The End of Anger

“A tremendously important book—gracefully done, painfully perceptive…fearless in its honesty.”

—Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities

“The most authoritative accounting I’ve seen of where our country stands in its unending quest to resolve the racial dilemma on which it was founded.”

—Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home

“The End of Anger may be the defining work on America’s new racial dynamics.”

—Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union

Ellis Cose is a venerated voice on American life. With The End of Anger, he offers readers a sharp and insightful contemporary look at the decline of black rage, the demise of white guilt, and the intergenerational shifts in how blacks and whites view and interact with each other. A new generation’s take on race and rage, The End of Anger may be the most important book dealing with race to be published in the last several decades.

This landmark study on American culture provides a vital framework for understanding our time:

• Fighters, Dreamers, and Believers: How the civil rights generation, their children, and their grandchildren developed starkly different views on race, anger, and opportunity in America.
• The Post-Racial Myth: An examination of Barack Obama's presidency—how it inspired unprecedented optimism in Black America while simultaneously exposing deep-seated racial anxiety in the nation.
• The Decline of Black Rage: Why the defining emotion of the civil rights struggle has been replaced by a new, more complex sense of hope, even in the face of persistent structural inequality.
• A New Black Middle Class: Through exclusive surveys of Harvard MBAs and other elite groups, Cose explores the successes and anxieties of a privileged class navigating a world of new possibilities.