American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

Written by Wesley Lowery

Narrated by Wesley Lowery

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9780358691358

Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author. He is the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and a Journalist in Residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In nearly a decade as a national correspondent, Lowery has specialized in issues of race, justice and law enforcement. He led the Washington Post team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 for the creation and analysis of a real-time database to track fatal police shootings in the United States. His project, “Murder with Impunity,” an unprecedented look at unsolved homicides in major American cities, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Lowery's first book, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, was a New York Times bestseller and awarded the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose by the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews for American Whitelash

[Francisco Espinoza · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very insightful read. Wesley Lowery is a wonderful author. I suggest this book.

[Al Vivian · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Poignant! Powerful! Persuasive! Masterfully done. Should be required reading EVERYWHERE!

[Alan Hill · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is somewhere very close to 5 stars for me. I think it lacked a little impact on the theory side. It is an amazing account of the modern face of white reactionism, and as a gen z, the first president I thought about in the present tense is probably Obama.

I remember his election. It isn’t the actual inauguration, or any of his heralding speeches that stuck with me though. It is the reckoning I had with politics as I got into an emotional debate with one of my then friends in the fourth grade who was CONVINCED that Obama wasn’t actually American and was instead a African Muslim immigrant in disguise would ruin our country. I remember this vividly, and even though I don’t speak of it much it often lingers in my mind. Several memories like this are what I recalled while reading this book. It is a little different to recall where you were during so much of a non fiction book. As a young person, it isn’t an experience I often have. I remember when I first saw Charlottesville on the news. I remember the racial climate during Obama’s presidency. As a black boy who lived through a lot of this book, I know the story first hand.

One of the biggest triumphs of the book for sure is the prose, it isn’t poetic but it conveys very succinctly a somewhat nebulous message about the historic trend of White backlash against racial progress. It’s when we get beyond the area of explaining the phenomenon that I think the book may falter a little.