On Feb. 1st, 2022, the University named African American studies scholar Carol Anderson as the 2022 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize. The prize honors “outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and/or religious relations,” according to the University website. The recipients, named annually, receive $25,000 and a medal, both of which are presented at a ceremony to honor the winner. Recipients also have a residency at the University; Anderson’s will take place from Oct. 24 to Oct. 26, 2022.

Anderson won the award for her prominent work in African American studies. “Carol Anderson has produced seminal scholarship that not only explains how structural racism shapes life, policy, and politics in America but also demands the action necessary to bring about a better future for us all,” President Liebowitz said in a Feb. 1 BrandeisNOW article. 

Anderson earned a Ph.D. in history from the Ohio State University in 1995 and is currently ​​the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University. She is a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was elected into the Society of American Historians. She was also a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. 

Her book “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide,” published in 2016, was a New York Times Bestseller as well as the winner of 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year, a Boston Globe Best Book of 2016, and a Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016. The book was inspired by an op-ed Anderson wrote for The Washington Post in 2014 as a response to media commentators referring to the protests after the shooting of Michael Brown as “black rage.” In her op-ed, Anderson wrote that that response was "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames, everyone had ignored the kindling." 

Her other books include “Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955,” “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960,” and “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy.” “One Person, No Vote” was on the long list for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction. Her latest book, “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” published in 2021, was a New York Times Editor’s pick and was named one of the Best Social Science Books of 2021 by Library Journal.