THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND, decades lost in drawers because white people

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
RICHARD WRIGHT
Library of America
$19.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy.
Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes—or is permitted to escape—from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Richard Wright was one of the twentieth century's crop of Great American Storytellers, a writer whose entire life of creation was a gift to a country that did not deserve his passionate voice calling into the face of its indifference that we can be better, do better, and must in order to survive.

People my age were required to read Native Son in high school English, and I am so very glad we were. I wouldn't have picked up the book any other way. It needed to be shoved on me. And wonder of wonders, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District of the early 1970s did. It was a tough thing to let myself believe, that people simply but sincerely hated for no better reason than someone was a different skin color than they were. I assumed all those yahoos were just performing their snotty, hateful idiocy like they did their fake homophobia; it seemed to me that racism against Black and Hispanic students was the same. Anything to look cool, after all, and these were teenagers whose ideas of Cool were neither self-reflective nor rebellious enough to have progressed from the 1950s their own parents were stuck in.

Then we read the equally astounding true-crime (I call racism a crime and am not likely to stop doing so) Black Like Me, an account of a white man passing as Black in the Jim Crow South. It too was gut-wrenching, but was different in kind than the novel Native Son. A factual report...well, I am quite sure that my own racism got hard, hard knocks that year. (I am fully aware that I'm complicit in racist society, that in no way am I "not a racist" just because I support Black political candidates and so on.) It's a pity we couldn't have read this jaw-dropping, intense, visceral evocation of the Other as refiner and perfecter of his Othering. It is the apotheosis of Otherness and Othering that this intense story tells its readers.

Anyone who's paid me any attention knows that I can be run off from continuing a read by child abuse, by use of the n-word, by cruelty to animals...the list goes on...and not a few unfriendlies are smirking in anticipation of taxing me with this book's abusive, rage-filled, n-word-bombing ethos...how can I give this five stars and still abandon ship with content warnings in other, arguably less offensive cases? Because Richard Wright never does a single thing to make the awfulness of PoV character Fred Daniels's world sensational. The author isn't kidding around, bedizening a story with nastiness to provoke a response. He is telling a story about how Othering a man will, over time, after many small and large blows and much deliberate infliction of every kind of pain, turn him in to the thing that he was not, did not want to be, and could not bear to know that he now was.

It worked, in its honesty and its clarity of purpose. I left the sewer Fred lived in without regret, without revulsion, and with the most horrified, profound acceptance of Fred as he was abused and neglected into being. Acceptance of his re-creation, transformation.

In the inexcusably hate-filled twenty-first century, we are fighting the battle that Fred lost all over again. There are wins...the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers...there are defeats, the gerrymandering cases standing out to me as disasters to Black people...but the trend is towards, as it ever was, the endless and pointless perpetuation of hate based on stupidity among the haters and truculence among the hated.

Books like this are strong medicine against both ends of the spectrum. Fred, a victim, sees what the System does to people, and ultimately still surrenders to it. Not to fight against the dehumanizing and brutalizing actions and inactions of the system that allows Fred to exist in the literal sewers is to acquiesce in the process of creating more Freds...and that is a moral wrong and a societal tragedy. Author Wright doesn't allow his readers the luxury of redemption. This book remained unpublished for seventy years because it is the most hopeless document of degradation's triumph I've ever read. White people of the 1940s would've been offended by the clear-eyed assertion of police violence as it happened...nowadays that illusion is gone...but they wouldn't have wanted to read about a good man surrendering his humanity regardless of that knee-jerk response. The accusing fingers pointing back at them as they called out Author Wright for his bleak treatment of Fred (theirs was the system he succumbed to, after all) were simply too on-the-nose.

There is an extended essay included with the novel entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” that enables our appalled eyes to see where so much of the story we've just read originated. The fact that Christian religion played such a big role in Wright's formation into a man capable of the kind of wordsmithing he does isn't a big surprise. I'm very grateful that the author's daughter required the essay to be published within the book containing the novel...it's a long piece and, even if you're on the fence about reading the novel, I hope you'll consider procuring it to read the essay alone. It is a marvelous explication of how each generation forms the next, for good and ill.

What Author Wright isn't, in the writing of this story, is subtle. The metaphors defining it simply aren't debatable: Whites own the sunshine and consign the Blacks to the literal sewers to eke out whatever existences they can. A Black man who's innocent of any crime is shoved into the sewer with the rest of the leavings because he's never had a place in the sunshine that was truly his. As he copes increasingly poorly with the sewers, he's not allowed to leave them; he's run away from the white police, deprived them of their fun of torturing and eventually killing him, so they say "stay there and die."

