White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

“White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide” by Carol Anderson is a New York Times Bestseller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in March 2017. 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’, 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.”

Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. Professor Anderson’s research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States. Carefully linking 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.