White Rage

White Rage by Carol Anderson

Over and over again through the history of the USA, the advances of Black US Americans towards achieving their rights, goals, aspirations, and visions have been met with a gauntlet of ferocious responses from White US Americans. In White Rage, Carol Anderson documents and describes major instances of Black US American achievement and how White Americans have responded with racist violence from the individual level all the way up to the massive system level. She clarifies how these White Rage responses have changed over the course of US history (i.e. from lynch mobs to “color-blind” mass incarceration), adapting to the evolving discourse around race and civil rights to become more insidious and invisible while still entrapping and oppressing just as effectively as earlier manifestations of White Rage.

The five chapters of White Rage chronicle Reconstruction, the Great Migration, Brown v. Board of Education and other civil rights court cases, the Civil Rights Movement, and the election of President Obama, as well as the White US American responses to each of these historical events or movements. The work Anderson does in this volume is powerful and two-fold: she first clarifies and amends the inaccurate historical education most US Americans receive in high school and college by providing a clear and accurate account of US history—one that actually addresses race and racism in the US rather than eliding or obscuring it; she also clearly outlines the consistent historical response of White US Americans to Black advancement as one of racism, violence, disenfranchisement, and rage. This deeply necessary corrective pushes back against the perception that the racial reality in the USA has been one of consistent “upward progress,” showing how, in actuality, White Americans have contested and attempted to undermine Black US American progress every step of the way.

Harrowing, disturbing, clarifying, and powerful, this is a book every White US American should read.