Contemporary Authors

• Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2003
• Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2015
• White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2016

1. White rage : the unspoken truth of our racial divide LCCN 2015049398 Type of material Book Personal name Anderson, Carol (Carol Elaine) Main title White rage : the unspoken truth of our racial divide / Carol Anderson. Published/Produced New York : Bloomsbury, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. Description 246 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781632864123 (hardback) CALL NUMBER E185.61 .A5438 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Bourgeois radicals : the NAACP and the struggle for colonial liberation, 1941-1960 LCCN 2014020153 Type of material Book Personal name Anderson, Carol (Carol Elaine), author. Main title Bourgeois radicals : the NAACP and the struggle for colonial liberation, 1941-1960 / Carol Anderson, Emory University. Published/Produced New York NY : Cambridge University Press, 2015. Description xii, 372 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm ISBN 9780521763783 (hardback : alk. paper) 9780521155731 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 076591 CALL NUMBER E185.5.N276 A53 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 154726 CALL NUMBER E185.5.N276 A53 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Eyes off the prize : the United Nations and the African American struggle for human rights, 1944-1955 LCCN 2002031554 Type of material Book Personal name Anderson, Carol (Carol Elaine) Main title Eyes off the prize : the United Nations and the African American struggle for human rights, 1944-1955 / Carol Anderson. Published/Created Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2003. Description x, 302 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0521824311 (hardback) 0521531586 (pbk.) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam031/2002031554.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/cam031/2002031554.html CALL NUMBER E185.61 .A543 2003 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2015 031791 CALL NUMBER E185.61 .A543 2003 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: n 2002041045

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Anderson, Carol (Carol Elaine)

  Birth date: 19590617

  Field of activity: African Americans--History

  Found in: Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the prize, 2003: CIP t.p. (Carol
  Anderson; University of Missouri-Columbia) publisher's
  info (Assistant Professor of History at the University
  of Missouri-Columbia)
  Phone call to author, Sept. 5, 2002 (Carol Elaine Anderson)
  Bourgeois radicals, 2015: eCIP title page (Carol Anderson,
  Emory University) eCIP data view (born June 17, 1959)
  Emory University web site, May 23, 2014 (Carol Anderson,
  assoc. prof. of African American Studies and history;
  author of Eyes off the prize)

  ================================================================================

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  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

• Department of African American Studies, Emory University Web site - http://aas.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/anderson-carol.html

  Carol Anderson
  Photo of

  Download Full CV
  Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies

  Email: carol.anderson@emory.edu
  Biography

  Carol Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Professor Anderson’s research and teaching focus on public policy; particularly the ways that domestic and international policies intersect through the issues of race, justice and equality in the United States.

  Professor Anderson is the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards. In her second monograph, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, also published by Cambridge, Professor Anderson uncovered the long-hidden and important role of the nation’s most powerful civil rights organization in the fight for the liberation of peoples of color in Africa and Asia. Professor Anderson's most recent work, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, published by Bloomsbury, is a New York Times Bestseller, Race and Civil Rights of August 2016, and was a New York Times Editor's Pick for July 2016. Click here for more about White Rage.

  Her research has garnered substantial fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (The Big Ten and the University of Chicago), and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

  She has also served on working groups dealing with race, minority rights, and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations. Her op-ed in the Washington Post was the most shared for the newspaper in 2014.

  Professor Anderson has received numerous teaching awards, including the Crystal Apple Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, the Mizzou Class of '39 Outstanding Faculty Award, the Most Inspiring Professor Award from the Athletic Department, the Gold Chalk Award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching, and the Provost's Teaching Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty.

  Professor Anderson was a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee and is currently on the Board of Directors of 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.

  CV: http://aas.emory.edu/home/documents/Vita%209-15-2016%20Carol%20Anderson.pdf
  American Historical Association
  Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora Organization of American Historians
  Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
  World History Association

• Democracy Now! - https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/1/professor_carol_anderson_on_police_killings

  Professor Carol Anderson on Police Killings, Trump, the Clintons & Her New Book "White Rage"
  StoryNovember 01, 2016
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  Topics

  Race in America
  Police Brutality
  2016 Election

  Guests
  Carol Anderson

  professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is the author, most recently, of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

  Jury selection has begun in two high-profile murder trials of white police officers who killed unarmed black men. In Ohio, former University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing shot and killed 43-year-old Sam DuBose last year after stopping him for not having a front license plate. In North Charleston, South Carolina, officer Michael Slager faces a murder charge after a bystander filmed Slager shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back as he ran away. For more, we speak with Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is the author, most recently, of "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide."
  TRANSCRIPT
  This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

  AMY GOODMAN: Your book is called White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

  CAROL ANDERSON: Yes.

  AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the white rage that you’re witnessing today.

  CAROL ANDERSON: That rage covers itself. So, when I talk about white rage, I don’t actually mean the Klan and the cross burning, because that’s simple. In this society, we know how to identify that. This is the much more subtle, the much more destructive type of racial violence. And it emanates out of Congress, out of the Supreme Court, out of state legislatures. And it’s designed to, in fact, undercut black achievement, black aspirations and black advancement.

  So we see that, for instance, with—when Trump, at the presidential debate, and they said, "Well, how would you handle issues of racial healing and the racial divide?" and he said, "I’ve got words that somebody refuses to say, and that’s 'law and order,' and that’s 'stop and frisk.'" That is a dog whistle. That is—those are policies that, in fact, undermined the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65, has led to mass disfranchisement, so that you've got almost 8 percent of the black population unable to vote.

  AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Donald Trump in North Carolina instructing security guards to remove a black man from the crowd, describing him as a thug.

  DONALD TRUMP: You know the great thing about that—we have a protester. By the way, were you paid $1,500 to be a thug? Where is the protester? Where is he? Was he paid? You can get him out. Get him out. Out.

