2018 read #6: White Rage by Carol Anderson.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
166 pages
Published 2016
Read from February 9 to February 21
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

When I was young, one excuse my father scraped up for keeping my brother and I out of public school was a never-defined bogeyman named "busing." The way he spoke of this dread thing made me fear it like a punishment, though to me it sounded a lot like riding the bus downtown with my Grandma, which left me confused -- because what could me more fun than riding the bus downtown with my Grandma? I only learned what busing was much later, by which time I had mostly forgotten the venom in my father's voice and how determined he had been to avoid it.

I never went to public school for more than a few months. Not a few months at a time -- a few months total, out of my entire childhood. Busing was only one excuse. The fact was, my father was delusional and paranoid to the point where he could not function, and me living in a car traveling aimlessly across the country with him was merely an incidental side effect.

Fast forward to 2018, when the entire country is paralyzed and unable to function thanks to the delusions and paranoia of somewhat less than half of the electorate. The America I had glimpsed with my father inside gun shows and Oklahoma gun shops -- what back then seemed like a fringe, with its Deep State conspiracies, toxic hatred and masculinity, military rations, survivalist manuals, and monolithic Whiteness -- now parades openly under the light of a thousand tiki torches, its pathetic sociopathy given a physical shape in an orange would-be dictator whose whinging insecurities are applauded as manly resolve. Despite my upbringing, despite seeing the fetid roots of Trumpism with my own eyes way back in the early '90s, I had been completely floored by ascent of White populism. How could an obvious fascist, with all the charisma and legitimacy of a toy from a Crackerjack box, have swept into power? What happened to the vaguely comforting soft-liberal platitudes of acceptance and progress I had absorbed from cartoons and PBS as a kid, then so scorned from my rarefied Social Democratic perch in my 30s? Growing up in a car, absorbing a picture of American sociology from '90s kiddie pop culture, had sheltered me, hidden the ugly realities of American Whiteness from me until the paranoid gun show crowd suddenly ran every branch of government, and the America I believed I had known turned out to be a Saturday morning fiction.

White Rage is required reading for any of us who entered the Age of Trump with a sheltered, privileged perspective on race. One by one, Anderson picks apart the pleasant myths of Civil Rights progress to show the pale termites destroying the substance behind the façade. Every step of the way, from dismantling Reconstruction to destroying public schooling rather than desegregating, from suppressing the Black vote with poll taxes and literacy tests to suppressing the Black vote with voter ID requirements and gerrymandering, and all the insidious and rarely-questioned "everybody knows" myths of American public policy, Anderson presents a methodical picture of White America's inability to tolerate Black American success and advancement. Each chapter is an emotionally exhausting survey of the evils that systemic, deep-rooted anti-Black racism has perpetrated, climaxing with the triumph of the Southern Strategy, the Nixon-Reagan Supreme Court, and the simultaneous release of crack into the inner city and the criminalization of Blackness under the "War on Drugs." It is horrifying, appalling, enraging. And it makes me despair for any true progress in a post-Trump America.

As with many books about conservation or biodiversity, Anderson closes with a hopeful epilogue musing on the possibility of positive change, if only enough of us would unite to repudiate White rage and build a truly free and inclusive future. And as with all those books about saving the environment, the hopefulness of that epilogue (written and published before the 2016 election) is in a sense more depressing than the litany of horrors that went before it. Right now, at least, it doesn't feel like much will change. Trumpism and anti-Black fascism have been political forces throughout White America from the very beginning; the facile belief that "all of that was in the past," which informed so much of my worldview in the '90s and '00s, was in fact part and parcel of the sociopolitical effort to reframe and minimize the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe things will get better in a generation (assuming some insecure fascist dictator doesn't push a button, on either side of the Pacific), but right now, it's hard to see how.

And that in itself is another vital dose of insight from this book.