The author doesn't, then, offer Redemption to either side. It's a very uncharitable and un-Christian thing to withhold. But he's got a reason, does Author Wright: "Chickens come home to roost, don’t they?" his daughter quotes him as saying.

They very much do. The perch they roost on is, in this rare and exquisitely painful read, your complicit soul.

UNDER COLOR OF LAW, first-in-series LA-set The One Good(-Enough) Cop story

UNDER COLOR OF LAW
AARON PHILIP CLARK (Trevor Finnegan #1)
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The murder of a police recruit pins a Black LAPD detective in a deadly web where race, corruption, violence, and cover-ups intersect in this relevant, razor-sharp novel of suspense.

Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal.

Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered Black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

As pressure mounts to solve the crime and avoid a PR nightmare, Finn scours the underbelly of a volatile city where power, violence, and race intersect. But it’s Finn’s past experience as a beat cop that may hold the key to solving the recruit’s murder. The price? The end of Finn’s career…or his life.

I RECEIVED THIS AS PART OF THE FIRST READS SELECTIONS THROUGH AMAZON PRIME.

My Review: I was in a weird position in September 2021. I got my monthly free-because-you-have-Prime offerings from Amazon and, where I usually have no problem picking between two or three of the stories, I was *stuck* between two I really, really wanted to read...the situation was so bad and the deadline to make my choice was looming so I asked my bookish friends to choose between them for me.

A dark and twisty psychological thriller set in Nebraska lost out to this law'n'order-floutin' procedural thriller, though not by much. Either of them would've been fine by me. This story's victory was perfect, I figured, since its publication was set for 1 October and I was #Spooktobering with mysteries and thrillers instead of ghosts and werewolves and the like. And now, mirabile dictu, it's #Noirvember when the review comes out!

It really shows that this author is also a screenwriter. His first pages are a lights-and-sirens, pursuit-copter assisted chase that whipped past as fast as it would've on screen. The major notes in the symphony the author's prepared for us are clear; the problem he's decided to write about couldn't be more timely. What isn't ordinary is the PoV of a cop, a Black cop, on police brutality. On the department's culture, on what it means to try to be a Good Cop, a good Black man, and a decent human being in a system that has little room for any of those identities.

Trevor "Finn" Finnegan stepped off the straight and narrow early in his career at LAPD. What he did is not a mystery; but you should find out from his story. The results of his ethical compromise are simple: He climbed the ladder faster than a Black man should've and is roundly resented by all for it. He has a toxic relationship to his "high yellow" father (and hasn't it been an age since I've heard that term!), an ex-LAPD officer, that was always going to be fraught but never got better. Neither knew how to make it so...his mother's early death didn't help. The men aren't going to be besties, but they have a basic world-view compatibility: No one gives you nothing, just decide how much you'll pay for it.

But what Finn decides to pay is a price that doesn't make for good reading...or living. What happens as a result of this price, this devil's bargain, is devastating. It changes everything. I think it's a change for the better, but that's by no means sure....

Why this is only getting a 3.5-star rating from me comes down to the ghastly sexual politics. There's a pair of women with whom horndog Trevor is involved, in a weird off-kilter way, and his actions do not speak well of him. In relation to one of the women, he all but throws her privileged whiteness in her face while enacting, apparently unironically, male privilege in its most extreme form. He then imagines the other woman in his life will condone, forgive, and accept his bad behavior...and Author Clark's construct of her makes that not improbable. Ugh.

My revolted reservations aside, the writing is deft, it fails to fall into speechification as it sometimes hints at doing, and the plot is one I feel strongly needs to be told. Good people doing bad things for what they tell themselves are noble aims is an evergreen because it's not just relatable it's instructive. I'll read the next book in what promises to be a very interesting series.

THE PRIZE, a damning indictment of greed and careerism with a huge dollop of blame for the Lady Bountiful syndrome

THE PRIZE: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?
DALE RUSSAKOFF
Mariner Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced to a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the downtrodden schools of Newark, New Jersey, then mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie were beside him, vowing to help make Newark “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” But their plans soon ran into the city’s seasoned education players, fierce protectors of their billion-dollar-a-year system. It’s a prize that, for generations, has enriched seemingly everyone, except Newark’s children.

