White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

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Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapter 4-Afterword

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Chapter 4-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: "Rolling Back Civil Rights"

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s won many local victories as well as two great, nationwide achievements: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment, housing, public services, and voting. These landmark acts of legislation provoked excesses of white rage that are detailed in this chapter. Anderson focuses on the way that, in the decades after the iconic successes of the Civil Rights Movement, the Nixon and Reagan administrations dismantled those successes by initiating widespread voter suppression measures and discriminatory school funding and districting policies, in addition to the War on Drugs (with the mass incarceration of African Americans as its unspoken goal).

This chapter focuses more on media narratives and campaign strategies than the previous chapters, as Anderson is describing how the public face of racism changed in the 1970s and 1980s. In this era, the blatant racism of the Reconstruction and Great Migration periods was made into something more palatable and acceptable for the mass public. Nixon's campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, provided a startlingly transparent explanation of this policy of "racism with plausible deniability" (119), which Anderson quotes: “‘You start out in 1954 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’" (119).

This tactic allowed the feeling of white rage to fester and flourish under the cover of “economic” concerns and fears about crime. Examples of Atwater’s “Southern Strategy” in practice include a Nixon campaign ad that featured images of riots, protests, and civic disorder with the tag line, “Vote like your whole world depended on it: Nixon.” The purpose of the ad, according to Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, “was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could ‘avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal’” (104).

These appeals to white rage formed the foundation of George Wallace’s 1968 campaign for President, as well as Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan’s campaign platforms, each of which Anderson discusses in this chapter.These campaigns worked on “working-class whites whose hold on some semblance of the American dream was becoming tenuous as the economy buckled under pressure from financing both the Great Society and the Vietnam War” (102). African Americans became a convenient scapegoat for these financial pressures, as the progress made by the Civil Rights Movement created a backlash of white rage. As Anderson points out, “Black gains, it was assumed, could only come at the expense of whites” (102).

Once elected to office, those who campaigned on strategies appealing to white rage set about rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Era through legislative means aimed at the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. One of the most important court decisions of this campaign was San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), a case which originated in a disadvantaged, racial-minority Texas school district. Parents from the district sued to challenge the system of school funding via property taxes, which gave an unfair advantage to schools and children from richer areas. The Edgewood neighborhood of San Antonio was 96 percent Mexican and black, and the lower property values meant that local schools were deeply underfunded, compared to richer areas with equivalent or lower tax rates.

The Texas district court agreed, ruling that “‘education is a fundamental right,’” and “Texas’s funding scheme was irrational and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” (112). But upon appeal, the Supreme Court, with four of Nixon’s appointees, ruled in favor of the school district, declaring that the discriminatory system could not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because “there is no fundamental right to education in the Constitution” (112). Because public schools are funded by property taxes across the country, the Court argued, this funding system could not be regarded as innately unjust, despite the manifest disparity between the tax dollars spent on educating the average white student compared to the average black student. The effects of this decision, Anderson argues, were wide-ranging and are still being felt in the “neo-segregation” of our present education system.

Under President Reagan, cuts to federal programs and federal jobs, coupled with the weakening of civil rights protections in the workplace, had a profound effect on the economic and social well-being of African Americans. During Reagan’s presidency, the median income for African-American families fell, while it grew for white families:

[Reagan’s] job cuts, retooling of student financial aid to eliminate those most in need, and decimation of antipoverty and social welfare programs virtually ensured that the goal of the African American community for economic stability and progress would crumble and fade” (123).

The crack epidemic then engulfed these already-troubled communities. Anderson traces how the Reagan Administration allowed and even promulgated that drug epidemic by funding right-wing movements, or “contras,” in Latin America, which were largely funded by the drug cartels who brought crack cocaine to American inner cities. The War on Drugs proved an effective method of stripping black Americans of their civil rights: mass incarceration due to drug convictions has resulted in huge numbers of African Americans losing the right to vote and the ability to earn a decent living, and has eroded the safety and stability of their communities. Together with the media campaigns to associate “crime” and “blackness” in the popular imagination, the drug war and conservative opposition to welfare and social programs have proved enormously effective outlets for white rage.

Chapter 5 Summary: "How to Unelect a Black President"

In the final chapter, Anderson examines the reaction to Barack Obama's election from the perspective of white rage. Paradoxically, Obama's victory provided both ammunition and camouflage to reactionary whites, because the election of a black President enraged white racists while allowing them to deny the continued existence of systemic racism in American society; after all, if the United States were a racist society, how could a black man have been elected?

Republican strategists and activists, having seen the enormous voter turnout that Obama's campaign produced, created new measures to suppress minority votes across the country: "I don't want everybody to vote," one conservative activist said, because "[Republican] leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down" (140). Strategies to prevent minorities from voting, spearheaded by Republican organizations like True the Vote, have flourished since Obama was elected, with the purpose of preventing a candidate like Obama from ever being elected again. These vote-suppression efforts have raised the specter of widespread “voter fraud” as a pretext for making it harder for people to register to vote, make it to the polls, and participate in the democratic process, despite the fact that no solid evidence of widespread fraud has ever been produced. Anderson describes numerous voter-suppression measures enacted in the wake of Obama’s election, such as voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and polling place hours, and deregistration initiatives that remove names from the rolls of registered voters for supposed address errors.

The most important tool in the arsenal of Republican strategists aiming to suppress minority votes came with the Supreme Court decision in the Shelby County v. Holder case (2013). Anderson refers to this decision as a “gutting of the Voting Rights Act” (148).

