Anderson explains how the concept of "white rage" began to take shape in her mind around two instances of police violence: the killing of Amadou Diallo, in 1999, and the killing of Michael Brown, in 2014. In both cases, the same narrative of misplaced black rage drove the media coverage: why should African Americans be outraged over police violence, when the real problems are within their own communities? This led Anderson to realize that "what was really at work here was white rage" (2). "White rage" describes a systemic, virulent, and ultimately self-destructive opposition to black advancement and progress that has operated in the United States government, courts, and businesses for centuries. It provides a genteel cover for racism at every level of society, and it surfaces whenever significant steps are made by African Americans seeking equality and full citizenship.

Carol Anderson's White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide begins at the end of the Civil War. For Anderson, the Reconstruction Era was a time of great promise and possibility: with slavery, our nation's "original sin" (1), finally abolished, the country could have taken a great step towards the fair, democratic state imagined in the Declaration of Independence.