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.

If postmortems of the 2016 US presidential election tell us anything, it's that many voters discriminate on the basis of race, which raises an important question: in a society that outlaws racial discrimination in employment, housing, and jury selections, should voters be permitted to racially discriminate in selecting a candidate for public office? In Whitelash, Terry Smith argues that such racialized decision-making is unlawful and that remedies exist to deter this reactionary behavior. Using evidence of race-based voting in the 2016 presidential election, Smith deploys legal analogies to demonstrate how courts can decipher when groups of voters have been impermissibly influenced by race, and impose appropriate remedies. This groundbreaking work should be read by anyone interested in how the legal system can re-direct American democracy away from the ongoing electoral scourge that many feared 2016 portended.

"White resistance to racial equality is nothing new-yet its expression can change over time. Examining emerging manifestations can shed light on the larger forces that underpin racial inequalities. In this volume, leading scholars of race and whiteness assess contemporary shifts in white attitudes about racial justice and racial ideology, illustrating these dynamics with case studies at the personal, ideological, and institutional levels. Clashes such as the standoff with law enforcement at Cliven Bundy's ranch and white nationalist videos on YouTube vividly illustrate the vitality of contemporary racism. Examinations of more easily overlooked, yet also consequential arenas-art museums that enforce their boundaries as elite white spaces, conservative "right on crime" policies that mean new ways of surveillance and punishment for people of color, and settler colonialism in the work of liberal environmental advocacy groups-also give insight into the novel mechanisms and specific ideologies within institutions that reproduce racial inequality. Collectively, this empirically-rich collection helps explicate the racialized fear of change (whether grounded in reality or the imagination) that reinforces the pillars of white supremacy. Contributors also explore, with a critical eye, social movements for racial equality"--

LA Times winner for The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose A New York Times bestseller A New York Times Editors' Choice A Featured Title in The New York Times Book Review's "Paperback Row" A Bustle "17 Books About Race Every White Person Should Read" "Essential reading."--Junot Diaz "Electric...so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart."--Dwight Garner, New York Times, "A Top Ten Book of 2016" "I'd recommend everyone to read this book because it's not just statistics, it's not just the information, but it's the connective tissue that shows the human story behind it." -- Trevor Noah, The Daily Show A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the repose to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims other victims' families as well as local activists. By posing the question, "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can't Kill Us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black community's long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Can't Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.

The dark story of the shocking resurgence of white supremacist and nationalist groups, and their path to political power Six years ago, Vegas Tenold embedded himself among the members of three of America's most ideologically extreme white nationalist groups-the KKK, the National Socialist Movement, and the Traditionalist Workers Party. At the time, these groups were part of a disorganized counterculture that felt far from the mainstream. But since then, all that has changed. Racially-motivated violence has been on open display at rallies in Charlottesville, Berkeley, Pikesville, Phoenix, and Boston. Membership in white nationalist organizations is rising, and national politicians, including the president, are validating their perceived grievances. Everything You Love Will Burn offers a terrifying, sobering inside look at these newly empowered movements, from their conventions to backroom meetings with Republican operatives. Tenold introduces us to neo-Nazis in Brooklyn; a millennial Klanswoman in Tennessee; and a rising star in the movement, nicknamed the "Little Fü by the Southern Poverty Law Center, who understands political power and is organizing a grand coalition of far-right groups to bring them into the mainstream. Everything You Love Will Burn takes readers to the dark, paranoid underbelly of America, a world in which the white race is under threat and the enemy is everywhere.

It is not a matter of argument among the vast majority of scholars, but of demonstrable fact. White supremacy includes both individual prejudice and, for instance, the long history of the disproportionate incarceration of people of color. It describes a legal system still predisposed towards racial inequality even when judge, counsel, and jurors abjure racism at the individual level. It is collective and individual. It is old and immediate. Some white supremacists turn to violence, but there are also a lot of people who are individually white supremacist-some openly so-and reject violence. This Field Guide proposes that a better understanding of hate groups, white supremacy, and the ways that racism and patriarchy have braided into our laws and systems can help people to tell, and understand, better stories. .