White Rage
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide is a 2016 nonfiction book by Emory University professor Carol Anderson. Anderson was contracted to write the book following the reaction to an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in 2014. White Rage became a New York Times Best Seller, and was listed as a notable book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and the Chicago Review of Books. White Rage was also listed by The New York Times as an Editors' Choice, and won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
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What Hacker News says
- You are asking in good faith, so please don’t take this the wrong way.
I can give you one clue: from your comment I already know that you are a white American, and that the “well-educated, intelligent people [you] know” are also overwhelmingly white. Ask yourself: how do I know this? It’s because never in a million years would an African-American, or Muslim American, or Native American, say something like that. Non-white Americans experience racism, both overt and subtle, every day. Most White Americans are oblivious to it because they live in a highly segregated society, and they don’t have any close friends or family experiencing it. So they perpetuate the myth of a “colorblind society” - the idea that race doesn’t matter in America anymore. And by denying the problem, we are doomed to perpetuate it.
I recommend reading White Rage by Carol Anderson, it’s a good introduction to the topic. Every American should get educated on race relations 101. You can’t understand the USA without understanding the role racism plays in its history and institutions.
- It's far more than a swipe -- it's very relevant. If you look into the history of police, they started out as slavecatchers. Vigilantism quickly caught on and white folks were given implicit authority to question the origin, destination, and qualifications of any black person they happened to come across. You can follow the unbroken thread of this culture and attitude to today.
Police institutions today are a manifestation of the fragility of the white ego when confronted with black people with ambitions. They will ignore black folks who stay "in their place", i.e., don't leave their neighborhoods so white people don't see them. It is when black people attempt to assert socioeconomic mobility that the white folks quickly mobilize.
One of the impetuses for Brown v. Board of Education was that white administrators shut down the entire public school system so that "equality" was achieved in that both white and black students couldn't access public schools. Following vehement outcries from both black and white parents, they started handing out tax-funded vouchers to the white families only to attend private schools, which is how the charter school phenomenon became such a big idea. Betsy DeVos and her family are perpetuating this essentially segregationist system today, with tokenized and very public displays of "see it's not a racist system because sometimes black children win the lottery too!"
As we still operate in this society I had a kneejerk reaction and feel almost obligated to add a "not all white people" clause, which only reinforces the points made above.
Here are resources for the people who are reacting to the language I'm using:
Dr. Robin DiAngelo, who literally wrote the book on white fragility https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ey4jgoxeU
Prof. Carol Anderson on the closely-related concept of white rage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBYUET24K1c
