White Power and Plausible Deniability: White Rage by Carol Anderson

This week we read Carol Anderson’s book White Rage, which covered the syllabus topic “White Power and Plausible Deniability.” Anderson’s book is very readable and approachable for novice historians and if you are reading these posts looking for inspiration for a book to read, this would be a good place to start.  Hopefully you noticed connections with last week’s book and are gaining a sense that historians build on each others’ work to expand our knowledge of both the past and present.  

Anderson examines American history by focusing specifically on famous moments that on their surface made life better for African Americans. The introduction tells us that Anderson will examine five specific case studies: the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Great Migration to the north in search of better living conditions, Brown v. Board of Education, the passage of major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, and the election of Barack Obama (for a copy of my notes, see here). Many of us might remember these moments from our high school history classes when they were highlighted as moments of dramatic steps towards equality. However, Anderson also demonstrates that this optimistic version of history is in many ways a myth that overlooks the fact that white Americans felt threatened by these steps towards equality and repeatedly worked to return African Americans to a subordinate status, acting out “white rage.” After reading the introduction, we now know the book aims to tell a long story challenging the idea of “progressive” history – while there have been positive steps towards equality in American history, the past also features moments when society stepped backwards so progress is not the inevitable direction of history.

Hopefully you turned from the introduction to examine the book’s footnotes and noticed the book relies primarily on books written by other historians.  This is a sign the book is trying to “synthesize” big ideas and generate a larger thesis for readers.  Anderson brings the findings from historians of many different time periods together to tell a sweeping history of American racism.  As we saw last week with Kevin Kruse’s book, historians reliance on primary sources often ties them to specific communities and time periods – in Kruse’s book, Atlanta during the 1950s and 1960s. Anderson uses a combination of books to tell a long history of the past 150 years that spans the country’s political and cultural changes to demonstrate that one constant over those decades has been the enduring power of racism.

If you were looking to skim the book and examined the index, you might have focused on the key term “discrimination,” which appears in almost every chapter. Since we know each chapter will examine discrimination and the introduction suggests all will have a similar structure (positive step to equality met with white rage and a step back), I believe a successful skimming strategy would involve sampling any of its chapters. I chose chapters one, four, and five thinking they would be directly linked to our current political debates, but I suspect two and three would connect as well – if you read other chapters, I welcome your comments below.

Anderson’s first chapter examines the abolition of slavery and the radical Republicans who passed the Thirteenth Amendment hoping it could ensure racial equality.  Radical Republicans also created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help provide land and education to freed slaves and many of the emancipated embraced these programs with gusto, viewing land as a route to economic self-sufficiency and education as a necessity for a better life. However, President Johnson pardoned Confederate leaders and allowed them to return to leadership positions in their state governments, undermining the Radical Republican project.  By the end of 1865, ex-Confederate leaders in many southern states had passed strict laws (Black Codes) that gutted the effectiveness of welfare programs designed to assist ex-slaves, denied them voting rights, and tried to reassert the pre-war economic order of cheap, uneducated workers.  Johnson refused to allow the Freedmen’s Bureau to distribute land confiscated from ex-Confederates, despite actively working for passage of the Homestead Act during his Congressional career to provide land taken from Native American tribes in the Midwest to white immigrants for free. Although Reconstruction was supposed to combat white terror groups and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments aimed to provide citizenship and voting rights to African Americans, Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1870s undermined their effectiveness and allowed states to flaunt these attempts at racial equality by instituting state laws curtailing voting rights for African Americans.

Chapters four and five demonstrate that the white rage described in chapter one was not a relic of the past but instead a pattern repeated throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s provided an opportunity for black advancement, but this angered white southerners as well as members of the white working-class in the north who felt new laws provided unfair benefits that they did not receive.  Republican politicians recognized this white rage and delivered on campaign promises to roll back the enforcement of these rules – Nixon limited the enforcement of the VRA and appointed Supreme Court justices committed to limiting these laws, while Reagan slashed funding for programs designed to assist African Americans and promoted drug policies that criminalized crack far more harshly than powder cocaine used by whites.  The rollback of rights continued in the twenty-first century when Republicans realized demographic shifts would make it very difficult to win federal elections as white voters declined as a percentage of the population. Instead, they capitalized on Supreme Court decisions cutting into the VRA and passed legislation aimed at disenfranchising African Americans. In recent years Republican operatives used “do not forward” mailers and monitored African Americans’ social media accounts in an effort to purge non-whites from voter rolls, while also campaigning for voter ID laws that deliberately overlooked the fact that it is significantly more difficult for minority groups to acquire identification cards.  These contemporary campaigns aim to disenfranchise African Americans – just as in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Anderson’s book clearly foreshadows the election of Donald Trump, ending right before last year’s vote.  As other commentators have noted, it should not be a surprise that the country elected a president bent on denying the legitimacy and legacy of the first African-American president. Anderson’s book places that in a troubling historical context of more than 150 years.  The echoes are palpable – I was particularly struck by a passage on page thirty describing violence outside a New Orleans polling station in 1866, as a white mob attacked black voters and the mob’s leader feared no reprisal since he believed President Johnson agreed with them.  In the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, white nationalist leaders also claimed the president supported their actions.  Beyond overt racial violence, President Trump’s policies and priorities also point to concrete efforts to disenfranchise minority groups by undermining voting access and appointing officials largely indifferent to the protection of civil rights.

Anderson concludes by noting that it is within our power to work for equality, as she sees the problem largely in terms of enforcement of existing rules and laws. She focuses specifically on voting rights, education, policing, and the judicial system – many of which already have federal laws designed to promote them, though they need their enforcement to be guaranteed for all Americans. The book provides a powerful reminder that progress towards racial equality is not guaranteed and in fact is often met with resistance – it is therefore our responsibility to learn from that past and actively promote racial equality in our world through our votes and voices.