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Carol Anderson’s 2016 book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, examines the way African-American progress has been halted and repressed many times. She calls it “white rage.” Anderson looks at five crucial turning points in the African-American struggle for freedom and equality: Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery, the Great Migration, desegregation, Civil Rights Movement, and Barack Obama winning the election as president.

Anderson’s work is interesting and original. She looks at the history of race relations in America, focusing on events that people often overlook or don’t know about. These overlooked stories are important because they show how white Americans have opposed racial progress, such as desegregation laws and voting rights for African-Americans. Anderson uses local sources to support her argument that white Americans have tried to stop change from happening by using violence, hate speech, and legal means like segregationist policies and zoning laws. This book will be helpful to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of American history with an emphasis on race relations.

The book begins with the Reconstruction Era. Instead of focusing on Lincoln, the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Anderson focuses on Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson and his decisions that resulted in a compromise to keep the newly re-formed Union together. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed after the Civil War to guarantee freedom for all people as well as equal protection under law. However, these amendments were ignored or undermined by Jim Crow laws which created crimes specific to black people. Moreover, Johnson’s own racism allowed him to overlook these violations of human rights because he was so dependent upon unpaid labor in this region.

Next, Anderson discusses the Great Migration of African Americans from the agricultural South to the industrial North. In a time when the nation’s industry and economy were growing at an enormous rate, Southern whites fought against black people who sought better jobs in Northern cities. They stopped newspapers that advertised these jobs, levied huge penalties on workers who quit their jobs, and even stopped trains with blacks heading north. The second half of this chapter focuses at length on how white rage awaited black workers once they arrived in Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit.

Chapter 3 of White Rage talks about the backlash to Brown vs. Board of Education, which made segregated schools illegal. The author goes into detail about how some states and counties fought for decades in order to keep white and black students separate from each other. In addition, public education was abolished in some places because it was seen as a right that everyone should have access to.

Chapter 4 focuses on the Civil Rights Era and how it was dismantled. Anderson discusses not only political actions like gerrymandering but also more insidious measures that destabilized African American communities, such as criminal justice reform and the War on Drugs. These two policies worked together to incarcerate large numbers of African Americans while also associating blackness with crime in the media and popular imagination.

Chapter 5: The Rise of Reaganism

In this chapter Anderson traces conservative opposition to civil rights legislation back to Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign (1963-65). He argues that Ronald Reagan’s election marked a turning point for conservatism because he “reinvented conservatism into something less concerned about economic inequality than cultural decline,” which allowed conservatives to oppose welfare programs without seeming racist (p. 156). In addition, his focus on “freedom from government interference rather than freedom from want or fear” provided an ideological framework for dismantling affirmative action policies and other social welfare programs that had been implemented under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program in 1965 (p. 160). Finally, Reagan’s personal popularity helped legitimize right-wing views even when they were unpopular among voters; by 1984 he won reelection with 54 percent of the vote despite having lost support during his first term due to high unemployment rates and increased federal spending (p. 162).