White Rage

The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

By: Carol Anderson

Narrated by: Pamela Gibson

National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Criticism, 2016.

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 flash points 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.

©2016 Carol Anderson (P)2016 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"Narrator Pamela Gibson perfectly conveys the insightful research and writing in this book about civil rights in the U.S. by an Emory University historian. Anderson contends that when African-Americans make even the slightest progress, a subtle, almost invisible, white rage in the form of opposition reverses what little progress has been made. An example is the current suppression of Black votes under the guise of voter fraud prevention. Gibson's delivery registers rage and compassion where appropriate. No one - from Lincoln to Trump - escapes criticism. Hard truths and supporting citations are clearly stated, leaving no confusion for listeners. Also, Gibson ably presents Anderson's unexpected humor, for example, when she talks about the current paralysis of the U.S. Senate." (AudioFile Magazine)

Pick up your Torch

This book was very enlightening for me. It went into great detail of the views and actions of the American leaders like never before. The main thing that caught me was the evolution of our racially injust system and how it has never really stopped, instead it has evolved into a legal battle. I am a black man and this will be my first time voting in the upcoming election. It enraged me to know that the same vote that my ancestors have fought hard to receive has not fully been reclaimed. I've taken this book as a cause for me to get more involved in politics and to help improve the lives of the "Least of these" in America.

White Rage: driven, dramatic, a must read

White Rage is already stunning for it's title, for it puts racism very much in the present tense and the moral burden where it should be. Anderson takes us from Reconstruction to Ferguson showing a long history of injustices that are still operating today. Maybe the saddest for me was the failure of school and housing integration that makes us a virtually apartheid country (Jonathan Kozol, Shame of the Nation.) I wish she went into the psychology of white rage a bit more.

Good Brief History of Post War Oppression

This has a brief history of grossly unfair practices of white Americans against black Americans. Many of these will be familiar to most readers, but hearing them again, all together, renews one's horror at those acts.

Nevertheless, there is a disconnect, as the title and the analysis focuses upon White Rage, while most of the actual examples show the clear, cold, calculating, clever, subversive, cloaked, strategic plans of the oppressors. White Rage is not the source of the problem, but a tool used by these oppressors not to continue racism, but to maintain wealth and power.

The book ends with Imagining America which does not continue these racist policies. I am not optimistic that following the ideas in this book and imagining a bright future will get the job done.

I vastly prefer the practical principles of antiracism set out in Stamped From the Beginning and How to be an Antiracist.

The narration was good, but a little dry for this material.

Totally Wow!!!

Wish this would change but I know the reality of life in the U.S. We have had more than 100+ years to change this. Truly saddened!

An outstanding work

This it's a very detailed analysis of how white anger and outrage has been channelled into actions and systems of control for containing blacks and other minorities.