American Whitelash
A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress
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4.3 • 20 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An NPR Best Book of the Year • Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
“American Whitelash is indispensable. Really. It is.” – Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wesley Lowery confronts the sickness at the heart of American society: the cyclical pattern of violence that has marred every moment of racial progress in this country, and whose bloodshed began anew following Obama’s 2008 election.
In 2008, Barack Obama’s historic victory was heralded as a turning point for the country. And so it would be—just not in the way that most Americans hoped. The election of the nation’s first Black president fanned long-burning embers of white supremacy, igniting a new and frightening phase in a historical American cycle of racial progress and white backlash.
In American Whitelash, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and best-selling author Wesley Lowery charts the return of this blood-stained trend, showing how the forces of white power retaliated against Obama’s victory—and both profited from, and helped to propel, the rise of Donald Trump. Interweaving deep historical analysis with gripping firsthand reporting on both victims and perpetrators of violence, Lowery uncovers how this vicious cycle is carrying us into ever more perilous territory, how the federal government has failed to intervene, and how we still might find a route of escape.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This sobering exposé of white supremacy and racial hatred in 21st-century America is a difficult but necessary read. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wesley Lowery lays out how, following Barack Obama’s historic presidential election in 2008, racism took on a frightening new form in response to an increasingly diverse nation. He traces a line from the Civil War to events like the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the deadly racist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Drawing upon his experience reporting on issues like police brutality and the internet-fueled rise of hate groups, Lowery presents the facts of history while never losing empathy for the people whose lives have been forever changed by racist prejudice and violence. By putting faces and names to white supremacy’s diverse victims, American Whitelash makes the problem feel personal and urgent.
