held that view, but it was disturbing to read that he didn’t care about the enslaved population of the South; he cared about keeping the union together and knew the only way to do that was to eliminate slavery. Southerners, of course, disagreed with him, proclaiming that their whole reason for fighting was to retain control of their property and their way of life. In designing the Reconstruction of the South, Lincoln did not include pathways to social and political equality for the newly freed slaves. Ever since then, every major step towards progress for African Americans has been accompanied by backlash, violence, intimidation and a concerted effort by whites to roll back, impede, stall, and deny that progress. African Americans were not free to relocate in search of better-paying jobs and every attempt to do so was met with resistance. White Southerners, as much as they hated and despised blacks, wanted them to stay put. They provided cheap sources of labor, labor that white men were unwilling to do. In the beginning of her chapter about the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South to the North, Anderson writes of a soul-sickening lynching of a woman, eight months pregnant. She is stripped, hung upside down from a tree, and “roasted” alive. They ripped the baby from her womb and stomped its head into the ground. These were not illiterate rednecks. The people in this mob consisted of local business owners and professionals. This woman and her husband were killed merely for being black. This was a fairly common occurrence in the South at this time and not unheard of in the North. I would say it’s still happening under the guise of the local law enforcement and “law and order.”
What I learned in school about the history of this time is complete and utter bullshit. I was given the impression (and I’m sure I am not alone) that Lincoln went to war to save the slaves, set them free, and the generous and compassionate Federal government started many programs to help African Americans succeed. So what’s their beef, right? After taking down the idea of Reconstruction and the Great Migration as being problem-free, Anderson moves onto the Civil Rights Era: Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education and the Voting Rights Amendment. Again, with every inch forward towards equality African Americans make, white Americans are there to fight it and undermine it. I was shocked to learn that public schools were closed rather than allow for integration. The tax money was then awarded to white students to attend private schools; however, many poor white Americans and, of course, all African Americans were unable to utilize that. Civil rights and affirmative action policies have been minimized and rewritten as reverse discrimination. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Amendment with the nonsensical justification that African Americans are doing GREAT, there’s no more disenfranchisement, so the most powerful part of the amendment is no longer needed. The idea that the black Americans are voting now more than ever because of the effectiveness of the VRA apparently didn’t cross their tiny white people (and Clarence Thomas, let’s not forget him) brains. Now that the VRA has been muzzled, guess what many Republican-led states are doing? Why, trying to legalize disenfranchisement of African Americans, Latinos, and anyone who may vote for the Democratic ticket. It’s not called disenfranchisement, it’s called “protection against voter fraud.” Yes, because America has such a crazy and entrenched history of voter fraud vs. disenfranchisement.
While The New Jim Crow discussed the policies of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton as being responsible for associating black skin with crime, violence and drugs, Anderson delves deeply into Ronald Reagan’s overwhelming efforts to vilify African Americans. She (as does TNJC) mentions that the image of African Americans as “welfare queens” and buying steaks with their food stamps originated with Reagan, but she also wrote about the sordid beginnings of the War on Drugs: the Reagan administration (and the CIA and National Security Council) allowing (and assisting) the Medellín and Cali drug cartels of Columbia to funnel cocaine/crack into South Central LA (specifically, into the hands of gangs). They also worked with Panama president Manuel Noriega to launder the money. Why? The Reagan Administration needed the money to help fund their effort to throw the Sandinistas out of power in Managua and reinstate the Contras: “While the new self-created drug crisis threated the security of millions of African Americans, the administration focused its efforts on facilitating greater access to weapons for the rebels purchased with off-the-books money” (126). All these new drugs flooded the streets of black communities via gangs and, along with the rise of unemployment and lack of opportunities for African Americans, created the crack epidemic. So Reagan’s call for greater “law and order” in black communities was a self-created crisis. The legacy of that cruelty lives on today in the illegal drug trade and gang wars (Chicago). I found this chapter absolutely horrifying. I can’t believe I didn’t already know this, but it’s shocking to read about government officials who are supposed to uphold law and order instead are committing crimes that will go unpunished. Anderson ends the book with a chapter titled “How to Unelect a Black President,” and describes exactly how an obstructionist, recalcitrant and resentful Congress did just that. She quotes an article, “An Open Letter to the People Who Hate Obama More Than They Love America,” from the Daily Kos to demonstrate the amount of ill will towards America’s first black president: “You hate Obama with a passion, despite the fact that he is a tax cutting, deficit reducing war President who undermines civil rights and delivers corporate friendly watered down reforms that benefit special interests just like a Republican. You dance with your hatred, singing it proudly in the rain like it was a 1950’s musical” (156).