  AMY GOODMAN: While Donald Trump described the man as a protester, it turned out he was actually a Trump supporter. Sixty-three-year-old C.J. Carey said he went to the rally to give Trump a letter. Professor Anderson?

  CAROL ANDERSON: Yes, and it begins to tell you that—so, for all of Trump’s outreach to the black community, there was no outreach. The point was, is that his racism was so palpable that it was turning off white educated voters, and so he tried to smooth that edge. But, in fact, the racism that is undermining—undermining, but undergirding, his campaign is there, so a supporter is immediately a thug. So, a black man is immediately criminalized as thug. And this is a businessman who is a Trump supporter. And that gives you some sense of the kind of perspective, the policy perspective, that Trump will enact if he becomes president.

  AMY GOODMAN: What were you most surprised by as you researched White Rage?

  CAROL ANDERSON: I was surprised by how consistent and supple white rage was, how it consistently used the language of democracy, the language of freedom, the language of protecting the integrity of the ballot box, as a means to undermine and undercut. So, we get not only the Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, but we also get, for instance, in the Brown decision, where the Supreme Court has said "separate but equal" cannot be the law of the land, and watching these people who say that they are inherently about democracy, in fact, undermining that democracy by violating court orders consistently, over and over again, kind of like what we’re seeing right now as the Fourth Circuit, for instance, has told North Carolina, you know, "Your voter suppression laws can’t stand," and they keep doing it.

  AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about other developments this week. Jury selection began on Monday in two high-profile murder trials: white police officers who killed unarmed black man. In Ohio, the former University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing shot and killed 43-year-old Sam DuBose last year after stopping him for not having a front license plate. And then there’s the case in North Charleston, South Carolina, officer Michael Slager facing a murder charge after a bystander filmed Slager shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back as he ran away. In that case, Walter Scott was stopped by the police officer as he was driving into the AutoZone shop right nearby for, I think it was, a broken taillight. He was stopped for the taillight, and he ends up being shot by the police officer.

  CAROL ANDERSON: Yes, yes, yes.

  AMY GOODMAN: The trials come as a Justice Department investigation into the choking death of unarmed African American Eric Garner by New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo is in disarray. The New York Times reported last week that the New York-based FBI agents and federal prosecutors are no longer assigned to the investigation. They did not feel Pantaleo should be charged. The shake-up leaves prosecutors with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in charge, making it far more likely officers will face criminal charges.

  CAROL ANDERSON: And part of what we’re seeing right here is the policy of stop and frisk, which came after the advances of the civil rights movement. And so, stop and frisk is based on the broken windows theory of policing. And it says, what we have to do—if we stop these little minor crimes, then we can really stop the big ones form happening. But that’s not what really goes on. In fact, you get the criminalization of blackness. In New York City, for instance, although blacks and Latinos made up 50 percent of the population, they accounted for 84 percent of those stopped, although twice as many weapons were found on the handful of whites that were stopped as opposed to blacks and Latinos. And so, if this was really about law enforcement, you would see greater policing of the white population. This is about something else. And so, what we’re seeing in the case of the broken taillight, in terms of the expired tag, that’s that hyperpolicing that’s going on because of stop and frisk, and it leads to the death of black people.

  AMY GOODMAN: You have linked the problem with policing today to education.

  CAROL ANDERSON: Yes.

  AMY GOODMAN: You say we wouldn’t face anything like this today, if what?

  CAROL ANDERSON: If Brown had really been implemented. Because part of what we know is that what a solid, quality education does, in terms of employment, in terms of health, in terms of voting rights—all of those things are really linked to education. But Brown—after Brown, the states fought back so intensely, even to the point where they shut down a public school system for five years. And so, it’s like you were in school at the fifth grade, and your school doesn’t open again until you’re in the 10th? And the states fought back so hard that we’re ending up with large numbers of African Americans who do not have the quality education that they have a constitutional right to. And so, now we’re asking the police force to then deal with those issues emanating out of poverty, emanating out of the lack of quality education.

  AMY GOODMAN: What do you see—how do you assess President Bill Clinton’s administration when it comes to issues of white rage, black disempowerment, black empowerment, and then Hillary Clinton?

  CAROL ANDERSON: So, for Bill Clinton, part of what I see is that he went the route of the Southern strategy, which was to play to the blacks as criminals. And this is where you see—and blacks as welfare cheats. And so, this is where you see his workforce legislation. This is where you see the kind of hyperpolicing with superpredators and all of that. And this led—again, it fed into the mass incarceration of the black population. Now, what Bill Clinton would do is he would try to play culturally black—so that was, you know, the saxophone on Arsenio or all that—but the way that his policies worked were in fact very anti-black. Now, with Hillary, what I see is that she was there with him in the ’90s.

  AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go back to that moment in 1996 when she was first lady, when she described some African-American youth as superpredators.

  CAROL ANDERSON: Yes.

  HILLARY CLINTON: They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.

  AMY GOODMAN: At CNN’s Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, earlier this year, Clinton was asked about her comments again.

  DON LEMON: Secretary Clinton, in 1996, you used the term "superpredators" to describe some young kids. Some feel like it was racial code. Was it? And were you wrong to use that term?

  HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I was speaking about drug cartels and criminal activity that was very concerning to folks across the country. I think it was a poor choice of words—I never used it before, I haven’t used it since, I would not use it again.

  AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Hillary Clinton. That was during the primaries, when she was debating Bernie Sanders. Your comments, Professor Anderson?

