Carol Anderson

Stephen Nowland/Emory University Photo Video

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Bourgeois Radicals, and Eyes off the Prize. Professor Anderson’s role as a public scholar has found her serving 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 and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. She has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS NewsHour, and Democracy Now!, as well as providing commentary for the Huffington Post, The Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post. Her op-ed in the Washington Post on Ferguson was the most shared for the newspaper in 2014. Her new book is "One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy." She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Books:

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy

Current Issues / Politics / Social Science
bloomsbury
September 2018
ISBN 9781635571387
288 pages

Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, the startling--and timely--history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin. In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans as the nation gears up for the 2018 midterm elections. More/less

White Rage

Current Issues / Politics / Social Science
MacMillan/Bloomsbury
ISBN 9781632864130
256 pages
$17.00, INSTOCK

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From the Civil War to our combustible present, and now with a new epilogue about the 2016 presidential election, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race. White Rage chronicles the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as "black rage," historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she writes, "everyone had ignored the kindling." Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances 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 Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America. More/less