White identity has been constructed not only as neutral but also as good, pure, innocent, composed, rational, and desirable. Anderson, thus, sets out to "make white rage visible" (p.3), and she succeeds.Īnderson's book achieves two things: it catalogues the calculated, systemic, and comprehensive ways in which white America has consistently and persistently waged a race-disguised-in-economics war against African-Americans and it presents a compelling argument about how whiteness, both as an identity and as a social construct, must be unsettled and exposed. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively" (p.3). Anderson states in the prologue: "white rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. Anderson argues that while mainstream America was focused on the riots and black rage, white rage remained untouched and undisrupted. As a result, media and political rhetoric were dominated by the term "black rage," diverting focus from the issue that caused the uprising in the first place: police brutality and the murder of an innocent African American teen.Īs a means to process and reframe the racial tensions during this time, Anderson turns the reader's gaze onto white people and their rage, to reveal the perversity of the dominant political, social, and cultural climate. In response to this heinous crime, the African-American community of Ferguson, Missouri protested and rioted. While similar narratives are woven into the tapestry of this book, Carol Anderson focuses on redefining "white rage" and exposing the sophisticated ways in which it manifests itself though policy and legal structures in the United States.Ĭarol Anderson, a Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University, initially wrote about white rage following the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American young man shot by a white police officer who was never convicted of Brown's murder.
The title of the book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide may lead the reader to draw on images of marching, hooded Ku Klux Klan Clan members, lynching of African Americans, violence against peaceful Civil Rights protesters, the Dylan Roofs of the world, or white catholic school boys with "MAGA" ("Make America Great Again") hats standing defiantly in the face of a Native Elder. "America has a rhetoric of freedom and a reality of slavery." Julius Lester
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
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