  CAROL ANDERSON: My comments are that when I see that, it’s like Hillary was, in that moment in 1996, right along with Bill, and now that she realizes that the demographics in the Democratic Party have changed, that that coding doesn’t work as well, it doesn’t play as well, and so you see her stepping back. And I think part of what I’m also seeing, frankly, has been the pushing on that from the Black Lives Matter activists, who are helping her—and the Bernie folks, who are helping her begin to see what structural racism actually does in this society. So, in fact, when she mentioned—I think it was in the—one of the presidential debates, that we have to deal with structural racism, that was a major leap forward. But that requires then consistent pressure consistently be put on her to deal with what that really means policywise, so it can’t just be a slogan that gets dropped during the presidential campaign.

  AMY GOODMAN: Well, Carol Anderson, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Carol Anderson is professor of African American studies at Emory University. Her new book is called White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. When we come back from break, we go to Iceland to speak with the poet and activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She is co-founder of the Pirate Party, that made major gains in Iceland. That’s the anarchist party of Iceland. Stay with us.

• Amazon -

  Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of many books and articles, including Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 andEyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights: 1944-1955. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Brian Odom
112.18 (May 15, 2016): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. By Carol Anderson. May 2016.272p. Bloomsbury, $26 (9781632864123). 305.

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 represented for many the transition of the U.S. into a post-racial nation. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston shootings, continued episodes of police violence, and repressive voter registration laws signifying the continuation of historical tendencies, however, critical issues once thought closed are now just as alive as ever. In this engaging, thought-provoking work, Anderson [Eyes off the Prize, 2003) argues that what is really at work in America is a "white rage." This rage is characterized by an epistemic violence working through the courts, legislature, and government bureaucracies and triggered by black advancement. Anderson examines this larger trend, from the close of the American Civil War to the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement to the current, contentious debates. Anderson's clear, ardent prose detailing the undermining of America's stated ideals and democratic norms is required reading for anyone interested in the state of American social discourse.--Brian Odom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Odom, Brian. "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 6. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913497&it=r&asid=f232e0e7bf1702c814144133c0417bfb. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A453913497
Anderson, Carol: WHITE RAGE
(Apr. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Anderson, Carol WHITE RAGE Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 31 ISBN: 978-1-63286-412-3

A close reading of America's racial chasm.In the wake of what were often termed the Ferguson riots, Anderson (African American Studies/Emory Univ.; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, 2014, etc.) wrote an opinion column for the Washington Post with the headline, "Ferguson isn't about black rage against cops. It's white rage against progress." Here, she extends her argument, showing how any signs of black rage might be more than justified in the face of decades of white intolerance, indifference, and obstruction. The author provides a perspective dating back to the Civil War, charging that the victory outlawing slavery failed during Reconstruction, which shifted terms without significantly improving the plight of the former slaves. "Indeed, for all the saintedness of his legacy as The Great Emancipator," she writes, "Lincoln himself had neither the clarity, humanity, nor resolve necessary to fix what was so fundamentally broken. Nor did his successor." Most of what Anderson traces in this compact study offers more summary than revelation, and while it does testify to the dehumanizing effects of white power and prejudice, the "white rage" of the title seems more like a rebalancing of the scales than a precise description. As she writes in the wake of Ferguson, "framing the discussion, dominating it, in fact, was an overwhelming focus on black rage...which, it seemed to me, entirely missed the point." Yet the book builds to an emotional climax that justifies its title, as the election of the nation's first black president brought such intensity to the nation's fissures: "the vitriol heaped on Obama was simply unprecedented," and the "hatred started early." By the epilogue, Anderson's analysis seems prescient. "Not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans," she writes, "...Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, fired up his 'silent majority'...with a macabre promise: 'Don't worry, we'll take our country back.' " A book that provides necessary perspective on the racial conflagrations in the U.S.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Anderson, Carol: WHITE RAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449240787&it=r&asid=a27c70ff2da902ed3df5c47c9b6f8e80. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A449240787
Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Thomas J. Davis
141.5 (Mar. 15, 2016): p121.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury Pr. May 2016. 256p. notes. ISBN 9781632864123. $26. HIST

Fitting together historical flash points from the aftermath of the Civil War to the current Black Lives Matter movement, historian Anderson (African American studies, Emory Univ.; Bourgeois Radicals) displays how public policies have systematically discarded all attempts at a colorblind U.S. democracy. The author shows how whites have passionately refused to budge from positions of privilege, thwarting at every turn black advances toward equal rights and economic opportunity. Indeed, she illustrates how white rage has persistently undercut progress among African Americans. For example, by closing down public schools and then abandoning public education systems, she notes, white reaction sabotaged the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education mandate for equal rather than separate public education. The author further exposes white rage as national; not regional, as she recounts Northern and Midwestern opposition to the Great Migration of the 1900s and describes mass black incarceration, decimated central cities, defunded and dysfunctional institutions, and even the vitriol heaped on President Barack Obama. VERDICT Anderson's mosaic of white outrage deserves contemplation by anyone interested in understanding U.S. race relations, past and present.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Davis, Thomas J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Davis, Thomas J. "Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 121. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA446521184&it=r&asid=dfad81b0941626f3a458e63758e18792. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A446521184
Anderson, Carol. Bourgeois radicals: the NAACP and the struggle for colonial liberation, 1941-1960
D.C. Catsam
53.3 (Nov. 2015): p482.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about

Anderson, Carol. Bourgeois radicals: the NAACP and the struggle for colonial liberation, 1941-1960. Cambridge, 2015. 372p bibl index ISBN 9780521763783 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9780521155731 pbk, $32.99; ISBN 9781316147092 ebook, 26.00