Dale Russakoff delivers a riveting drama of our times, encompassing the rise of celebrity politics, big philanthropy, extreme economic inequality, the charter school movement, and the struggles and triumphs of schools in one of the nation’s poorest cities. As Cory Booker navigates between his status as “rock star mayor” on Oprah’s stage and object of considerable distrust at home, the tumultuous changes planned by reformers and their highly paid consultants spark a fiery grass-roots opposition stoked by local politicians and union leaders. The growth of charters forces the hand of Newark’s school superintendent Cami Anderson, who closes, consolidates, or redesigns more than a third of the city’s schools—a scenario on the horizon for many urban districts across America.

Russakoff provides a close-up view of twenty-six-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his wife as they decide to give the immense sum of money to Newark and then experience an education of their own amid the fallout of the reforms. Most moving are Russakoff’s portraits from inside classrooms, as homegrown teachers and principals battle heroically to reach students damaged by extreme poverty and violence.

The Prize is an absorbing portrait of a titanic struggle, indispensable for anyone who cares about the future of public education and the nation’s children.

Another gift from a special friend. Thank you, darling heart, but can I have a comic book now?

My Review: Betsy DeVos is the Secretary of Education. That sentence, plus the one about the racist, sexist shitheap that is Jeff Sessions becoming the Attorney General, really should drive home the point that these people your fellow Americans voted into office are the lowest of the low, the lowest and the least principled represented in halls of power where their like should simply never be allowed.

I do not belong to the school of thought advocating healing our divisions. I advocate the secession of the decent people from the rotten-souled fascist right-wing rest of y'all. And we'll take our tax money with us...we pay more than we get.

But then my conscience gets to me. What about the desperately poor and the hungry whose lives will, horribly, get still worse? The schools that will close? The school lunch programs that will vanish forever?

This book makes the cost of the Union's dissolution stark. It's never mentioned. It's not part of Dale Russakoff's brief in the least. But listen to this:

To those...who see education through the lens of students and classrooms, it is obvious that urban public schools are being asked to overcome nothing less than the effects of poverty. Reformers are right...to insist on consistently excellent teaching and leadership, but the results in Newark and in distressed cities across the country make clear that much more support is needed.

Given that most of the nation's schools are financed by property taxes (a system as blatant in its intent to preserve and protect the existing system of privilege as can be designed), and given that US government spending on early childhood support is abysmal compared to the entire rest of the planet, where is that support meant to come from? DeVos won't be there in her seat of power advocating for the Head Start program or the school lunch program. So now what?

Here's one perspective:

“Education reform is not about its leaders and their prerogatives. It’s about communities,” Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and an ardent reformer, wrote on The Root, an online magazine. “Education reform doesn’t have to be—indeed, cannot be—force-fed to communities of color . . . We can be equal partners in ensuring what is best for our children and all children. It won’t work any other way.”

Inviting dialogue! Wow. What a concept. Except that there are a lot of people with huge financial stakes in the status quo that do NOT want to see reform. A 1994 Department of Education audit (mentioned in the book) of the Newark system found breathtaking corruption, a building that a school board member was selling to the district for $2.7 million that was generously worth under $200,000 being the one I was most repulsed by. In fact, "outsider" Democrat Newark mayor Cory Booker presented machine Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie with a school reform plan that warned explicitly against opening the process to public scrutiny since the unions and the other money-suckers would subvert or derail the process to protect their slots at the trough. (My phrase, not his.)

Then again, it's not just the greed factor that's at work in this process and its manifest failures:

“Education reform comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades,” [an insider] said. “It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.”

So even though our kids are failing to get even the minimal education they're being offered in the first place, who the hell asked your white ass to come sit at the table and tell us what's what? The Annenberg education initiatives of the 1990s (the Chicago branch of which featured one Barack Obama among its leading lights) faced the same issues. Here's a piece by a Teach for America alumnus. He isn't sanguine about the efficacy or the future of the program. Russakoff gives more detail, which I felt was nicely summed up by this:

“The ethos when I went through Teach for America was that good teaching and good leadership could solve the problems of poverty,” said [a Newark program participant]. “That’s part of the pie, but that’s not all of the pie. Our most dynamic teachers were burning out—the need and anger in the children, the mental health issues, the absenteeism, the transience.” They were witnessing the effect of what researchers call adverse childhood experiences, multiple traumas that, studies have shown, significantly interfere with learning and focus in children in the most disadvantaged communities.”

