Historian Carol Anderson, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies, was recently featured in Politico’s “50,” a guide to “the thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016.” Anderson is featured alongside Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California Irvine. Situating the 2016 election in a longer historical context, Anderson and Tesler assert that “white racism has long shaped American politics—and 2016 is no exception.” The article highlights Anderson’s recent book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). View an excerpt below and check out the full article.

“This year, in her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Anderson argues that black Americans’ advances have always been followed by white Americans’ efforts to resist them or roll them back. After slavery was abolished, there were Jim Crow laws; after Brown v. Board of Education, whites segregated themselves in private schools and wealthier districts; after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Richard Nixon made an appeal to white voters with his “Southern strategy” and Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, which disproportionately jailed African-Americans. Whether in legislatures, the courts or police departments, Anderson argues, white rage against black progress has worked to keep deep racial inequality entrenched in American society—and does to this day.” 

Professor Carol Anderson recently spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Rosalind Bentley in advance of her appearance at the AJC Decatur  Book Festival. Anderson puts recent police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement in historical context, and the interview includes commentary about her new book, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016). Check out a clip below and read the full interview here.

“If you only define status as, ‘I got mine,’ and you define what this nation has to offer as a zero-sum game — meaning you can only get something at my expense — then there’s fear. Exclusivity is shortsighted and it will destroy this nation.”

 

Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, published an op-ed in The New York Times on August 22nd. In “Why Hilary Clinton Might Win Georgia,” Crespino puts the 2016 presidential contest in the context of past Republican and Democratic campaigns to re/take the South. Crespino asserts that the shading purple of states like Georgia and South Carolina “has less to do with the future than the past, and both parties run a risk in misreading it. Mr. Trump’s racially charged hard-right campaign reveals a fault line in Republican politics that dates from the very beginning of G.O.P. ascendancy in the South.” Read an excerpt below and check out the full article.

“Whether or not Republicans hold on to Georgia and South Carolina this year, the lessons they are likely to take away are predictable. Democrats will assume that these states, like Virginia and North Carolina, are part of a long-term liberal trend and push traditional liberal ideas harder in future elections. Republicans will most likely write off Mr. Trump as a one-time phenomenon and not do anything. In doing so, both parties will ignore lessons from the history of the Southern conservative majority.

“What might be happening instead is something new in the South: true two-party politics, in which an urban liberal-moderate Democratic Party fights for votes in the increasingly multiethnic metropolitan South against an increasingly rural, nationalistic Republican Party. If that happens, it will transform not only the politics of the American South, but those of America itself.”