Carol Anderson

October 28, 2020 6:30 pm

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Since 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. Then there was 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. Anderson carefully links these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition. She pulls back 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.

Moderated by Alexes Harris. Alexes Harris, Ph.D., is the Presidential Term Professor and professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Dr. Harris’ work spans the U.S. criminal justice system, including juvenile justice, case processing outcomes and monetary sanctions. Her research is centered on issues of inequality, poverty and race. Harris’ book, A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as a Punishment for the Poor details how fines sentenced to defendants often put an undue burden on disadvantaged populations.

Want to read Carol’s books? Check out her back-catalogue at our partner bookstore, the University Bookstore: https://www.ubookstore.com/White-Rage-Unspoken-Truth-of-Our-Racial-Divide

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About the speaker

Human and civil rights advocate & expert on African American history and 20th century politics

Carol Anderson is professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed White Rage, published by Bloomsbury (2016). 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.

Her research has garnered substantial fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, National Humanities Center, Harvard University, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

She has also served on working groups dealing with race at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations. In addition, based on the strength and accessibility of her research, the leadership at Amnesty International, USA, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Ford Foundation, and others have used Eyes Off the Prize to frame and examine their human rights work in the United States.

This has also led to sought after commentary in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and CNN.com that places contemporary issues dealing with race, human rights, and politics in a historical perspective. Her Washington Post op-ed, “White Rage,” was the most widely shared for the paper in 2014.

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 bachelors and masters degrees in Political Science (International Relations) and History. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.