White Rage

African Americans who went to the North simply stepped into a new articulation of the seething, corrosive hatred underlying so much of the nation’s social compact.

First published in 2016, Carol Anderson’s White Rage is a rejoinder to the national dialogue that frames police shootings of African American men as the consequence of “black rage” that makes officers fear for their lives. Anderson makes this point in the prologue “Kindling,” which elaborates on her Washington Post Op-Ed in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri. The book expands the scope, offering a history of the relations between African Americans and White America. This history, she argues, is defined by white rage at even the slightest steps toward equality made by African Americans.

White Rage unfolds in five chapters, each of which examines a nominal step for African Americans toward realizing the American dream: Reconstruction, the Great Migration, Brown vs the Board of Education specifically, The Civil Rights Movement generally, and the election of the first African American president. But this is not a triumphant story. Anderson presents these moments in terms of how the establishment of White America set about rendering the gains hollow, perpetuating the racial schism in this country.

When I teach US history, I have my students watch a video where Anderson talks about the Tulsa Race War of 1921, when heavily armed white mobs destroyed the prosperous black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She brings the same vivid detail here, exposing particular stories like that of Dr. Ossian Sweet, whose bid to own a home in the white part of Detroit ended with his house besieged by a mob and he and his family put on trial for murder when they attempted to defend themself. In this case, Anderson recounts, the prosecutor built his case on the testimony of a police officer perjuring himself about the events, Sweet’s defense attorney––none other than Clarence Darrow––shredded the case, and, while Sweet eventually won in court, the series of events nevertheless ruined his life.

For all the trauma of the individual cases, though, Anderson demonstrates that White Rage is not the result of individual racists or a small number of southern states, but a systemic program across the country. She discusses, for instance, not only the well-known issues of voter suppression and drug policy, but also how during the height of the Space Race, there was a conscious decision that it was preferable to squander talents of wide swathes of the US population than to mobilize every available resource in the competition with the Soviet Union.

White Rage is beautifully written, with a white-hot intensity, but does not give in to the darkness it discusses. This is not a happy story, but Anderson does not deny the hope that undergirded each of the moments that proved hollow. We must “rethink America,” she says, but she means the structures: elections, education, policing and criminal justice. Rethinking America means extending the promise of America to all its citizens and rejecting the seduction of “buzzwords, dog whistles, and sophistry.”

Anderson supervised the PhDs of several of my friends, but this is the first of her books I’ve read. I was not disappointed. White Rage is a perfect complement to Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, another hard look at the systemic inequity, hard problems, and unanswered questions bubbling just beneath the shallow surface of the American dream.

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Next up, I’m about halfway through Erik Larson’s In The Garden of Beasts, which follows the family of William Dodd, the historian named the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany. Thus far I’m not as impressed by this as I was by Devil in the White City, but Larson captures the menace of Berlin in 1933 as he explores how it came to be that everyone overlooked attacks not only on Jews and Communists, but on US citizens in 1933.