53-1443

E185

2014-20153 CIP

In this fine example of revisionist history at its best, Anderson (African American studies, Emory Univ.) challenges the idea that the NAACP, in the wake of W. E. B. Du Bois's final departure from that organization in 1948, essentially abandoned its burgeoning commitment to international affairs in the post-WW II era and turned its attention inward. As a consequence, the traditional interpretation goes, the NAACP abandoned Du Bois's commitment to anticolonial politics. But, as Anderson shows, the archival record tells a different story. In this process of "de-centering Du Bois," Anderson reveals the myriad ways that the NAACP continued and indeed accelerated its opposition to colonialism and support for liberation movements across the globe, especially in Africa. She is especially effective at revealing the ways that black Americans more generally and the NAACP in particular supported anti-apartheid movements in South Africa. On occasion, the author blurs the lines between the NAACP and larger African American engagement with anticolonial struggles, but on the whole, she makes a compelling case that the organization hardly turned its attention exclusively to domestic affairs after Du Bois's departure. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--D. C. Catsam, University of Texas of the Permian Basin

Catsam, D.C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Catsam, D.C. "Anderson, Carol. Bourgeois radicals: the NAACP and the struggle for colonial liberation, 1941-1960." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2015, p. 482. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA434319778&it=r&asid=8df37d02785b2fdc9b4b81090a49b8cc. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A434319778
Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
Norman D. Markowitz
40.1 (Apr. 2005): p144.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/

Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, by Carol Anderson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. vii, 302 pp. $65.00 US (cloth), $23.99 US (paper).

Carol Anderson, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri/Columbia, has written an exciting political narrative history of African-American attempts to raise the issue of human rights before the United Nations in order to attack de jure and de facto segregation and racism in the US in the early post World War II period. The anger that African-American novelist Richard Wright captured so forcefully in the figure of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist in his great pre-war defining work, Native Son, cries out from every page of Anderson's narrative--anger against Democratic party leaders, Southern racist politicians running interference for murderers, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt using her reputation and prestige to undermine militants, and NAACP leaders more interested in supporting the Truman administration and fighting Communists than in using the new post-war situation to advance the cause of civil rights.

Anderson's fascinating political narrative portrays the intense and complicated internal politics that characterized the NAACP, the pre-war National Negro Congress, and the post-war Civil Rights Congress. She also examines the white middlemen and power brokers dealing with African-American leadership in the Roosevelt, Truman, and early Eisenhower administrations, and the international manoeuvring over positions and policies concerning colonialism and racism in the early history of the United Nations. Although she does not use the term, her narrative of Civil Rights groups describes the political divisions within what appears to be an internal colony of the United States as its leaders struggle to have an international organization put pressure on the US government.

Few scholars should be surprised to discover that Anderson shows national organizations and governments to be more interested in their own internal politics and private agendas than the larger moral and ethical issues to which they payed lip service. It is, nevertheless, important to governments, organizations, and leaders accountable for their acts in the past if one is both to understand policy development and also to hold leaders accountable in the present.

If Anderson's fine work has a central weakness, it is in her passive acceptance of anti-Communist party, USA, and anti-Soviet stereotypes, which tends to make her narrative a one-dimensional negation of all organizations struggling to bring the issue of US racism to the UN. The Communist Party, USA, its activists and allies throughout the period and the Soviets after the war were the leading forces in the US and on the world scene in publicizing the oppression of African-Americans, because their ideology, values, and political interests had no long-term place for racism and colonialism.

The Soviets muted their anti-racist and anti-colonialist positions (they saw the two rightly as deeply inter-related and African-Americans as essentially an internal colony in the US) during the Popular Front period . This came about when they were seeking alliances against the Fascist Axis Alliance with the colonial British and French Empires and the informal US empire, composed of protectorates and spheres of influence throughout Latin America and its great economic power over British Commonwealth Canada.

The Communist party, USA, however, was much more consistent in its opposition to racism and to its building of an integrated party at all levels. While racism remained in Communist ranks, as it did far more pervasively through the larger society, Anderson's assertion that the Communist party essentially used groups like the National Negro Congress and later the Civil Rights Congress to raise funds for itself and carry forward its political agenda is both unproven and very unlikely.

First of all, the easiest way to be politically opportunistic in US politics has always been to either ignore or downplay institutional racism, as the policies of both liberal Democrats and so-called "democratic socialists" in this and later periods clearly show. By fighting racism in the white working class and taking the "hard cases" of racist brutality, from the Scottsboro Case in the 1930s to the Martinsville Nine and Trenton Six cases after World War II, Communists in the US, much like Communists in South Africa, left themselves open to greater assaults on their own civil liberties, which were under sweeping attacks in the early Cold War era when the Soviets in the United Nations and African-American and white CPUSA activists sought to publicize institutional racism. Indeed, it was, as Anderson recognizes and documents, the powerful study of US institutional racism which African-American Communist and Civil Rights Congress leader, William Patterson, brought to the United Nations under the title of We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People (New York, 2001) that was the most important direct attempt to bring the issue of African-American oppression before the United Nations.

The defeat of the Axis and the enormous rise in power of anti-colonial movements and Communist revolutionary forces made the Soviet's former allies their new enemies, regardless of what they did. Even Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe on Truman administration terms, which, given the loss of what is now estimated at twenty-seven million people, was politically impossible, would probably have been seen as a sign of weakness by US cold warriors, who might have taken more drastic actions to support Chiang K'ai-shek in China, the French colonial war in Indochina, and oppose anti-colonialism in Africa.

At the same time de jure segregation and de facto racism, while politically stronger in the short-run in the US, because segregationist Democrats here and racist settler regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia were now significant allies in the war against Communism, was also a handicap for cold warriors as they fought an anti-racist anti-colonialist enemy in the non-white former colonial regions of the "third world," where the majority of the human race resided.

If, as Anderson contends, the postwar "opportunity" for greater anti-racist gains was lost (and I agree with her) the blame rests squarely with the new centre-fight alliance in the US of right-wing or cold war liberals with conservatives who agreed on the necessity supporting dictatorships of the right through the world, with less fanfare the aforementioned racist white settler regimes, in the name of negative definitions of freedom and democracy, that is, that which is anti-Communist is ipso facto a part of the "free world." This forced the Civil Rights groups she studies to either modify and moderate their positions, or face political persecution at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, the Subversive Activities Control Board, and other federal agencies, as the Civil Rights Congress and its leaders, including William and Louise Patterson and Paul Robeson, did.

