White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Anderson tracks the many insidious ways that the undisguised violence of slavery and the Reconstruction Era went underground in the years that followed, from state-sponsored brutality and murder to the unofficial but public spectacles of lynching, to the cloaked, secret violence of the KKK, to the legal battles waged against integration, voting rights, fair housing, and equal economic opportunity for African-Americans. White rage against blacks has been able to remain in existence, and perhaps to become even more powerful, by cloaking itself in a veneer of respectable deniability. This is perhaps best demonstrated in the "Southern Strategy."

Anderson is devastatingly clear on the extent to which people in power were willing to betray American values in order to preserve the racial status quo. Not only did they betray the tenets of the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal—but they betrayed the principles of free-market capitalism, of due process of law, states’ rights, and the ideals of individual self-reliance and meritocratic advancement, all in the name of keeping African Americans from a free and equal share of democracy and upward mobility.