I started this year with a specific reading mission: to understand why Trump had been elected. I had some theories, but I wanted background and facts to base those theories on. Although The New Jim Crow and White Rage don’t discuss the 2016 election in much depth, both books have uncovered the ugly reality about America’s racist history and my own white biases and privilege. Racism and bigotry in America are flourishing. It is horrifying to read about the lynchings of the past, but it is just as horrifying to learn that the resentments, anger and hatred that fueled the past are still affecting America today and are still ongoing. We haven’t learned anything. White Americans will cut off their nose to spite their face and damn the consequences. Disenfranchisement: ongoing. Continued hatred and resistance to full integration: ongoing. Nothing has changed. As Anderson discusses, the entrenched and systematic actions of whites to block schooling for African Americans has resulted in a legacy that doesn’t just harm Southern states (although the Deep South states have the worst rankings for educational attainment and quality of health), but harms America in general. We are so concerned with keeping America white that we would rather be dumb and experience a decline in productivity and technical advancement then allow brown people to succeed. Currently, the Trump administration is calling for a reduction in legal immigration because fuck those brown people. It’s not like they help America advance or anything: “Black respectability or ‘appropriate’ behavior doesn’t seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats” (159).
Some years ago, I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He discusses the puzzling situation of the society that resided on the Easter Islands and built those gigantic stone statues. I am foggy on the details, but lots of timber was needed for the process of building/transporting these statues. The islands had limited forests, but the people were so obsessed with the need to have these damn statues (which are today’s equivalent of owning a Lamborghini or a McMansion) that they cut down every one of the trees, despite being aware that depleting their forests would threaten their survival. They didn’t care and did it anyway. This is how I see America: we’re so obsessed with NOW that we don’t see TOMORROW. Now is hatred, racism, small-mindedness, pollution, global warming, etc. We know these things will eventually affect our ability to thrive and (ultimately) survive on this planet, but we don’t give a shit. We are the people of Easter Island, obsessively building our status symbols, tending to our petty anger and resentments, and completely ignoring that eventually our actions will have consequences. I think we see those consequences now. I don’t see America as a progressive country; we seem to place in the middle or last on so many things: educational scores, access to healthcare, quality of life. Even our idea of America as a role leader in democracy is a cruel joke. We are capable of doing better than this, but I don’t think we can until the country as a whole faces its racist, violent and cruel past and addresses the continued racist systems of today. I encourage everyone to read this book.
August 12, 2017
I received this book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,written by Carol Anderson as a Goodreads giveaway. Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for my copy.
This book begins with the shooting of Michael Brown, a young African American man, who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014. This shooting is one of many which occurred involving African American men and police across the country. The unrest and outrage associated with these police shootings led to a movement.. Black Lives Matter. To me, these shootings raised serious concerns regarding the militarization of our country's police forces. I have also long been concerned about the mass incarceration of African American men and that has led me to do a great deal of reading on the subject. Initially, I thought this book by Ms. Anderson would be addressing the institutional racism in our criminal justice system. It turns out that was just a small part of what this book was about.
This well-written and meticulously researched book, instead, was a summary of sorts of the racism which has been built into society's institutions from the very beginning. This racism is so pervasive and ingrained that some don't even recognize it. Ms. Anderson begins with Reconstruction and moves through the Great Migration and through the era of the Civil Rights and Voter Rights Acts... through the election of the first African American president Barack Obama, voter suppression laws and ending with the startling election of Mr. Trump to the White House. This book, comprised of 180 pages plus source notes, was informative. Although I was already aware of the issues Ms, Anderson wrote about in this book, it it a great sourcebook . I know this was not her purpose, but I would have liked to see her choose just one of her topics and expand on that... there is so much to say about each of these subjects. For example, she could have used the topic I mentioned earlier... institutional racism in the criminal justice system and talked about the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the privatization of the United States prison system and how in combination with the endless and useless war on drugs, we have been incarcerating too many young African American men. I read a statistic from an article written in 2016, which stated that 'for every 3 African American males born now, 1 of those 3 will be incarcerated at some point in his life. That is horrible and unacceptable. My point: although this is an excellent summary of racism pervasive in our society from the time of Reconstruction..... racism which continues to hold back African American people,I think the book could have been more effective if Ms. Anderson had been less broad and more specific.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is unaware of the history of racism in the United States. Carol Anderson definitely broadly covers all the bases.
