White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

"We have the model for how to do this, he told the throng of seven hundred. 'Use legal means if possible, force if necessary. But put the niggers out. Put them out.'" 

These words were spoken by the president of a Detroit Homeowner's Association in 1925, when a black doctor and his family moved into their white neighborhood. They show how, even in the North, keeping African Americans out superseded all other concerns, including the law itself.

"Prince Edward County is emblematic of the way that systematized racism not only destroys black lives but also undermines the very strength of the United States." 

The government of Prince Edward County, Virginia, sabotaged their whole public-school system, harming students of every race, rather than choosing to integrate black and white students. Anderson calls this example "emblematic" because white rage is not only harmful to African Americans; rather, it is harmful to entire communities, and to the entire country.

"White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts and legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly […] 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."

For Anderson, it is crucial that we recognize racism and deliberate racial discrimination when it comes in depersonalized, official forms. We must recognize injustice when it speaks through the voice of the justice system itself. Anderson shows how the same hatred that motivated the Ku Klux Klan has motivated legislators, employers, and judges throughout our country's history, even if they have expressed it more subtly.

"For working-class whites whose hold on some semblance of the American dream was becoming increasingly tenuous […] black gains, it was assumed, could only come at the expense of whites. Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted." 

These sentences occur in Anderson's discussion of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. But they also articulate a central thesis of the book: that white people assume African-American progress takes something away from them; thus, they work to contain and restrict African-American progress. 

"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."

For Anderson, racism is a toxic strain in American public life that damages both the victim and the perpetrator. White rage backfires on white people the whole country, as it works to sabotage our schools, our justice system, our democratic process, and our economy.

"'You start out in 1954,' Atwater laid out, 'by saying "nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.'"

This quotation comes from Lee Atwater, a campaign strategist for Richard Nixon, explaining what he called the “Southern Strategy” for Republican campaigns in the post-Civil Rights era. Because overt racism had become unacceptable, politicians appealed to racist sentiments in the South by using coded language often economic in nature/topic. Atwater's shockingly blunt statement confirms one of Anderson's core claims: that racism is a driving force in American politics even when politicians may deny racist motives.

"Trump tapped into an increasingly powerful conservative base that had been nurtured for decades on the Southern Strategy's politics of anti-black resentment."

Anderson argues that the politics of racism is an ongoing and multi-generational force in American society. Trump's campaign drew on the racially-charged strategies of Atwater and Nixon, and his success showed that white rage still motivates American voters. 

"Crime and blackness soon became synonymous in a carefully constructed way that played to the barely subliminal fears of darkened, frightening images flashing across the television screen."

One way that Nixon, and Republican politicians who followed in his footsteps, provided a respectable veil for racism was through advertisements and media representations that associated black people and black neighborhoods with crime and violence. This tactic stoked white fears and white rage. 

"Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation. In short, education strengthens democracy." 

Education is, for Anderson, both the cause of and solution to racial injustice in the U.S. Unequal and insufficient educational opportunities for African Americans have trapped them in poverty and limited their quality of life, but through better education, the cycle of injustice and poverty can be overcome.

"Realtors, insurance agents, banks, and landlords had devised a witches' brew of schemes and machinations, such as redlining and redistricting covenants, to cordon off wide swaths of Detroit's housing stock from African Americans and carve a color line through the city."

Redlining and redistricting refer to ways that landlords and banks contrived to keep black people from moving into white neighborhoods by denying them loans, sales, or permits outside of designated black ghettoes. These tactics are an important reminder of how distributed and decentralized the effects of white rage can be; it doesn't simply come from politicians and the courts, but from local businesses and property owners, too.

"In effect, Southern courts transferred full control of black people from the plantation owner to a carceral state. The instrument of re-enslavement was a brutal deployment of sheriffs, judges, and hard-labor punishment for black-only offenses such as carrying a firearm, making an insulting gesture, or stealing a pig."

Anderson describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, criminal laws and the justice system were reorganized in Southern states to target African Americans specifically. A carceral state is a state that functions through prisons and incarceration, and in Anderson's argument, incarceration replaced slavery in the post-war South, and reproduced its oppression of black people.

“‘This is […] a country for white men, and by God, as long as I'm president, it shall be a government for white men.'"

These words were spoken by Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln to the presidency and thus led the country during the beginning of the Reconstruction era. Anderson views Johnson's presidency as one of the great missed opportunities of American history: the country might have emerged from the Civil War with a deep commitment to human rights and racial justice; instead, those in power were determined to keep it "a government for white men." 

"The objective was to contain and neutralize the victories of the Civil Rights movement by painting a picture of a 'colorblind,' equal opportunity society whose doors were now wide open, if only African Americans would take initiative and walk on through."

One way that racist attitudes persist in mainstream society is by denying that racism still exists. Anderson points out how successful some leaders and politicians have been at dismantling affirmative action, voting rights, and equal-opportunity regulations by arguing that the battle against racism is over. 

"Black respectability or 'appropriate' behavior doesn't seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama's presidency made that clear. Aspirations and the achievement of those aspirations provide no protection."

