American Whitelash Quotes

“What we expected of the Obama administration was beyond what the framework of the presidency allowed.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“Our history is simply a story that we tell ourselves. So often the tale that we tell is a lie.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement,” writes historian Carol Anderson in White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, in which she chronicles the rejection by a significant portion of the white populace of the civil rights advancements and victories of the Second Reconstruction. “White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. . . . It can look like white flight and private schools and city ordinances and neighborhood watches.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“The years that followed Obama’s election would see two long-simmering racial movements burst to the fore of mainstream politics. The first of these was a nativist movement of white Americans that questioned the validity of the president’s citizenship, his Christian faith, and his fidelity to America itself. For his eight years in office, Obama would have no more consistent and persistent foe. This opposition was fanned by leaders on the political Right—many of them media figures, some of them elected officials—who preached a politics of racial agitation: fear of immigrants and Muslims, contempt for black public figures and elected officials, and rebellion against government attempts to address racial inequalities. This movement wielded inflammatory rhetoric to appeal to the real fear held by many Americans, of varying political affiliations, that the country had irreversibly changed in ways that left them unheard and underserved, exposed and vulnerable.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

“the advent of multiracial democracy through the Second Reconstruction and the perceived browning of America through immigration has forced today’s white supremacists to accept as a premise that they’re “losing.” No longer can they claim, as their forebears did, that they aim to return to the norm of a white supremacist status quo. Today’s white supremacist movement is revolutionary—its explicit aim being to overthrow our maturing multiracial democracy.”
― Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress