REVIEW: "White Rage" By Carol Anderson
I was a freshman in high school, I believe, when a history teacher taught me that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery. It was, she told me, about economics.
I remember this particular lesson so vividly, probably, because it was the first thing a teacher had ever said that really surprised me — really made me question what I understood of the world.
While all of my previous lessons regarding this portion of US history had been inarguably vague — the truth of America’s “original sin” glossed over — I did feel like I understood one thing pretty clearly: the North and the South went to war because the South wanted to continue to own slaves and the North didn’t want this to happen.
Even though I was confused — concerned, really — I didn’t question this teacher. I had never been one to argue — something that I realize now was a byproduct of my privilege, a result of the fact that I lived a life in which I didn’t have to assert myself — and, if I were going to argue, it certainly wouldn’t have been with a teacher. As a result of this reluctance to rock the boat, I accepted the teacher’s assertion that they weren’t fighting about people’s rights to live as free, independent people but, instead, they were fighting over money.
Even now, I can see how viewing the Civil War this way would make it more palatable. How thinking of the southerners who fought for Confederacy as only worried about their financial stake — not also driven by an embedded belief that whites are inarguably superior to blacks in all ways — would make it easier. It would make it possible to push down those feelings of dread and disgust that inevitably rise up within you when you first learn that slavery was a very real thing that happened, comparatively, not that long ago.
One lesson that Carol Anderson imparted with absolute clarity, though, is that there is danger in accepting alternate explanations for the actions of our ancestors.
Starting with reconstruction and moving through the election of Donald Trump, Anderson penned a magnum opus rife with truths American’s have been almost universally reluctant to acknowledge.
With unflinching honesty and brutal details, she completely obliterated the rosy images that too many of us see when we look in the rearview, glancing back at the past.
While contemporary curriculum and dedicated educators don’t entirely ignore the racism that permeates the American experience, too many students are taught that incidents of race-related violence are just that: isolated blips that, while unfortunate, don’t typify our society.
It is all too often implied that the Civil War happened and, as a result of the Northern victory, the shackles were taken off and the slaves set free. The painful — and dangerous — truth is that, even today, children are commonly taught about the Civil War with the same total disregard for actual facts as all lessons regarding Thanksgiving — that magical day when Pilgrims and “Indians” put their differences aside forever and bonded over cans of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce.
This book made abundantly clear for readers that the belief that the Civil War was absolutely and irrevocably successful in ensuring “freedom” is as accurate as our elementary construction-paper-costume reenactments of the first Thanksgiving.
With fact after painful, infuriating fact, Anderson made abundantly clear that, even following the Civil War, black American’s weren’t free in any real sense. They were still bound by the figurative shackles of “illiteracy, poverty, and economic vulnerability.” And this was by design. Those with the power to facilitate the removal of these shackles were insistent on keeping them in place indefinitely. They might have lost the war, but they weren’t fully defeated.
In fairness, this wasn’t entirely new news.
Almost anyone who went through the American education system would likely have memories of teachers explaining, in broad, non-specific terms, how racism continued. They would remember learning about Jim Crow Laws, about Plessy vs. Ferguson, about Brown vs. The Board of Education. But even in these lessons, it was insinuated that these unapologetically racist actions were a relic of the past, however recent. It was implied that we had moved beyond that. It was suggested that now, finally, equality was the law of the land.
What reading this book taught me — and will hopefully teach all readers — is that the biggest danger lies in the assumption that our job is done. It rests in the little white lies, the euphemistic approach to teaching children about the most indefensible parts of our history.
Our journey is far from over.
Most people, it would seem, believe the axiom, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” In this case, though, it’s not as much that we have forgotten history as it is that we have deliberately ignored it.
Until we stop this campaign of ignorance, we will be trapped in this vicious and morally bankrupt cycle of engrained oppression.
And that is where this book is most powerful: it provides this history lesson that we all need. It details the horrors of the past and forecasts the potential problems of the future. It all but forces us to open our eyes and make the changes that can only occur from full, unflinching, confrontation of our collective history and acknowledgement of the prejudice that permeates society today.
A truly transformative read that will both enlighten and embolden readers, this primer on America’s racial divide should be required reading.
It earns 4 out of 5 cocktails.
I, like so many socially conscious readers, am actively working to build my knowledge. Have you been working on a similar goal? What books have proven transformative for you? Tell me about your recent anti-racist reads in the comments, below.
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