It may be common or comforting to look at the history of racial equality in this country as an upward trajectory, advancing from slavery to the election of Obama. But Anderson shows that progress towards racial justice has always been met with reactionary measures that stop that progress in order to protect the norms of white privilege. The Reconstruction Acts and the Equal Rights Amendments following the Civil War were answered with Jim Crow laws; the Great Migration and the Brown decision sparked virulent and effective opposition movements; the Civil Rights Era and its victories were likewise clawed back by segregationists and the War on Drugs. Even the election of Obama sparked widespread political initiatives driven by racial animus.

Anderson tracks the many insidious ways that the undisguised violence of slavery and the Reconstruction Era went underground in the years that followed, from state-sponsored brutality and murder to the unofficial but public spectacles of lynching, to the cloaked, secret violence of the KKK, to the legal battles waged against integration, voting rights, fair housing, and equal economic opportunity for African-Americans. White rage against blacks has been able to remain in existence, and perhaps to become even more powerful, by cloaking itself in a veneer of respectable deniability.