While Anderson has few solutions for African-American leadership in the period save greater and more focused militancy, she has asked most of the right questions and exposed the double standards, hypocrisy and essential cynicism that pervaded the US governments and establishment organizations, both white and African-American. As such, this is an very valuable work for students of African-American and general US history.

Norman D. Markowitz

Rutgers University

Markowitz, Norman D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Markowitz, Norman D. "Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Canadian Journal of History, vol. 40, no. 1, 2005, p. 144+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA133606337&it=r&asid=9bc670b4ccc6e0555cfe2ac639c157b6. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A133606337
Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
Daniel W. Aldridge, III
70.4 (Nov. 2004): p964.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha

Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. By Carol Anderson. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 302. Paper, $22.99, ISBN 0-521-53158-6; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-521-82431-1.)

In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson argues that both liberal and leftist African American leaders of the middle to late 1940s believed that the struggle for black equality required more than "civil rights," or the removal of the formal legal and political restrictions that characterized the Jim Crow era (p. 1). Rather, liberals, such as NAACP leader Walter White, and leftists, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, envisioned a broader movement for "human rights" that would remedy the disparities in education, health care, housing, and other social goods that plagued black America (p. 5). Black leaders wanted the United Nations Organization to establish international standards of human rights that would require the United States to ameliorate the social ills caused by centuries of racism. These hopes were dashed. Although liberals such as President Harry S Truman and UN Human Rights Commission chair and NAACP board member Eleanor Roosevelt were somewhat sympathetic toward black demands for civil rights, they were unwilling to support a broader human rights agenda that Anderson believes would have produced more genuine equality for African Americans.

Anderson argues that the politics of the Cold War explain why black demands for human rights fell on deaf ears. In the postwar period American leaders were much more interested in using the UN Commission on Human Rights to attack the Soviet Union than they were in human betterment. Further, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations would not support international standards of human rights that would bring U.S. racial practices under international scrutiny.

Anderson maintains that the NAACP accommodated Cold War hysteria by trimming its sails in the late 1940s and early 1950s to espouse a more limited "civil rights" agenda. Black leftists who resisted this shift, such as Du Bois, were ousted from the NAACP, and many black leftist organizations withered away during the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s. The result was a restricted "civil rights" movement that sought the demolition of the Jim Crow regime but was unable to address deeper structural inequalities.

Eyes Off the Prize is a well-written and densely researched work that makes an important contribution to the growing literature on African American engagement with U.S. foreign affairs. One may differ with Anderson's assumption that a broader "human rights" movement would have had any chance of succeeding given the political climate she describes or would have produced the results she anticipates. Further, she may underestimate the extent to which the NAACP's anticommunism was driven by its own long-standing differences with the Left, rather than being a capitulation to the Cold War climate. Nonetheless, Anderson illuminates the international context within which the African American civil rights struggle emerged and presents a balanced and perceptive analysis of the black liberal/leftist split of the 1950s. This is a fine book that deserves to occupy a central position in a growing and important field.

Davidson College

DANIEL W. ALDRIDGE III

Aldridge, Daniel W., III
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Aldridge, Daniel W., III. "Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Journal of Southern History, vol. 70, no. 4, 2004, p. 964+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA125485675&it=r&asid=6708bf1574ff89c6f595fa3e90635b25. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A125485675
Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
Edward C. Luck
119.3 (Fall 2004): p564.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Academy of Political Science
http://www.psqonline.org/History.cfm

Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 by Carol Anderson. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003. 290 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $22.00.

In several respects, this is an impressive and valuable book. It illuminates the subtle, but critical, linkages between domestic and foreign policy and among civil rights, human rights, and international institutions. For historians, it offers fresh perspectives on the domestic political forces that shaped the development of the core human rights instruments and the early days of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Seen through the lens of race relations in the United States, these historic advances look tentative, hesitant, and dangerously incomplete, U.S. policy, in particular, appears far more ambivalent than farsighted. The author usefully places the African American struggle for civil rights in the larger framework of the global movement for human rights, encompassing economic and social, as well as civil and political, rights.

This is, in short, a fine piece of scholarship. The text is carefully and fully documented, with the extensive and adept use of primary sources. The prose is vivid and lively, if a bit overwrought when describing racist violence and too sweeping when caricaturing personalities and policies.

Indeed, the heavy focus on the personalities of and interpersonal rivalries among key African American leaders is both a strength and a weakness. As a contribution to scholarship, it is certainly helpful to understand how personal foibles and ambitions repeatedly undermined the advancement of policy goals of importance to the African American community. Yet, it is less clear from the volume whether it was the interpersonal or the policy differences that mattered more in slowing the pace of change. No heroes emerge from this harsh narrative, either among the black leadership or from their erstwhile allies within the white political establishment. According to this account, none of the players were effective advocates for the economic and social rights of African Americans.

For all of its attributes, the book fails to deliver on its core claim: that the welfare of African Americans to this day would have been significantly enhanced if the NAACP and other civil rights organizations had in the late 1940s and early 1950s embraced the UN Covenant on Economic and Social Rights as fervently as they did the cause of political and civil rights. Though asserted at various points in the book, this proposition is never subjected to serious analysis or questioning. Perhaps the platforms of these groups paid too little attention to economic conditions and employment opportunities, as the author contends. But why would the Covenant itself represent the "prize" of the book's title? The historic record suggests, unfortunately, that a country's ratification of any given human rights convention does not ensure anything close to full compliance with all of its provisions.

