Heavy Lifting

Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

New York : Nation Books, 2017.  

xi, 582 p. ; 24 cm. 

 

Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning is a long read [more than 500 pages], a painful read, a hard read, and yet a necessary and worthwhile read. As a Kirkus review noted, one can dispute that this is the "definitive" history of racist ideas, but the book is an indispensable tool for coming to terms with the anti-Black racism in the US - and is a powerful tool in offering ways to wrestle with it.  

Kendi, positioning himself as an anti-racist, posits that the project of racism in the US advances not only through the efforts of segregationists (who consider Black people as inherently inferior to whites), but also with the help of assimiliationists who consider black people/culture as being pathological (due to racism) and yet capable of eventually achieving the "standards" of  the best of white culture and civilization. For Kendi, anti-racism is the force that can dismantle the damages of segreationism and assimilationism.  It is a powerful idea.

Kendi traces the history of racism and anti-racism in the US through five historic persons - Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angel Davis.  I found the section on Angela Davis to be the most satisfying in that I think it best illuminates the way that capitalism and racism are inextricably bound up.  Davis is also a great role model for the importance of intersectionality. 

This book took me almost a month to get through, so it might be a struggle for most YA readers.  But I'll definitely get the YA version written with Jason Reynolds for this library and look forward to reading through it.

 

 

What Brown's Gonna Do With You

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

New York : Riverhead Books, 2014.

458 p. ; 21 cm.

When a book wins the National Book Award (2013), that definitely puts in on one's radar - and so I brought home The Good Lord Bird with me during the spring and summer pandemic lock-down.  

This novel is a rollicking, funny, provocative and hard to put down read.  It follows the adventures of Henry, an enslaved 12 year old freed in Kansas by the passionate and violent abolitionist, John Brown.  Mistaking Henry to be Henrietta, a girl, Brown "adopts" him into his band and nicknames her "Little Onion." The novel is told by Henry who - with his maturing over about three years, his change from enslaved to free, and his passing as a girl - allows McBride to explore many angles of John Brown's movement and eventual assault on Harper's Ferry.  McBride is able to present shifting and complex takes on fanaticism, recklessness, posturing, violence, racism, slavery, sexism, opportunism, danger, and sacrifice by giving his smart-alecky, wry and cynical main character center stage.

The cover of the book has a quote from the New York Times referencing Mark Twain, and I definitely felt the sensibilities of Twain's character Huck Finn in McBride's Henry.  

The novel is not without provocation.  Henry - suffering the harsh, spartan life of being with a paramilitary band on the frontier - at times wishes he were back being enslaved.  Fredrick Douglass comes in for some harsh treatment as a "diva" of the antislavery circuit and as an intemperate sexual harasser.  But all in all, the novel is a brilliant run through a historical episode in US history that still reverberates to this day.  I would definitely recommend it to a reader who wants a good literary read that will grab them and not let go.