It's no secret that Barack Obama's election provoked racists and caused a widespread outbreak of white rage. But one unexpected aspect of that outbreak was the revelation that even someone as educated, articulate, and respectable as Obama could still provoke violent excesses of bigotry. This shows that it is not vulgarity or a lack of refinement that makes some white people uncomfortable, but simply skin color itself.

"Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, taking stock of the nearly inevitable demographic apocalypse, put it best: 'We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.'" 

Anderson quotes the reaction of one Republican senator to the coalition of young people, women, and minorities who elected Obama. Graham's candor reveals that the Republican Party has built their platform on appealing to "angry white guys," or, put another way, on eliciting white rage. 

"Now, felony convictions, chiefly via the war on drugs, replaced the explicit use of race as the mechanism to deny black Americans their rights as citizens. Disfranchisement, permanent bans on jury service, and legal discrimination in employment, housing, and education—despite the civil rights legislation of the 1960s—are now all burdens carried by those who have been incarcerated. That burden has been disproportionately shouldered by the black community, which, although only 13 percent of the nation's population, makes up 45 percent of those incarcerated."

This is one of the more complex claims of Anderson's book, but it is a crucial one. Under Jim Crow laws, it was legal to turn African Americans away from polling places, schools, and certain neighborhoods. Since the Civil Rights Act, discrimination based on race is no longer legal. But it is still legal to turn away convicted felons from housing, jobs, and polling places—and, Anderson explains, the drug laws have been drafted and selectively enforced to target black people. The outcome, therefore, is the same as it was under Jim Crow.

"All the while, white rage manages to maintain not only the upper hand but also, apparently, the moral high ground. It's Giuliani chastising black people to fix the problems in their own neighborhoods instead of always scapegoating the police. It's the endless narratives about a culture of black poverty that devalues education, hard work, family, and ambition. It's a mantra told so often that some African Americans themselves have come to believe it."

White rage almost never openly confesses to its racist motives and designs. Instead, it is a common tactic to blame the African-American community itself for the problems that racially-unfair policies have created.

"While the U.S. population grew, especially as minority communities became a larger share of the electorate, Republican regimes cut nearly 900 polling places where American citizens could cast a ballot. This was a particularly 'pernicious tactic for disenfranchising voters of color' because it was 'often done quietly, late in the election season, making pre-election intervention or litigation virtually impossible.’"

Anderson shows in detail in her Afterword the consequences that voter suppression can have on elections and the future of American democracy. By closing polling places in minority neighborhoods and purging minority voters from registration rolls, Republican governors and officials have maintained an electoral advantage by shutting out African Americans from the democratic process. These practices are a major factor, she argues, in the election of Trump.

“The ever-present threat of violence was pervasive, with the full support, and sometimes participation, of law enforcement. As J.W. Milam, the Mississippian who tortured and murdered fourteen-year-old Emmet Till only to be found ‘not guilty’ in 1955 by a jury of his peers, remarked, ‘Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids.’”

Anderson does not dwell on lynchings like the famous Emmet Till case at great length in the book. But she does talk at great length about the legal efforts made to prevent black people from voting and going to school, which is apparently what the murderer, Milam, wanted, too. This quote is important because it places torture and murder along a continuum of white rage, along with school segregation and vote suppression.

“The glint of promise that had come as the war ended required an absolute resolve to do what it would take to recognize four million newly emancipated people as people, as citizens.”

The end of the Civil War is the first of several moments Anderson refers to as a crossroads for the nation, when changes could have been made that would have protected and fostered equality and justice. In other crossroads moments, too, the people and the government of the U.S. have lacked the resolve to take the better path. 

“Just as African Americans’ so-called genetically induced moral and intellectual failings provided the rationale for Jim Crow, the GOP created a similar series of hypotheses to rationalize voter suppression. The Southern Strategy’s long-term efforts to link the Democratic party with blacks and to make African American[s] synonymous with crime, thus made tying Democrats to widespread fraud a simple, logical leap.”

In this passage, Anderson connects several different threads of white rage together in the context of voter suppression initiatives by the Republican Party. Under the guise of rooting out voter fraud, Republican governments and movements have removed thousands of black names from the voter rolls and rolled back the protections of the Voting Rights Act. This pretext for getting rid of black voters–who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats–is in line with the other false narratives that have been advanced in the service of white rage.

“As the horrific toll crack cocaine caused in the inner city became more and more obvious, the administration’s response was not to fund a series of treatment facilities but to demonize and criminalize blacks and provide the federal resources to make incarceration, rather than education, normative.”

During the Reagan’s presidency, crack cocaine was constantly associated with the black community in the media, and the government took strong steps to increase criminal penalties for drug offenses. Anderson argues that the choice to manage the drug problem with incarceration, rather than treatment, stems from the association between drugs (especially crack) and blackness, and that the result of this choice was the mass incarceration of black people.

“What President Reagan loathed was the Great Society that, despite its dispersal of benefits to middle-class whites and its measurable effectiveness in lifting the elderly out of poverty, he succeeded in coding as a giveaway program for blacks.”

This passage shows the effectiveness of racial animus and white rage in achieving political goals: even though Reagan’s hatred for Social Security, Medicaid, student loans, and other forms of public assistance was not rooted in hatred of blacks, by associating those programs with black people, he succeeded in making them unpopular with large numbers of white voters.