As the author amply demonstrates, even if the U.S. had ratified the Covenant on Economic and Social Rights--it was not even submitted to the Senate until the Carter Administration (1978)--there would have been plenty of spoilers to slow its implementation. Why would the NAACP's endorsement a half-century ago of a Covenant that has never had much political support in this country have made much difference either in gaining its ratification or in the daily lives of African Americans? The notion of transnational economic and social rights simply has not fit easily with traditional conceptions of American capitalism, federalism, and political culture. Had the NAACP and the Truman administration been populated by farsighted saints, this still would have been a heavy load to move. But the author does a considerable service by reminding us both that leaders do matter and that human rights begins at home.

EDWARD C. LUCK

Columbia University

Luck, Edward C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Luck, Edward C. "Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Political Science Quarterly, vol. 119, no. 3, 2004, p. 564+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA124641570&it=r&asid=7d9c9bbbae1e8375717e02c18642eec6. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A124641570
Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
Kwame Dixon
89.3 (Summer 2004): p278.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.
http://www.jaah.org/

Carol Anderson. Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. 314. Cloth $65.00, paper $23.00.

Carol Anderson's Eyes off the Prize is a rich historical narrative that examines the critical role played by various African American organizations in the struggle to create the United Nations and the international system for the protection of human rights. Anderson argues that organizations, such as the NAACP, the National Negro Congress (NNC), The Civil Rights Congress, the Council on African Affairs, and the National Council of Negro Women, played pivotal roles in shaping the discourse surrounding U.S. human rights policies in the aftermath of World War II. This important work adds to the growing body of recent literature on the role and impact of African Americans on U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era. Anderson contends that it was liberal black leadership led mainly by the NAACP that was in the best position to influence the emerging human rights paradigm, and push the human rights policy of the U.S. beyond the parameters of emerging cold war rhetoric.

Black leaders at the close of World War II clearly understood the unique historical opportunities available in international relations, and thus pressured the U.S. to agree to internationally-binding human rights standards that would soon come to define the basis of a newly formed United Nations human rights system. By 1944 black leaders had decided that only the instruments of human rights could repair the damage that more than three centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism had done to African Americans' citizenship rights. Civil rights laws would not be enough. Therefore, NAACP marshaled its resources--a war chest of more than a million dollars, nearly 500,000 members, and access to power brokers throughout the world--to make "human rights" the standard for legal equality. Although there were other organizations contributing to this effort, including those of the black left, none had the credibility, money, and influence to place human rights on the agenda in the struggle for black equality. Substantively, these groups focused on self-determination, colonialism, and the color question, and pressed for economic, social, and cultural claims as well as civil and political rights to be firmly grounded in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the subsequent covenants on human rights. Procedurally, they fought to establish a UN Human Rights Commission with the power to receive and investigate complaints of human rights abuses.

The human rights struggle of African Americans would be seriously compromised and limited in trajectory due to the entrenched power of the southern Democrats and the shallowness of the white liberal commitment to black equality. The struggle was ultimately destroyed by the cold war and the anticommunist witch-hunts, which compromised the integrity of black leadership and forced the NAACP to take its eyes off the prize for human rights. Working in concert with other organizations at the San Francisco Conference, the NAACP applied an enormous amount of pressure to force U.S. government officials to agree to the inclusion of human rights in the UN Charter. Then, sickened by the wave of postwar lynching, fearful of an impending economic collapse that threatened the black community, and dismayed with the federal government's sluggish response to racial wrongs, the NAACP (doing what it believed the too small and too compromised NNC could not do) took African America's case to the United Nations.

Anderson pays meticulous attention to the details and contentious debates that were crucial in the formation of the UN, and the drafting of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first major human rights treaties. She chronicles the obstructionist role of the two U. S. Presidents, the U.S. Senate, and the State Department through Eleanor Roosevelt in limiting the scope and jurisdiction of human rights. The NAACP's close and uncritical relationship with President Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt, who undermined the NAACP and NNC's attempt to present a petition on behalf of millions of Africans and people of color living under colonialism, would prove to be a serious miscalculation.

Anderson clearly presents the role of so-called "friends of the Negro," and an incompetent, pro-Jim Crow State Department. Theoretically, Eleanor Roosevelt, the liberal, and the staunch segregationists in the State Department should have approached the issue of black equality from different perspectives, but they did not. To be sure, there was a difference in tone, but not in substance where it really counted; and at crucial moments when the issue of racial discrimination was at stake, Roosevelt was in complete agreement with the State Department. Ultimately, civil rights leaders had little success in defining their movement as a struggle for human rights. The calls of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to transform the civil rights campaigns into a human rights movement came only when both men were considered outcasts or renegades by many U.S. government officials.

Anderson sheds much-needed light on the crucial role of W. E. B. Du Bois, William Patterson, and Rayford Logan as true human rights advocates. However, the inclusion of a section explaining the significance of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the human rights covenants, along with some explanation on how the UN human rights system and other international bodies function, would have been helpful.

Kwame Dixon

Syracuse University

Dixon, Kwame
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dixon, Kwame. "Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." The Journal of African American History, vol. 89, no. 3, 2004, p. 278+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA123755611&it=r&asid=317761ffdc8f2dfa7847a5216ee0244c. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A123755611
Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
Cary Fraser
23.4 (Summer 2004): p179.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html

Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. By Carol Anderson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x + 302 pp. Photos, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper).

Carol Anderson has made a powerful contribution to the evolving scholarship on the African American challenge to the "white supremacist" order that has defined American life and politics. During the twentieth century, modern intellectual trends discredited the idea of race as a "scientific" construct in the shaping of human life and undermined its centrality in shaping United States citizenship and the social hierarchy. This study helps to illustrate the tortuous and treacherous path carved by African American activists in the struggle to liberate themselves, and their society, from the anachronism of "white supremacist" ideology in the critical years between the end of the Second World War and the acceleration of the civil rights struggle in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision.

