Location
7:00 Book Discussion
(Zoom Meeting Opens at 6:45)
Everyone is welcome to join our discussion, even if you did not have time to read the article or listen to the podcast.
Join LWV ABC Book Club Zoom Meeting
- Meeting ID: 924 7032 1268
- Passcode: 854158
- Dial in: +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) or +1 929 205 6099 US (New York)
WHITE RAGE The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016) by Carol Anderson
The book, while only 246 pages, presents a information dense analyis of American history and will be discussed in both March and April.
- March Book Club: Prologue, Chapters 1 and 2 which focus on Reconstruction and the Great Migration
- April Book Club: Chapter 3, 4, 5 and Afterward which focus on desegregation, civil rights and the election of the first Black president.
Book Description:
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,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she argued, "everyone had ignored the kindling."
Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints 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. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America. 246 pages.
- National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
- A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
- A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Yea
“This book is an extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism bequeathed by white anger and resentment, and to show its continuing threat to the promise of American democracy.” – New York Times
"[A] powerful survey of American history as seen in the violent white reactions to black progress, from Reconstruction to the great migration to the current political landscape." -- Boston Globe
Library Availability: Multiple ebooks and books available at Hennepin County and Anoka County Libraries.
