The Fire This Time

Much like Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go From Here?”, Carol Anderson’s “White Rage” outlines the sustained historical resistance against African American civil rights. Anderson locates this resistance in majority-white power structures like the police, legislative bodies, the housing market, and the criminal justice system. She echoes Wilkerson’s thoughts about the cyclical nature of this struggle: “For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash” (84). This backlash does not wear its brutal intent on its sleeve, since white rage uses the orderly systems on which this country was founded to demean black Americans. 

Anderson’s rapid perusal of American history highlights a few key events that prompted such backlash. Through a long series of court decisions and the enaction of laws, the engines of government suppressed black advancement and perpetuated systemic racism. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, moreover, politicians, lawmakers, and other authorities altered their language to mask white rage as economic thrift or political expediency. Whereas the Black Codes of the former Confederacy explicitly hampered the rights of African Americans, the Tea Party’s proposal to cut government jobs contains no racial overtones but disproportionately affects black government workers. 

The landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954 and marked significant progress in the Civil Rights Movement. However, as Anderson describes, white citizens and lawmakers alike were outraged at this ruling. Southern legislatures used legal loopholes to keep schools segregated, while others participated in violent demonstrations against black students who attended newly integrated schools. 

The election of the first black president in 2008 similarly evoked white rage in myriad ways. The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, for example, made voting districts vulnerable to discriminatory policies. This ruling “gutted the Voting Rights Act” (86), the 1965 legislation that protected African Americans against prejudice at the polls. Voting is a fundamental democratic right, but the American legal system can still manipulate voting procedures to perpetuate inequality. 

At the time of Anderson’s writing, highly publicized instances of deadly force against black Americans were rocking the nation. The death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, provoked a wave of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police. The death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, in addition to Zimmerman’s acquittal, sparked widespread controversy and activism as well. Anderson echoes Ward’s Introduction when referencing how the judge in Zimmerman’s trial “transform[ed] a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun [became] a victim” (87). This skewing of perspectives is itself an injustice and act of cruelty against the young man who lost his life—or, in Anderson’s words, is further evidence of the legal system’s white rage.