The Cruel Hand Chapter Summary

In her recent book White Rage, Carol Anderson explores various time periods of progress made and how subsequently they each were met with by the history of white supremacist reaction, or white rage, to the African American fight for justice. Since the passing of the Thirteenth amendment to the Civil Rights movement to the election of President Barack Obama, white rage has fueled deliberate roll back to these achievements of African Americans.
In “The Cruel Hand,” Anderson examines the threat to the status quo of inequality that the Civil Rights movement posed with the incredible progress in education, voting, as well as employment that were made; also within chapter four, she focuses on the role that the Nixon and the Reagan eras played in undermining the black progress that had been made during the Civil Rights movement and in fueling “white rage.” Both the Nixon and Reagan administrations were able to execute two fairly significant tasks to crush the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. The first way was through reclaiming the narrative of the Civil Rights movement; and, the second way was by redefining racism itself.
There is much power in controlling the narrative; dominant ideologies such as that bound in white
we can probably expect more of them to occur over succeeding decades as we approach the demographic fault line where whites become a statistical minority in this country. Obama's election was a major trigger for the policy backlash that led to Donald Trump Barack Obama’s election — and its powerful symbolism of black advancement — was the major trigger for the policy backlash that led to Donald Trump, and which has now put America’s national security at risk. White rage got us to this point