National Book Critics Circle Award Winner New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016 A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 From the Civil War to our combustible present White Rage reframes our continuing conversation about race chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in Americanow in paperback with a new afterword by the author acclaimed historian Carol Anderson. As Ferguson Missouri erupted in August 2014 and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as black rage historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable oped in The Washington Post suggesting that this was instead white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames she argued everyone had ignored the kindling. Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy white reaction 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 Supreme Courts 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 socalled Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House and then the election of Americas first black President led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition Anderson pulls back th