Back to the problems of poverty that education is being asked to overcome. That is manifestly absurd. Education is the way out of poverty. This is an article of faith among the educated. But what does that statement look like to a child whose world contains one educated person, usually not of his or her own ethnic background? "Be like me," they hear said earnestly and with all the best wishes in the world.

How? What does that look like?

Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words. (my emphasis)

By. Age. THREE.

Are you getting a view of the biblical proportions of this problem yet? The sheer magnitude of the changes needed to make even a minuscule dent in the problem? The reformers have hammers. The problems become nails:

“A lot of high-stakes accountability has become self-defeating—focusing solely on the identification of bad schools, the bad teachers, as opposed to creating a signal and involving teachers in processes that lead to investigations and changes,” [an expert] said.”

So here's The Purpose Explained:

[An expert] said the system, known as Student Growth Percentile, was designed to measure student gains or losses, not to assign blame or credit for them. “Simply focusing on teachers as being the only potential cause of growth of students is pretty obviously myopic..." The data would be more useful...as a starting point for discussions with teachers on the reasons individual students are improving or losing ground, which could include many factors in and out of school.

Mmm hmm. Statistics used as ploughshares, not swords, in the battle to save yet another generation of poverty-mired Black children from a lifetime of marginal existence. That's gonna happen. After all, the entire system isn't based on the need for the Black child to grow up to be a grunt worker, a pawn, or a prisoner, is it?
/sarcasm

So what's the answer? Mark Zuckerberg, who comes across in this book as a genuinely well-meaning man with a slightly different hammer he wants to wield on Newark's public school system:

Zuckerberg’s document laid out similar goals: “Restructure pay scale to increase base salaries for new hires . . . Abolish seniority as a factor in all personnel decisions and incentivize the removal of poor performers.” He also wrote that he wanted the best teachers to receive bonuses of up to fifty percent of their salary, the kind of incentives paid to top workers in Silicon Valley.”

Selected from among many other equally utopian proposals to stand for the dangers of false equivalency in public conversation about society's needs. Zuckerberg, a political conservative, wants to model the world on a business platform created by and for people who are high achievers. In Alcoholics Anonymous, this is called "acting as if," or "fake it til ya make it," an idea that behavior becomes habit becomes character.

Oh dear. That's not such a great idea, Zuck, especially since your own organization is so...fallible, let's say, due to its constituent members aping your own regressive politics and enforcing the attendant repressive and unpleasant standards on the billions who don't want any part of them. But that's another rant for another day.

Businesses aren't by their nature equipped to deliver what the teachers in the trenches say with near unanimity what they really want:

[T]eachers consistently tell researchers that, given the choice, they would opt for a good principal and supportive working conditions over merit pay. Indeed, research had found no correlation between merit pay and student achievement, although reformers and venture philanthropists were fighting hard to make it a staple of new teacher contracts.

So that's easier and cheaper than the throw-money-at-the-problem shtik, right? That's the teachers sorted. And the kids?

Children with more than one traumatic experience—violence, severe poverty, family breakup, or substance abuse in the home—were more than twice as likely as others to fail at least one grade.

And we're back to square one: Support the family that a child comes from, help the family eat, live in a stable location, get the services that it needs, and the battle's more than half won.

Does any of that seem to you likely to happen in Trump's America?

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP, a heartfelt sermon to an absent congregation

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP: A Sermon to White America
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
St. Martin's Press
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Short, emotional, literary, powerful―Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice soars above the rest with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: I don't take my white male privilege as my due. I recognize that, even in my state of disability and deeply offensive otherhood by being unapologetically gay and intelligent in a world that really really dislikes both those qualities, I am still protected by a halo of white maleness from the full force of contumely routinely piled on others. I'm not stopped by cops while walking on the boardwalk. I'm not made a target by predators as I wander through my wealthy little town. I'm not, in short, Black or Latinx or Desi.

Dyson is still speaking to me in my bastion of safety. I'm not immune to racism because I don't personally practice it. I am the beneficiary of racism's unbearable viciousness. Every unsolved murder of a Black man or teen or child hit by a stray bullet fired in a dispute over goodness knows what (that happened year before last in Hempstead, a few minutes from where I live) suffers from a lack of what I have without question: The full protection of the society I live in, however grudgingly offered. I can demand that the institutions in place give me what I need. Others can't. And that is institutionalized racism at its most disagreeable. Because I, and so many like me, can make these demands, others are perforce denied their access to them. It is a scarcity model, a zero-sum game, where my privilege comes at the expense of your access to the spoils.