This book begins with the shooting of Michael Brown, a young African American man, who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014. This shooting is one of many which occurred involving African American men and police across the country. The unrest and outrage associated with these police shootings led to a movement.. Black Lives Matter. To me, these shootings raised serious concerns regarding the militarization of our country's police forces. I have also long been concerned about the mass incarceration of African American men and that has led me to do a great deal of reading on the subject. Initially, I thought this book by Ms. Anderson would be addressing the institutional racism in our criminal justice system. It turns out that was just a small part of what this book was about.
This well-written and meticulously researched book, instead, was a summary of sorts of the racism which has been built into society's institutions from the very beginning. This racism is so pervasive and ingrained that some don't even recognize it. Ms. Anderson begins with Reconstruction and moves through the Great Migration and through the era of the Civil Rights and Voter Rights Acts... through the election of the first African American president Barack Obama, voter suppression laws and ending with the startling election of Mr. Trump to the White House. This book, comprised of 180 pages plus source notes, was informative. Although I was already aware of the issues Ms, Anderson wrote about in this book, it it a great sourcebook . I know this was not her purpose, but I would have liked to see her choose just one of her topics and expand on that... there is so much to say about each of these subjects. For example, she could have used the topic I mentioned earlier... institutional racism in the criminal justice system and talked about the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the privatization of the United States prison system and how in combination with the endless and useless war on drugs, we have been incarcerating too many young African American men. I read a statistic from an article written in 2016, which stated that 'for every 3 African American males born now, 1 of those 3 will be incarcerated at some point in his life. That is horrible and unacceptable. My point: although this is an excellent summary of racism pervasive in our society from the time of Reconstruction..... racism which continues to hold back African American people,I think the book could have been more effective if Ms. Anderson had been less broad and more specific.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is unaware of the history of racism in the United States. Carol Anderson definitely broadly covers all the bases.
February 6, 2017
Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide is so moving, so eye-opening, so enraging in this time of renewed Jim Crow legislation and outlook that I really don’t have the words. Yes, someone as verbose as I can’t summon the words.
Nor can I recommend this highly enough; I only wish I could award it six stars. I’ve finished the last page, but I can’t seem to stop weeping for what is — and for the better America that might have been had we white folks listened to our better angels.
Special thanks to Dave Anderson, who introduced me to this indispensable book.
Nor can I recommend this highly enough; I only wish I could award it six stars. I’ve finished the last page, but I can’t seem to stop weeping for what is — and for the better America that might have been had we white folks listened to our better angels.
Special thanks to Dave Anderson, who introduced me to this indispensable book.
May 19, 2019
If you are a fan of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’, you will probably enjoy this book, ‘White Rage’ by Carol Anderson.
It is necessary to read history that is uncomfortable. In some cases the stories hit close to home when the white establishment are the clear villains. Reagan and Eisenhower were not great presidents if you are measuring their enthusiasm for ending obvious inequalities and addressing racism. In any event this is that type of book.
Chapter 1 Reconstructing Reconstruction
Chapter 2 Derailing the Great Migration
Chapter 3 Burning Brown to the Ground
Chapter 4 Rolling Back Civil Rights
Chapter 5 How to Unelect a Black President
Epilogue: After the Election
Chapters 1 and 2 are two fresh perspectives on the failure of Reconstruction including Andrew Johnson’s efforts to reimpose control over freed slaves. The second chapter covers the eventual exodus of nearly a third of African Americans from the plantations to the Northern cities in pursuit of a better life. Anderson documents the illegal efforts of the white establishment to prevent the exodus which included unlawful imprisonmenr, beatings, terrorism at train stations and even lynchings for some of the organizers. For those who made it out, the reception in the North was often filled with bigotry. African Americans were directed to live in the segregated parts of Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee. So racism was alive and well in the North. But it is also true that the white establishment did not exert as much systematic control over the daily lives of most African Americans. The economic opportunities for African Americans were significantly improved over life in the South, at least until the Great Depression.
