White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial
Divide

Monday, February 11, 2019

6:00 pm, McCosh Hall, Room 10

Throughout our history, as African American have advanced 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 so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House. Professor Anderson will discuss the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, and renders visible the long lineage of White rage, adding an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

Carol Anderson is professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of several bestselling books including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018) and the critically-acclaimed White Rage (2016). Professor Anderson is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge University Press), which was awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. Her book Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 was published by Cambridge in 2014.  She has also written for Foreign Policy, the Washington Post and CNN.com.

Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science (International Relations) and History. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.

This event, free and open to the public with no ticket or reservation required, is sponsored by the Spencer Trask Lecture Series.