Under the Voting Rights Act, counties with a history of voting rights violations were required to receive approval from the Department of Justice before making changes to election districts or voting procedures. Shelby County, Alabama, was one such county, but the local election supervisors defied the law to redraw district boundaries, unseating the county’s only African-American councilman. When the NAACP sued, the county officials claimed that federal oversight of their electoral process was no longer needed, and they shouldn’t have to account to the Department of Justice. The case made it to the Supreme Court and was decided 5-4 in favor of the Shelby County commissioners in 2013, effectively striking down the provision of the Voting Rights Act that allows for federal oversight of elections in areas with a proven track record of discrimination.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argued that this protection was obsolete because, essentially, racism was over now.The narrow majority “conceded the past terror and pernicious laws that had resulted in millions of African Americans being disfranchised. But it was a new day in the South, Roberts wrote confidently” (149). In fact, Roberts argued, since racial discrimination was a thing of the past, the protections and oversight enshrined in the Voting Rights Act were, in fact, unfairly discriminatory towards the South.

The effects of the Shelby County v. Holder decision were widespread and devastating: immediately after the ruling, nine of the twelve former Confederate states passed laws making it more difficult to vote. By 2014, thirteen more states passed voter restriction statutes, all “under the guise of protecting the ‘integrity’ of the ballot box, but all had the intent of limiting and frustrating voting by African Americans and, now, Latinos too” (151).

Texas, for instance, enacted a draconian voter-ID law which effectively purged 600,000 black and Latino voters who faced bureaucratic and financial obstacles to obtaining the required IDs. A district court judge ruled that, since it cost money to obtain an ID, the ID requirement was tantamount to “an unconstitutional poll tax” on citizens (152). But the Supreme Court also upheld the Texas law. Without the protections of the Voting Rights Act in place, these states are free to enact discriminatory voting regulations and the effect on elections has been measurable.

Anderson also considers the white rage inspired by Obama in the domain of media and popular culture. Despite Obama’s enduring popularity with Americans and the range of challenges he faced as President, including an economic crisis and two unpopular wars, he faced an unprecedented amount of vitriol from, especially, the right-wing media.

The right-wing media’s animosity towards Obama cannot be explained by his policies, which were moderate: “Obama’s centrist solutions and utter lack of radicalism in the face of a recalcitrant and obstructionist Congress should have made him a hero to traditional Republicans. But just the opposite happened” (155).

The vitriol, Anderson argues, can only really be explained by his race. Media criticism of Obama, Anderson points out, has often participated in anti-black stereotypes and occasionally veered into downright bigotry, with former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani claiming, "I do not believe the president loves America... He wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up" (157). Further, a New Hampshire police commissioner was observed yelling "fucking nigger" at the TV, when Obama was shown (157). High-profile, racially-motivated attacks like the killing of Trayvon Martin, and Dylann Roof's murder of nine black churchgoers in South Carolina, are the extremes of a racist outlook that is still deeply embedded in mainstream American society.

Afterword Summary: "After the Election: Imagining"

The Afterword to the most recent edition of White Rage was written after Donald Trump's election to the presidency in 2016, and it focuses sharply on the voter suppression efforts described in Chapter 5 of the book. Trump was elected by a margin of fewer than 80,000 votes, Anderson points out, and numerous initiatives to suppress minority votes, passed after the election of Obama, effectively prevented far more than 80,000 people from voting. Anderson's Afterword is both a reasoned and passionate call to action, which urges Americans to recognize minority voters as the "firewall between a democracy continuing to evolve and one threatened by the corrosion of a Trump presidency" (162), and to restore the Voting Rights Act where it has been undermined. Trump catered to the explicitly-racist elements of American society, Anderson argues; his election should serve as a reminder to all of us that white rage is still a powerful and destructive force to be reckoned with.

Chapter 4-Afterword Analysis

The latter chapters of White Rage follow more subtle manifestations of the same notion—that blacks and whites should never be equal—without the same level of transparency as in past eras. At some point after the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, it became improper in mainstream society to openly espouse racist views; as the segregationist governor George Wallace himself noted, with apparent sadness, after 1968, "the days of respectable racism were over" (101). As a result, in order to remain respectable, the racism had to become covert or disguised, and Anderson devotes the final two chapters of her book to the policies and movements that grew out of what one commentator called "racism with plausible deniability" (119).

This means that the actions and movements that Anderson traces in these two chapters, including like voter suppression, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, and the 2013 government shutdown (orchestrated by the Republican-led Congress), are more tenuous and complicated in their racist motives and underpinnings.

Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan railed against welfare and drug abuse, not against black people. But the laws and regulations that they enacted to reform welfare and fight the War on Drugs target the African-American population disproportionately. As Lee Atwater, architect of Nixon's dog-whistle "Southern Strategy," explained, the point was that "blacks get hurt worse than whites" (119). In part because the events she is discussing are more recent, Anderson relies more on sources from journalism and the media in these chapters, and less on archives of court and congressional records. It can seem that the discussion has veered more towards general politics than African-American history, as in the discussion of the Iran-Contra scandal, where Reagan’s CIA funded anti-communist rebel groups in South America profited from illegal drug trafficking: it can be hard to see where African Americans fit into all of that. But it is also important to recognize that this level of abstraction is a large part of Anderson's point: the concrete bigotry of a President saying "this is a country for white men" has diffused into politics in general, like welfare reform and the 2013 government shutdown. This is because white rage has taken hold in a depersonalized and covert fashion. The result is that what appear to be ordinary functions of government are built upon a foundation of white rage.