Chapter 3 deals with segregated education. This chapter was interesting and lots of new material that I had never seen. I have certainly read better books about Thurgood Marshall and Brown v Board of Education but I was riveted by the coverage of Delaware and Maryland’s efforts to stymie integration. Adherence to the Supreme Court rulings of the mid 1950’s did not come until twenty years later in the 1970s.
The section on disenfranchisement, effectively chapters four and five, is probably the portion of the book that resonated the most. This recent period of history lacks the physical violence of the earlier chapters but perhaps it is so visceral because we are living through the B.S. of voter id laws, gerrymandering and many methods of disenfranchisement today.
The epilogue is too short as it was penned right after the election. However there may be enough material for a second volume based on the two years of this administration’s assault on the advancement of African American causes and minority causes in general.
So overall this is a a concise history book, adding .5 stars for brevity. The author did an excellent job of making her points and most of the topics were a fresh look and as a whole the book does not have an academic feel to it. If you are looking for an in depth analysis on the central topics of the book take note that there is an excellent bibliography and reference section of some two hundred pages.
4.5 stars
It is necessary to read history that is uncomfortable. In some cases the stories hit close to home when the white establishment are the clear villains. Reagan and Eisenhower were not great presidents if you are measuring their enthusiasm for ending obvious inequalities and addressing racism. In any event this is that type of book.
Chapter 1 Reconstructing Reconstruction
Chapter 2 Derailing the Great Migration
Chapter 3 Burning Brown to the Ground
Chapter 4 Rolling Back Civil Rights
Chapter 5 How to Unelect a Black President
Epilogue: After the Election
Chapters 1 and 2 are two fresh perspectives on the failure of Reconstruction including Andrew Johnson’s efforts to reimpose control over freed slaves. The second chapter covers the eventual exodus of nearly a third of African Americans from the plantations to the Northern cities in pursuit of a better life. Anderson documents the illegal efforts of the white establishment to prevent the exodus which included unlawful imprisonmenr, beatings, terrorism at train stations and even lynchings for some of the organizers. For those who made it out, the reception in the North was often filled with bigotry. African Americans were directed to live in the segregated parts of Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee. So racism was alive and well in the North. But it is also true that the white establishment did not exert as much systematic control over the daily lives of most African Americans. The economic opportunities for African Americans were significantly improved over life in the South, at least until the Great Depression.
Chapter 3 deals with segregated education. This chapter was interesting and lots of new material that I had never seen. I have certainly read better books about Thurgood Marshall and Brown v Board of Education but I was riveted by the coverage of Delaware and Maryland’s efforts to stymie integration. Adherence to the Supreme Court rulings of the mid 1950’s did not come until twenty years later in the 1970s.
The section on disenfranchisement, effectively chapters four and five, is probably the portion of the book that resonated the most. This recent period of history lacks the physical violence of the earlier chapters but perhaps it is so visceral because we are living through the B.S. of voter id laws, gerrymandering and many methods of disenfranchisement today.
The epilogue is too short as it was penned right after the election. However there may be enough material for a second volume based on the two years of this administration’s assault on the advancement of African American causes and minority causes in general.
So overall this is a a concise history book, adding .5 stars for brevity. The author did an excellent job of making her points and most of the topics were a fresh look and as a whole the book does not have an academic feel to it. If you are looking for an in depth analysis on the central topics of the book take note that there is an excellent bibliography and reference section of some two hundred pages.
4.5 stars
July 19, 2020
Meticulously researched and documented by Emory Professor and Departmental Chair Carol Anderson, White Rage chronicles how blacks have been systemically abused by white America and the anger that their ongoing insistence on fairness and equality has provoked.
"Reconstructing Reconstruction" shows the many ways in which the Emancipation Proclamation was crippled for a century, including the insidious Black Codes, which made seeking jobs impossible due to charges of vagrancy and peonage, where sharecroppers were economically forced back into slavery.
