Top 50 Carol Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular – to what it can see. It’s not the Klan. White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.”

— Carol Anderson

2. “White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.”

— Carol Anderson

3. “The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”

— Carol Anderson

4. “But as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom observed, “Whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, and against its own laws and customs.”

— Carol Anderson

5. “Not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fired up his “silent majority” audience of thousands in July 2015 with a macabre promise: “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”1.”

— Carol Anderson

6. “Black respectability or “appropriate” behavior doesn’t seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama’s presidency made that clear. Aspirations and the achievement of these aspirations provide no protection. Not even to the God-fearing. On.”

— Carol Anderson

7. “The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa.”

— Carol Anderson

8. “Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.21 Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted.”

— Carol Anderson

9. “The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently punished black resilience, black resolve.9 And.”

— Carol Anderson

10. “Congress, therefore, passed both the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which defined as citizens all persons born in the United States, except for Native Americans. The moderates believed they had stripped out the most objectionable clauses from the legislation – the right to vote and widespread land distribution – so that President Johnson could now easily sign both bills into law.”

— Carol Anderson

11. “Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy. As.”

— Carol Anderson

12. “Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freedpeople – provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too – for they had been left out as well – could gain access to proper education. Imagine.”

— Carol Anderson

13. “The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability.”

— Carol Anderson

14. “According to Human Rights Watch, “the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state.”

— Carol Anderson

15. “Even when philanthropist Pierre S. Du Pont launched a program to bring these schools up to code, white residents made it clear that they not only opposed public funding for black schools but were equally resistant to private, philanthropic resources intervening as well.”

— Carol Anderson

16. “I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

— Carol Anderson

17. “White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively. In my Washington Post op-ed, therefore, I set out to make white rage visible, to blow graphite onto that hidden fingerprint and trace its historic movements over the past 150 years.”

— Carol Anderson

18. “Reagan’s “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.”

— Carol Anderson

19. “Sadly, the ascent of a black man to the presidency of the United States did not, despite all the talk of hope and a post-racial society, signal progress. Instead, it has led to a situation, not so unlike the era of Jim Crow, where a sense of physical vulnerability is shared across classes in the black community.86.”

— Carol Anderson

20. “The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine – tactics that went on for at least four decades – left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy.”

— Carol Anderson

21. “Nor did Johnson’s policies or the Black Codes ensure that African Americans would not be a “burden upon society.” If anything, they guaranteed the opposite. Blacks were denied access to land, banned from hunting and fishing, and forbidden to work independently using skills honed and developed while enslaved, such as blacksmithing. Under such conditions, self-sufficiency could never have been achieved.”

— Carol Anderson

22. “Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person’s life that it did not touch.”

— Carol Anderson

23. “The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.”

— Carol Anderson

24. “Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discrimination against blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote. In addition, only Massachusetts did not exclude African Americans from juries; and many states, from California to Ohio, prohibited blacks from testifying in court against someone who was white.”

— Carol Anderson

25. “The truth is that when World War I provided the opportunity in the North for blacks to get jobs with unheard-of pay scales and, better yet, the chance for their children to finally have good schools, African Americans fled the oppressive conditions in the South.”

— Carol Anderson

26. “Right then he had a revelation: “They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!”17.”

— Carol Anderson

27. “Comprising 13 percent of the electorate, African Americans stood as the firewall between a democracy continuing to evolve and one threatened by the corrosion of a Trump presidency tainted with the “drip, drip, drip of scandal,” ethics violations, foreign intrigue, and authoritarianism.”

— Carol Anderson

28. “What the paper failed to recognize was that black people’s willingness to work had never been the problem. Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.”

— Carol Anderson

29. “Equally vicious was the practice of “whitecapping,” which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local whites maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could “ride for miles and not see a black face.”

— Carol Anderson

30. “The states of the Deep South, which fought Brown tooth and nail, today all fall in the bottom quartile of state rankings for educational attainment, per capita income, and quality of health.139.”

— Carol Anderson

31. “The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.12.”

— Carol Anderson

32. “Somehow many have convinced themselves that the man who pulled the United States back into some semblance of financial health, reduced unemployment to its lowest level in decades, secured health insurance for millions of citizens, ended one of our recent, all-too-intractable wars in the Middle East, reduced the staggering deficit he inherited from George W. Bush, and masterminded the takedown of Osama bin Laden actually hates America.76.”

— Carol Anderson

33. “Using the targeted power of the criminal justice system as a tool of voter suppression meant that five times as many registered Democrats as Republicans were disfranchised. And for that, the nation paid dearly.”

— Carol Anderson

34. “The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as “many as 12 percent of eligible voters nationwide may not have government-issued photo ID,” and that “percentage is likely even higher for students, seniors and people of color.”

— Carol Anderson

35. “The Supreme Court thus identified states as the ultimate defenders of rights, although Southern states had repeatedly proven themselves the ultimate violators of those rights.”

— Carol Anderson

36. “In August 1862, he lectured five black leaders whom he had summoned to the White House that it was their duty, given what their people had done to the United States, to accept the exodus to South America, telling them, “But for your race among us there could not be war.”10 As to just how and why “your race” came to be “among us,” Lincoln conveniently ignored.”

— Carol Anderson

37. “Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi’s black adults were not registered to vote.49.”

— Carol Anderson

38. “The bottom line was that black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination.”

— Carol Anderson

39. “As in most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order.”

— Carol Anderson

40. “The point, longtime aide John Ehrlichman explained, was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.”

— Carol Anderson

41. “1863 Draft Riots:.”

— Carol Anderson

42. “The new president, just like Lincoln, had convinced himself instead that the Civil War was only about preserving the Union. No more. No less. And therefore, he set about stitching the rebel South back into the fabric of the nation.”

— Carol Anderson

43. “Some 20 percent of Trump supporters believed the Emancipation Proclamation had been bad public policy and that the enslaved should have never been freed.”

— Carol Anderson

44. “Similarly, Carl Schurz reported that in his conversation with a plantation owner, who was beside himself that emancipation had left him without any slaves to do the heavy lifting, the man dismissed the idea of working the land himself. “The idea that he would work with his hands as a farmer seemed to strike him as ludicrously absurd. He told me with a smile that he had never done a day’s work of that kind in his life.”

— Carol Anderson

45. “The property value of black schools in Clarendon County, attended by 6,531 students, was “officially listed as $194,575. The value of the white schools, attended by 2,375 youngsters, was put at $673,850.” Thus, the county spent nearly ten times more per capita on the white students’ facilities.”

— Carol Anderson

46. “While claiming that the government had never provided access to land for “hard toiling whites,” Johnson simply erased the nineteen years that he had worked for the passage of the Homestead Act to ensure that his constituency was given 160 acres wrested or browbeaten from Native Americans.”

— Carol Anderson

47. “Even for Detroit’s liberal mayor, peace was based on black people quietly and gracefully accepting the fact that they had no right to their rights.”

— Carol Anderson

48. “That a child could excel even when “forced to attend an underfunded school with poorer physical facilities, less experienced teachers, larger classes,” and a number of other deficits compared with “a school with substantially more funds,” Marshall barked, “is to the credit of the child not the State.”

— Carol Anderson

49. “For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship.”

— Carol Anderson

50. “The states couldn’t possibly build two comparable systems. But if they really wanted Jim Crow, the NAACP began to make painfully clear, they would have to pay for it.5.”

— Carol Anderson