Anderson explores United States strategy within the United Nations at its initial conference in San Francisco and illustrates the ways in which the official American delegation (with the notable exception of Ralph Bunche) sought to marginalize the African American consultants in the delegation and their concerns about creating an international order in which racial inequality would be rendered illegitimate. Then, and in subsequent negotiations, United States policymakers adopted a central tenet for U.S. diplomacy in the post-1945 world--the United States would seek to dominate the United Nations and would opportunistically seek to exercise moral leadership in the postwar world. In effect, the dictates of realpolitik would shape the moral vision that guided U.S. foreign policy. This conundrum was particularly evident in the desire of the United States negotiators to avoid confronting the bankruptcy of Western European imperialism and in shielding the American racial order from international scrutiny--vivid testimony to the enduring logic of white supremacy among United States policymakers. In effect, like Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, U.S. policymakers, including Eleanor Roosevelt who served as chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and was a key architect of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, found it impossible to accept the principle of racial equality in international affairs. For these policymakers, it was simply inconceivable that white supremacy in either domestic politics or in international affairs should be abandoned--even after Nazi Germany had demonstrated the barbarism that underlay policies of racial supremacy.

Confronted by this obdurate commitment to "white supremacy" in American life, African American leaders across the political spectrum sought to capitalize upon the increasing influence of the black vote in national elections to undermine the mainstream commitment to segregation. However, as the 1948 election showed, the intergenerational and ideological conflicts among African American leaders, the Southern Conservative capacity to paralyze both the Democratic party and the Congress, and the inability of President Truman to translate rhetoric into sociopolitical change, crippled the search for an end to "white supremacist" politics. Trapped by their need for white allies, and with limited control over levers of power within United States society, African American leaders struggled to define and control the political space that the black vote had opened. That predicament in the context of the mobilization of xenophobia and anti-communist hysteria that swept American life from 1947 onward ultimately proved insoluble. In effect, anti-communism came to the rescue of segregation and provided the basis for the conservative resurgence that would lead to the election of Dwight Eisenhower. Despite the Brown decision, this Republican interregnum and the white backlash that it presaged would forestall the creation of a new legal architecture for race in American society until the Johnson administration of the 1960s. As the author of this fine study has shown, the confrontation with Nazi Germany had done little to shake the confidence of American policymakers in "white supremacist" politics--with devastating consequences for the minority communities in the United States.

Cary Fraser

Pennsylvania State University

Fraser, Cary
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fraser, Cary. "Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 23, no. 4, 2004, p. 179+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA403786129&it=r&asid=f2f8a2576d9707fb00c735e6a7bf1854. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A403786129
Is white rage driving our racial divide?
Pamela Newkirk
(June 23, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post

Byline: Pamela Newkirk

The virulent backlash against President Obama's 2008 election set the stage for this year's presidential campaign, in which Muslims, Mexicans and other marginalized groups have been explicitly maligned.

While Obama's historic two-term presidency has inspired the "birther" movement, an unprecedented spike in death threats, and wanton disrespect by members of Congress and other prominent officials, until now, many observers had been hard-pressed to attribute the hostility to race.

In "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide," Carol Anderson compellingly does just that. In this slim but persuasive volume, she catalogues white Americans' centuries-long efforts to derail African American progress. She cites the venomous response to Obama alongside a litany of setbacks that have followed African American strides stretching back to the Civil War and emancipation.

Anderson, a professor of African American history at Emory University, traces the thread of white rebellion from anti-emancipation revolts through post-Reconstruction racial terror and the enactment of Black Codes and peonage, to the extraordinary legal and extralegal efforts by Southern officials to block African Americans from fleeing repression during the Great Migration. She continues connecting the dots to contemporary legislative and judicial actions across the country that have disproportionately criminalized blacks and suppressed their voting rights.

Anderson argues that this pattern of advancement followed by retreat has effectively eroded, if not scuttled, every modicum of progress made by African Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation.

Anderson's book, which began as a 2014 opinion article in The Washington Post, recounts numerous instances when hard-won gains by African Americans have been reversed. For example, in 2008, for the first time in history, the black voter turnout rate nearly equaled that of whites, and the turnout of voters of all races making less than $15,000 nearly doubled. "While the number of whites who voted remained roughly the same as it had been in the 2004 election," she says, "two million more African Americans, two million additional Hispanics, and 600,000 more Asians cast their ballots in 2008."

The GOP, "trapped between a demographically declining support base and an ideological straitjacket ... reached for a tried and true weapon: disfranchisement." Anderson notes that despite the rarity of voter fraud, state after state began requiring voters to have documents such as bank statements, utility bills and W-2 forms, which African Americans, Latinos, the young and other economically disadvantaged people are less likely than others to possess.

Then, in 2013 the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to strike down a key part of the Voting Rights Act that for decades had protected African Americans from blatant disfranchisement. Since the ruling, 22 states have passed voter-restriction statutes. Anderson also argues that white resistance to the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision explains why, six decades later, black children largely remain trapped in segregated and unequal schools.

Anderson singles out President Ronald Reagan for presiding over the rollback of many of the gains blacks made during the civil rights movement. She says that while Reagan "positively oozed racial innocence," his policies showed a contempt for blacks.

Black unemployment had declined sharply during the '60s and '70s, actually closing the racial gap, and the number of blacks enrolled in college had doubled between 1970 and 1978. But Reagan erased those gains through massive cuts in federal programs and jobs. Black unemployment rose to 15.5 percent -- the highest it had been since the Great Depression -- and black youth employment to a staggering 45.7 percent. "At this point," Anderson writes, "Reagan chose to slash the training, employment and labor services budget by 70 percent -- a cut of $3.805 billion."

Among the programs targeted were those that assisted college-bound African Americans, causing their college enrollment to tumble from 34 to 26 percent. "Thus, just at the moment when the post-industrial economy made an undergraduate degree more important than ever, 15,000 fewer African Americans were in college during the early 1980s than had been the case in the mid 1970s," Anderson writes.