"Derailing the Great Migration" goes on to describe how attempts to recruit Southern blacks to populate northern factories were met with violence, enormous fines, interfering with interstate transportation, and banning the distribution of the Chicago Defender newspaper. Overcrowding in the North led to deplorable living conditions, and violence when blacks tried to move into white neighborhoods, even marginal ones.
"Burning Brown to the Ground" details how the 'separate but equal' doctrine ratified in Plessy vs. Ferguson case in the late 1800s did nothing of the sort, and how the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education was often ignored by state rights advocates, local school authorities, even State universities for 50 years or more in some cases, citing numerous examples and statistics, including spending per student.
"Rolling Back Civil Rights" shows the extent to which the Nixon and Reagan administrations demonized black leaders, and created a war on drugs (to fund the Contras), targeting the lowest strata of society, including making the penalties for crack possession 100 times more stringent than cocaine possession (i.e., 5 grams of crack was equal to 1.1 pounds of coke), leading to mass incarceration of blacks, Hispanics, etc.
"How to Unelect a Black President" speaks to the ways in which indigent, black and Hispanic voters were excluded from voting over completely unjustified claims of voter fraud, which are about one in a million statistically. Requiring state-issued IDs, which are expensive or administratively burdensome or impossible to acquire was a common scheme.
Much to consider in this book.
"Reconstructing Reconstruction" shows the many ways in which the Emancipation Proclamation was crippled for a century, including the insidious Black Codes, which made seeking jobs impossible due to charges of vagrancy and peonage, where sharecroppers were economically forced back into slavery.
"Derailing the Great Migration" goes on to describe how attempts to recruit Southern blacks to populate northern factories were met with violence, enormous fines, interfering with interstate transportation, and banning the distribution of the Chicago Defender newspaper. Overcrowding in the North led to deplorable living conditions, and violence when blacks tried to move into white neighborhoods, even marginal ones.
"Burning Brown to the Ground" details how the 'separate but equal' doctrine ratified in Plessy vs. Ferguson case in the late 1800s did nothing of the sort, and how the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1954 Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education was often ignored by state rights advocates, local school authorities, even State universities for 50 years or more in some cases, citing numerous examples and statistics, including spending per student.
"Rolling Back Civil Rights" shows the extent to which the Nixon and Reagan administrations demonized black leaders, and created a war on drugs (to fund the Contras), targeting the lowest strata of society, including making the penalties for crack possession 100 times more stringent than cocaine possession (i.e., 5 grams of crack was equal to 1.1 pounds of coke), leading to mass incarceration of blacks, Hispanics, etc.
"How to Unelect a Black President" speaks to the ways in which indigent, black and Hispanic voters were excluded from voting over completely unjustified claims of voter fraud, which are about one in a million statistically. Requiring state-issued IDs, which are expensive or administratively burdensome or impossible to acquire was a common scheme.
Much to consider in this book.
August 17, 2017
America is currently in the midst of a clear whitelash, as evidenced mostly clearly by the election of Donald Trump, a man whose bigotry and white supremacy were cornerstones of his campaign.
This past weekend, in Charlottesville, we saw further evidence of this whitelash: a mob of racist and anti-Semitic white people, emboldened by the president's rhetoric, felt so threatened by racial progress that they infiltrated an entire town with their bigotry and violence.
But, as Carol Anderson explains, this concept of whitelash—or as she calls it, white rage—is hardly anything new. In fact, there's a distinct history of white rage and resentment following racial progress, from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era to the War on Drugs.
In her heavily sourced and well-researched book, Anderson recalls the many ways that white rage has manifested in American history to uphold the structural oppression of black people.
It's clear that Anderson was aiming for brevity with her book. While it isn't as comprehensive and engrossing as, say, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, White Rage provides a succinct overview of the ongoing legacy of racism in America.
This past weekend, in Charlottesville, we saw further evidence of this whitelash: a mob of racist and anti-Semitic white people, emboldened by the president's rhetoric, felt so threatened by racial progress that they infiltrated an entire town with their bigotry and violence.
But, as Carol Anderson explains, this concept of whitelash—or as she calls it, white rage—is hardly anything new. In fact, there's a distinct history of white rage and resentment following racial progress, from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era to the War on Drugs.
In her heavily sourced and well-researched book, Anderson recalls the many ways that white rage has manifested in American history to uphold the structural oppression of black people.
