"White Rage" by Carol Anderson

"White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide" by Carol Anderson had been languishing in my TBR (to be read) pile for a while. I reached for it in early June, shortly after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as Black Lives Matter protests sprang up across the United States and around the world.

As an overview of how we got to this point, it was probably a good book to start with, although not an easy one (but then, what book on this complex, painful topic is "easy," right?). 

Anderson, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, explains in the prologue about how the book came to be, in her observations about the protests and looting after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (and, earlier, the 1999 shooting death of Amadou Diallo by New York City police). 

"Again and again, across America's ideological spectrum, from Fox News to MSNBC, the issue was framed in terms of black rage, which, it seemed to me, entirely missed the point," Anderson writes, laying out the book's thesis. 

"...What was really at work here was white rage. With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling. In some ways, it is easy to see why. White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively... 

"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 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.”

Anderson takes us more or less chronologically, step by step, through 150 years of American history -- from the Civil War and Reconstruction through Plessy vs Ferguson, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, Brown vs Board of Education, the civil rights movement of the 1950s & 60s and the Voting Rights Act to the election of (and backlash against) Barack Obama and, in a new afterword written for the paperback edition, the election of Donald Trump. Along the way, she demonstrates how hard-won black progress has been consistently met with rage and resistance from the white majority through the institutions of power that it controls.  

I knew some of the history that Anderson recounts here, but certainly not all of it, and not all of the details -- which can become overwhelming at times, and which is probably why it took me a full month to work my way through this book. (I was startled to read, for example, on page 22:  "Indeed, such was Mississippi's obstinacy that it delayed ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment [which abolished slavery in the United States] until 2013." !!!)  The book is just 287 pages -- including a mere 178 pages of text -- and well documented, with 62 (!) pages of footnotes.  It was cited on many critics' lists as one of the best books of 2016.  I can see why.  While the material may sometimes be difficult, it's thoughtfully and well written and well argued. 

Four stars on Goodreads.

This was Book #21 read to date in 2020 (Book #3 finished in July). I'm currently at 70% of my 2020 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 30 books, and am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule to meet my goal. :) You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2020 tagged as "2020 books."