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 showing that this was,
instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames, '
she wrote, '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.
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.