It's clear that Anderson was aiming for brevity with her book. While it isn't as comprehensive and engrossing as, say, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, White Rage provides a succinct overview of the ongoing legacy of racism in America.
July 25, 2016
This svelte book packs a powerful punch. Although the Ebook edition states 236 pages, about 69 of those pages represent copious notes and the index. So, this book grows out of an op-ed that the author wrote for the Washinton Post after Ferguson, MO exploded. The theme was white rage against progress, rather than black rage against the cops. She expanded on that line of thinking and this volume is the result.
She lays out the clear case of white rage rearing its racist head throughout history every time Black people attempted to assert their humanity. "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."
The historical anecdotes can be found in other books of course, but connecting those moments to the overarching theme of white rage was a dexterous feat, neatly executed. The second chapter, Derailing the Great Migration was especially potent, highlighting the many hurdles(read, The Warmth of Other Suns for depth)placed on Blacks attempting to "leave" the South. At ever turn, there was indeed white rage.
"The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability. And the Great Migration directly challenged that foundation. Black success was the white South’s bogeyman. And the fear that this engendered erupted in ticketed passengers being dragged off trains, interstate commerce getting blocked, the wartime needs of the nation going ignored, and labor becoming criminalized for taking its skills to an employer willing to pay."
So the more things change the more they remain the same. We need to be vigilant and keep our humanity and justice front and center when we engage in conversations that attempt to dismiss our humanity. Carol Anderson has presented a compelling argument that white rage has historically and presently been an actor upon Black lives.
She lays out the clear case of white rage rearing its racist head throughout history every time Black people attempted to assert their humanity. "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."
The historical anecdotes can be found in other books of course, but connecting those moments to the overarching theme of white rage was a dexterous feat, neatly executed. The second chapter, Derailing the Great Migration was especially potent, highlighting the many hurdles(read, The Warmth of Other Suns for depth)placed on Blacks attempting to "leave" the South. At ever turn, there was indeed white rage.
"The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability. And the Great Migration directly challenged that foundation. Black success was the white South’s bogeyman. And the fear that this engendered erupted in ticketed passengers being dragged off trains, interstate commerce getting blocked, the wartime needs of the nation going ignored, and labor becoming criminalized for taking its skills to an employer willing to pay."
So the more things change the more they remain the same. We need to be vigilant and keep our humanity and justice front and center when we engage in conversations that attempt to dismiss our humanity. Carol Anderson has presented a compelling argument that white rage has historically and presently been an actor upon Black lives.
January 31, 2020
Carol Anderson succinctly describes many of the innumerable ways white Americans--often through legislation and in the courtroom--have systematically repressed the advancement of African Americans from the end of the Civil War until today. She describes:
- Specific ways the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were undermined to prevent blacks from gaining full rights during Reconstruction
- How, during the early 20th century, southern states fought to prevent blacks from moving north for better jobs in an attempt to keep African Americans stuck in the south where Jim Crow limited their employment opportunities and dominated every aspect of life
- Methods that states and school districts used to derail desegregation after the Brown decision, which prevented countless black children from receiving quality education, leading them and their families to lives of poverty
- Backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in numerous attempts to overthrow civil rights legislation in court
- Voter suppression laws, targeted at blacks, that were proposed and/or passed into law in southern states after the election of Barack Obama, and the country's extreme negative reaction to the relatively moderate Obama
I learned many things in the book's mere 164 pages of text that are completely absent from American history textbooks. The book is thoroughly researched (see the 62 pages of sources cited), and Anderson presents all of the information in a concise narrative. She brings everything together to show how much the white prejudice that has prevailed throughout history still influences race relations today. Maybe when more people realize how pervasive and systematic discrimination has been and still is, we can challenge our own attitudes about race. I highly recommend this book, for everyone.