How does one cause those who have abundant goods, easy access to services and wealth, to share with those who have not? Dyson exhorts and educates the white elite to enjoin us to see things as they are. Then we're left to question our consciences as to whether the way things are is okay with us. My answer is "no I'm not okay with it" and still that makes no difference in the world at large. It brings institutional racism no closer to collapse. And, crucially, it brings me into no significant danger of losing my white male privilege. Dyson has effectively presented me the case for my privilege to end; he and I together with the people of conscience can only exhort, can try to explain to any audience we can find that as "guiltless" as we may be in our own hearts, we need to put our hands to the divine work of ending our own luxury.

Savonarola tried that. Got him burned at the stake. The Black Panther Party has advocated for this for over 50 years. Got their leaders jailed, murdered, marginalized. White America isn't in the pews listening to the sermon, Dr. Dyson. The converts are, I hope, already out there flapping their gums about the subject. I bash my keyboard to bring awareness to the issues of exclusion and denial. This is my way of encouraging all my fellows in privilege to resist the understandable desire to (silently, tacitly) accept the tainted gifts that the kakistocracy currently ascendant in US politics delivers to us.

Despite the urge to put a book that makes you feel ashamed of things you think you can't control or influence right down on the nightstand, I ask you please to stop yourself from the easy course. Please pick the book back up. Please understand that Dyson is extending a hand to you, palm up, to offer you reasons to take action and make decisions that support true equality. Put your palm to his. Take that action, make that decision, no matter how small or how "useless." There is a reason for you to do the right thing:

We don't hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.

#ReadingIsResistance

GHETTOSIDE, being a jeremiad of a review of a jeremiad of a book

GHETTOSIDE: A True Story of Murder in America
JILL LEOVY
Spiegel & Grau
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.

But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

This book was a holiday gift from a special friend. "Thanks" honey, I love you too.

My Review: I had nightmares reading this damned book. I finish a book a day. This one took me a solid month of on-again, off-again "holy shit I can't, I just can't" reading to finish. I'm a privileged fuck. I always was. I think my one hope for any redemption is that I've never been under any illusion I wasn't. This is a read to make a decent soul scream and rage against the horrors of an everyday reality *in*our*own*country* that is so, so, I can't...I do not possess a word anywhere in my brain that's equal to the towering emotional and political indignation, fury, disgust, horror, agony, grief that I am experiencing.

I'll attempt to be a bit more rational from here on out. I think quoting Leovy herself will help with my incoherent outrage.

Start with this. Leovy's commonsensical reduction of the problem facing our country's law enforcement machinery, the notable lack of a will to do the right thing:

...[T]o assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

That's pretty much the entire book's point in a nutshell. Understand this, really get it, and you'll be able to read this book without feeling bitch-slapped by the facts. It won't help one iota with the emotional shellacking you're going to take. Yep, that's right laddies and gentlewomen, this another Eat-Your-Spinach Book! Oh boy oh joy, Jeremiah bar Derus slings another jeremiad at ya!

But c'mon, read this and tell me that you can't see why:

Society's efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic were inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political, and racial sensitivities. When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectacles — mass shootings, celebrity murders — a step removed from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men.

They were the nation's number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the country's population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect — that a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of America's black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

These facts constitute an invitation to jeremiadize, no? The appalling stark factual truth makes for bad feelings but better votes, or so I hope. The facts of young Bryant Tennelle's murder aren't unusual. They're quite appallingly routine, in fact. I can't see any reason to pretend otherwise. His father is one of the good guys...a cop...but he was just like a million other young Black men in his neighborhood. And he paid with his life for his father's decision not to leave the world he grew up in, the world of violence and death and grief that generations of political and social inaction at the least destructive and targeted harassment at the worst have created. Make no mistake: Leovy shows clearly that this situation isn't new, isn't accidental, it isn't some ghastly malevolent internal evil inherent in South Central's men. It's us, the rich white people who vote for Law-n-Order for no free rides for moochers for the eternal unchallenged supremacy of Our Kind over the lower orders. Or, to put it simply, Trump's Murrika.

The fact is that this carefully constructed economic and social apartheid has predictable consequences. Among them is the inevitable rise of illegal shadow economies centered around illegal activities. How the hell else are you supposed to be part of this giant consuming machine? It takes money to be one of those getting and spending, and flipping burgers at Mickey D's isn't going to get you an Escalade:

When your business dealings are illegal, you have no legal recourse. Many poor “underclass” men of Watts had little to live on except a couple hundred dollars a month in county General Relief. They “cliqued up” for all sorts of illegal enterprises, not just selling drugs and pimping but also fraudulent check schemes, tax cons, unlicensed car repair businesses, or hair braiding. Some bounced from hustle to hustle. They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds, all off the books. Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businessmen sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call the police when they need help, explained an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call our homeboys.”

