White Rage: The Unspoken Truth Of Our Racial Divide

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth Of Our Racial Divide

National Book Critics Circle Award WinnerNew York Times BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of 2016A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016From 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.Review"[A] slim but persuasive volume . . . A sobering primer on the myriad ways African American resilience and triumph over enslavement, Jim Crow and intolerance have been relentlessly defied by the very institutions entrusted to uphold our democracy." - Washington Post"White Rage is a riveting and disturbing history that begins with Reconstruction and lays bare the efforts of whites in the South and North alike to prevent emancipated black people from achieving economic independence, civil and political rights, personal safety, and economic opportunity." - The Nation"[White Rage] is an extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy." - Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review"I?ve read a fair bit of African-American history, but White Rage, by Carol Anderson, which is beautifully written and exhaustively researched, illuminated for me just how deliberately education policy in the United States disenfranchised African-Americans." - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bestselling author of AMERICANAH and HALF OF A YELLOW SUN"An unflinching look at America's long history of structural and institutionalized racism, White Rage is a timely and necessary examination of white anger and aggression towards black America . . . A compelling look at American history, White Rage has never seemed more relevant than it does today." - Bustle, ?17 Books On Race Every White Person Needs To Read?"White Rage belongs in a place of honor on the shelf next t