THE CONSEQUENCE OF WHITE RAGE: BEING WORSE OFF AS A NATION

Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) ("White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular--to what it can see. [] Working the halls of power, it can achieve its end far more effectively, far more destructively. [] The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspiration, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve." Id. at 3-4.  From the book jacket: "Anderson makes clear that since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances toward full participation in our democracy, white reaction--usually in the courts and legislatures--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 Great Migration north was physically opposed in many Southern states, and blacks often found conditions in the North to be no better. 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 that the War on Drugs that disenfranchised and imprisoned millions of African Americans. The election of Barack Obama, and the promise it heralded of healing the racial divide, perpetuated instead a rash of voter suppression laws in Southern and swing states, while the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act." "Carefully linking these and other historical flash points when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted white opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered punitive actions allegedly made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud. From the text: "Imagine the educational prowess our population might now boast had Brown actually been implemented. What a very different nation we would have been if all the enormous legal and political efforts that went into subverting and undermining the right to education had actually been used to uphold and ensure that right. If all those hundreds of millions of federal dollars poured into science education had actually rained down  on those hungry for education, regardless of race, ethnicity, or income. Think about what a different national conversation we might be having, even as the economy turns ever more surely to knowledge-based, rather than watching our share of the world's scientists and engineers dwindle." Id. at 163.).