Unpurse your fucking lips, hypocrite. You're right there with your VISA in your wallet and your mortgage payments met. You're in this hip-deep and you've made it look good in a big public way. Of course everyone else wants it too. Everyone in the world wants it too, and that's how we got this far down the rabbit hole that's rapidly turning into a black hole swallowing the entire substance of the planet. Bryant Tennelle could have had your kind of life, if he'd been able to keep his own. He was a middle-class kid in a world where walking the tables to middle classdom is only possible when you join the alternative economy and its social offshoots, or you sell out and support the "legitimate" system.

One of Skaggs’s colleagues picked up a word a Watts gang member used to describe his neighborhood: ghettoside. the term captured the situation nicely, mixing geography and status with the hustler’s poetic precision and perverse conceit. It was both a place and a predicament, and gave a name to that otherworldly seclusion that all violent black pockets of the country had in common—Athens, Willowbrook, parts of Long Beach, Watts. There was a sameness to these places and the policing that went on in them. John Skaggs was ghettoside all the way.

The author has quite a case of hero worship for John Skaggs. I am right there with her on the fact that he is a decent and honorable man. Based on the book's portrayal of him, I think his desire to do the right thing is just a part of him, like his hair or his eyes.

I can genuinely understand how a man of his caliber would look around and say to himself, "No."

Explicitly confronting the reality of how murder happens in America is the first step toward deciding that it is not acceptable, and that for too long black men have lived inadequately protected by the laws of their own country.

It's obvious and inescapable that this is reality. A man like John Skaggs isn't built to see this and not do what he can to change it. But there's a price to pay for this kind of starchiness. He doesn't come across as a very approachable person. Does that matter? In the wider scheme of things, not really; but it makes the book a bit hard to carry on with at times. Author Leovy's obvious admiration for Skaggs increases the effect.

But listen up, internet-enabled scions of generations of privilege and oppression: Change is Gonna Come. Get on board or you'll really, really, really regret it. Ask the poor white people who voted for Trump. They know.

THE BLACK CALHOUNS, proof that history is fluid when more voices join the conversation

THE BLACK CALHOUNS: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family
GAIL LUMET BUCKLEY
Grove Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley—daughter of actress Lena Horne—delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African-American family from Civil War to Civil Rights.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. From Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement, this ambitious, brilliant family witnessed and participated in the most crucial events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Combining personal and national history, The Black Calhouns is a unique and vibrant portrait of six generations during dynamic times of struggle and triumph.

ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: There is a television miniseries on its way via ABC Studios. Here's to hoping they do it justice.

My goddesses. There is so much I personally don't know about the African American history of my own country. The saga of the Calhouns is epic, and an instructive look at the roots of white nationalism in the demagoguery of politicos hoping to be elected to office. Vile, disappointing, unsurprising given today's terrors.

The author understandably focuses on her famous mother, Lena Horne, for specifics and anecdotes to enliven her historical thesis about the existence and condition of an African American elite in each decade following the American Civil War. That's inevitable, I suppose; had she done otherwise, assuming she possessed the information to do so, this book would've been as thick as a Bible and about as interesting. Gadzooks were there a lot of Calhouns and cousins and families and friends and husbands and...well, let's just say that a four-line summary of the huge majority of the dramatis personae still pumps us to over 300pp of relatively dry material.

It's the relatively dry part that bothers me the most. I am entirely sure that Author Buckley possesses the chops to do more with even cursory mentions than is done here. I am even more sure that fewer names and more anecdotes/reminiscences/stories would've made for a deliciously readable, dare I say it novelistic, book.

Not that there is a single thing *wrong* with this book. There's a slightly slippery slope in the alternating north/south chapter format; it starts to feel forced. Believe me when I tell you that this isn't anything more than a quibble. I don't at all want to give you the impression that the book isn't a terrific investment of your eyeblinks, especially my fellow white folks who are earnestly seeking some road signs in this complicated minefield that is race relations. It helps that Author Buckley has a background in history. Her potted course in American race relations is richer for it.

Don't miss this chance to learn about race-related issues in a relatively painless way, from the "other" side of the issue.