Her most explosive allegation is that at a time when marijuana use was down, and cocaine, heroin and hallucinogen use was declining or leveling off, Reagan's National Security Council and CIA "manufactured and facilitated" a drug crisis and were complicit in flooding African American communities with crack. She says the administration's shielding of Colombian drug traffickers "actively allowed cocaine imports to the United States to skyrocket 50 percent within three years. ... Soon crack was everywhere, kicking the legs out from under black neighborhoods," she writes.

"The Reagan administration's protection of drug traffickers escalated further when the CIA received approval from the Department of Justice in 1982 to remain silent about any key agency 'assets' that were involved in the manufacturing, transportation, or sale of narcotics," she adds.

Anderson cites research showing that between 1984 and 1994, the homicide rate of black males ages 14 to 17 more than doubled, while life expectancy rates among African Americans declined -- "something that not even slavery or Jim Crow had been able to accomplish," she notes.

And as crack ravaged black communities, Anderson argues, the Reagan administration targeted the victims, rather than the drug-smuggling villains. In 1986 Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which mandated minimum sentencing, emphasized punishment over treatment, and disproportionately criminalized African Americans, Latinos and the poor. Two years later, Congress enacted mandatory sentencing for first-time offenders. The war on drugs, Anderson says, "replaced the explicit use of race as the mechanism to deny black Americans their rights as citizens."

Meanwhile the Supreme Court, in a series of cases, upheld racial profiling by police and mandatory sentencing for drug offenses, and made it more difficult to prove racial bias in a variety of circumstances, including jury selection and arrests. And while African Americans are the least likely to use or sell drugs, Anderson writes, "law enforcement has continued to focus its efforts on the black population." As a result, she writes, blacks, while 13 percent of the national population, make up 45 percent of those incarcerated.

Anderson convincingly shows that African Americans' economic and social progress has historically, and sometimes ferociously, been reversed. Less persuasive is her contention that rage, rather than a cool and calculated effort to retain economic and social primacy, is behind the destructive policies she cites. Moreover, Anderson makes little effort to explore how African Americans might ultimately overcome the kinds of willful and anti-democratic machinations she describes. For example, could the Brown ruling have been more effective if it had emphasized racial equality over integration? Also, are African Americans' efforts to overcome discrimination inevitably doomed to fail, or have some strategies prevailed?

Still, Anderson deftly draws a straight line from post-Reconstruction setbacks to contemporary measures that follow a discernible, if often overlooked, pattern of one step forward and two steps back. While short on solutions, "White Rage" is a sobering primer on the myriad ways African American resilience and triumph over enslavement, Jim Crow and intolerance have been relentlessly defied by the very institutions entrusted to uphold our democracy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Newkirk, Pamela. "Is white rage driving our racial divide?" Washingtonpost.com, 23 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455966089&it=r&asid=33f897ae1c9dfbb5e009c24337e3a77f. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A455966089

Odom, Brian. "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 6. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA453913497&asid=f232e0e7bf1702c814144133c0417bfb. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. "Anderson, Carol: WHITE RAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA449240787&asid=a27c70ff2da902ed3df5c47c9b6f8e80. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Davis, Thomas J. "Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 121. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA446521184&asid=dfad81b0941626f3a458e63758e18792. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Catsam, D.C. "Anderson, Carol. Bourgeois radicals: the NAACP and the struggle for colonial liberation, 1941-1960." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2015, p. 482. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA434319778&asid=8df37d02785b2fdc9b4b81090a49b8cc. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Markowitz, Norman D. "Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Canadian Journal of History, vol. 40, no. 1, 2005, p. 144+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA133606337&asid=9bc670b4ccc6e0555cfe2ac639c157b6. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Aldridge, Daniel W., III. "Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Journal of Southern History, vol. 70, no. 4, 2004, p. 964+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA125485675&asid=6708bf1574ff89c6f595fa3e90635b25. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Luck, Edward C. "Eyes Off the Prize: the United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Political Science Quarterly, vol. 119, no. 3, 2004, p. 564+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA124641570&asid=7d9c9bbbae1e8375717e02c18642eec6. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Dixon, Kwame. "Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." The Journal of African American History, vol. 89, no. 3, 2004, p. 278+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA123755611&asid=317761ffdc8f2dfa7847a5216ee0244c. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Fraser, Cary. "Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 23, no. 4, 2004, p. 179+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA403786129&asid=f2f8a2576d9707fb00c735e6a7bf1854. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017. Newkirk, Pamela. "Is white rage driving our racial divide?" Washingtonpost.com, 23 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA455966089&asid=33f897ae1c9dfbb5e009c24337e3a77f. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.

• Foreign Affairs
  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2016-10-17/white-rage-unspoken-truth-our-racial-divide
  Word count: 229

  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
  by Carol Anderson
  Reviewed by Walter Russell Mead
  In This Review

  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
  Carol Anderson

  In this year of populist backlash, media coverage has often focused on the anger that ordinary white Americans feel over economic and demographic changes they see as threatening. Anderson reminds readers that white rage has a long history in the United States and that it has frequently come in response to black progress. Her book tells the story of Reconstruction and Jim Crow in harrowing terms, using specific incidents of white violence against blacks to personalize the horror. She looks to the northern states as well, showing how white mobs viciously attacked middle-class black families who tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods. Anderson writes as a passionate advocate rather than as a dispassionate historian, and at times, she undermines her own credibility, as when she links the genesis of the crack epidemic to Reagan administration efforts to fund the Nicaraguan contras. Nevertheless, for readers who want to understand the sense of grievance and pain that many African Americans feel today, White Rage offers a clearly written and well-thought-out overview of an aspect of U.S. history with which the country is still struggling to come to terms.

• White Rage
  https://books.google.com/books?id=8pnBCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
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