- Specific ways the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were undermined to prevent blacks from gaining full rights during Reconstruction
- How, during the early 20th century, southern states fought to prevent blacks from moving north for better jobs in an attempt to keep African Americans stuck in the south where Jim Crow limited their employment opportunities and dominated every aspect of life
- Methods that states and school districts used to derail desegregation after the Brown decision, which prevented countless black children from receiving quality education, leading them and their families to lives of poverty
- Backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in numerous attempts to overthrow civil rights legislation in court
- Voter suppression laws, targeted at blacks, that were proposed and/or passed into law in southern states after the election of Barack Obama, and the country's extreme negative reaction to the relatively moderate Obama
I learned many things in the book's mere 164 pages of text that are completely absent from American history textbooks. The book is thoroughly researched (see the 62 pages of sources cited), and Anderson presents all of the information in a concise narrative. She brings everything together to show how much the white prejudice that has prevailed throughout history still influences race relations today. Maybe when more people realize how pervasive and systematic discrimination has been and still is, we can challenge our own attitudes about race. I highly recommend this book, for everyone.
March 15, 2017
I don't know how to write this review without sounding completely ignorant. On the night of the 2016 election, when the results had come back, I numbly wrote in my journal about my confusion. I have a fascination with plane crashes, because it's usually not one thing that went wrong, but a series of small things that all cascade and become catastrophic. I wondered what all of the events were to have tilted the election results the way they had.
Born in Texas and brought up in a decent (I thought) public school education, I read classics by black authors -- Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines -- and did a proper Civil Rights Act course; we talked about Martin Luther King Jr. and Emmett Till and I knew that there had been injustice against black people, but for some reason it didn't really click to me how widespread, systemic, and calculated everything was. I thought it was "some governments" in the south or "some racists who were happy to murder other people."
While I was reading this, I had angry tears in my eyes. Not just because I was ashamed of my country's history, but also that I ashamed by my naiveté: I was 32 years old and fairly open-minded and still hadn't realized everything until it'd had been laid out in front of me. From a terrible president (Johnson at first, but really, many others following him), backed by lawmakers who were happy to keep black people disfranchised, to the ordinary everyday people who supported those laws, to the blacks who were beaten or killed for straying from their "place" -- everything that is happening right now is clicking into place. Oh. That is why so many people are angry, on all sides.
It's not a particularly easy book to get through (it's a little dry, being history, though it's written pretty efficiently) but I recommend it. Maybe this is the book that cracks it open for you, too.
Born in Texas and brought up in a decent (I thought) public school education, I read classics by black authors -- Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines -- and did a proper Civil Rights Act course; we talked about Martin Luther King Jr. and Emmett Till and I knew that there had been injustice against black people, but for some reason it didn't really click to me how widespread, systemic, and calculated everything was. I thought it was "some governments" in the south or "some racists who were happy to murder other people."
While I was reading this, I had angry tears in my eyes. Not just because I was ashamed of my country's history, but also that I ashamed by my naiveté: I was 32 years old and fairly open-minded and still hadn't realized everything until it'd had been laid out in front of me. From a terrible president (Johnson at first, but really, many others following him), backed by lawmakers who were happy to keep black people disfranchised, to the ordinary everyday people who supported those laws, to the blacks who were beaten or killed for straying from their "place" -- everything that is happening right now is clicking into place. Oh. That is why so many people are angry, on all sides.
It's not a particularly easy book to get through (it's a little dry, being history, though it's written pretty efficiently) but I recommend it. Maybe this is the book that cracks it open for you, too.
October 1, 2016
I have some complex feelings about this book. On one hand, it's a well-written history 0f the systems of racism in America, from slavery to the present day. Even if you think you know the whole story, hearing it laid out in such a detailed, sequential way will cause you to rethink what you thought you knew.
On the other hand, Ms. Anderson spends a fair amount of time on how the Reagan administration and the CIA are responsible for the drug trafficking into the US in the mid-80's, as they attempted in any way possible to finance the Contra's in Nicaragua. While I do believe there is a fair bit of truth to the story, the evidence is inconclusive - and Ms. Anderson presents it all as absolute, proven fact. It takes away from the credibility of the rest of the book, unfortunately, as there seems to be a miss in her presentation of this particular piece of history.
On the other hand, Ms. Anderson spends a fair amount of time on how the Reagan administration and the CIA are responsible for the drug trafficking into the US in the mid-80's, as they attempted in any way possible to finance the Contra's in Nicaragua. While I do believe there is a fair bit of truth to the story, the evidence is inconclusive - and Ms. Anderson presents it all as absolute, proven fact. It takes away from the credibility of the rest of the book, unfortunately, as there seems to be a miss in her presentation of this particular piece of history.
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