Review: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

There is a grating tendency among anti-capitalist academic books that this effort manages to avoid, which is viewing the duty of the writer to be that of detachedly observing the system. Táíwò is present in his own narrative, using his perspective as a Black man raised in a Nigerian diaspora community to show some of the pitfalls and limitations of “deference politics”; deference to those who managed to make it to the “room where it happens” takes for granted that such rooms should exist rather than addressing the needs of all those who didn’t make it to the room. Táíwò also emphasizes the need for action over mere description of the world. Although Marx may have said “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” many Marxist academics remain focused on interpretation. To be clear, I am grading Táíwò on a curve here; his passionate polemic on the need for constructive politics (over deference politics) is vague in implementation. But he does at least view the world as changeable, and addresses an audience that hopes to change the world—another distinguisher from many academic books, which seem aimed at other academics.

It’s perhaps a poor indicator that I opened this review with “Well, it’s a bit better than a lot of academic books.” There isn’t all that much to this book; it is short, but despite its brevity it is a padded version of his 2020 essay. The extra pages lightly touch on works by other writers and organizers (Jo Freeman’s essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Amilcar Cabral and Paulo Freire on liberation and self-government, Nick Estes on indigeneity and trauma, etc.) but his treatment of these other topics neither bolsters his own argument nor sheds insight into these other works. During the process of publishing the book, someone made the decision to change the title from the at least descriptive one the essay took ("Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference") to one that suggests a thorough historic analysis that the book doesn’t deliver on (“Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics”). Still, it’s an approachable book that brings up a number of important political questions, and could be a good springboard for a chatty book club.

Review: Left of Karl Marx by Carole Boyce Davies

Sometimes I wonder what compels someone to write a book. This one seemed like it was written out of a genuine and deep admiration for Claudia Jones, and a desire to impart that joy with other academics. 

For all the author’s high regard for Claudia Jones, the author does not seem to be writing for the next Claudia Jones (there is an interesting aside in the Introduction where the author justifies her use of non-academic (communist!) sources, such as Jones herself). The book is missing a sense of urgency (Jones certainly considered her writing to be of pressing importance) and of scale — it is nearly claustrophobically focused on Jones, failing to ground her writing in the thinking of her time or to much extent explore her influence on the writers and political movements that came after her. 

I’m not convinced that the author really even understands Jones in her context. For example, in Jones’ famous 1950 International Women’s Day speech, Jones affirms solidarity with people facing all types of oppression, linking their struggles with the socialist movement. This, the author claims, is something “more radical than communism”, despite it aligning fully with Lenin’s 1902 work, What Is to Be Done?, a work Jones, as a self-identified Leninist, would have read but that the author seems unaware of. (Relatedly, the title of the book is an allusion to the location of Jones’ gravestone relative to that of Marx, and not a political statement the author argues effectively.) When we come to Jones’ well-documented beliefs with which the author particularly disagrees—Jones’ alignment with the CPUSA’s positions in the 1950s, for example—the author insists this smart, well-read, well-traveled woman has been naively deceived. 

Yet for all the minute focus on Jones, it isn’t even an exhaustive one-stop-shop for understanding her experience as a Black socialist woman. Her exclusion from the CPGB due to racial prejudices is briefly mentioned and the reader is pointed towards a work where some other scholar has elaborated it. Academic convention prevents you from stepping on other people’s toes, I suppose. Someone with fewer constraints should write a book on this very deserving thinker.

As a stand-alone chapter to see if you will enjoy the book’s approach to Jones’s writing, I suggest Chapter 4 (“Deportation: The Other Politics of Diaspora”).

Review: Maladies of Empire by Jim Downs

Maladies of Empire tells the usually-untold story of how epidemiological and medical advances were made directly as a result of the institutional aspects of colonialism. The “told” story usually includes Onesimus, an enslaved man who told his master, an 18th century New England priest by the name of Cotton Mather, about the practice of inoculation against smallpox using exposure to a small quantity of the virus to prevent a more severe, systemic infection. Mather tested this process on some 250 enslaved people and eventually his own son, convincing the aggressively skeptical medical establishment of the validity of this Black “folk” wisdom. Good discussion of this episode in history is usually limited to the ethicality of experimentation on enslaved people (see Medical Apartheid). But there’s sort of a comforting aspect to this narrative too: Onesimus was a relatively well-treated slave, and that his master listened to him and learned from his cultural traditions plays into the story the Anglo empire likes to tell that cultural mixing was beneficial for itself and all the civilizations it conquered.

Where Maladies of Empire goes beyond this is to document how the very processes through which the British Empire colonized much of the world also enabled the medical field to understand the spread of diseases. The story starts with slave ships:market forces drove slavers to keep costs down as much as possible without hurting the sale price of their human wares. This captive population was carefully documented and experimented upon, and from here, the medical establishment learned about the minimum fruit or vegetable intake required to stave off scurvy.

The mechanisms of the spread of infectious disease, however, necessitated the aggregation of records from across the world. Who was living where? Where did these ship passengers come from? Where did they go? After how many days did symptoms start? The meticulous records through which the British Empire tracked their ships and military and subjects allowed medical doctors to track the spread of yellow fever and cholera. For the first time, scientists were analyzing data that others had collected, possibly from the other side of the globe. 

The birth of epidemiology is therefore also, in a sense, the birth of data science, and the dark sides of data science were present from the start. The individual names and stories of the people who contributed the data — often racialized or institutionalized or poor — are lost to the sands of time, while the knowledge gleaned from their data goes on to benefit the wealthy and white. Downs’ story-telling is up for a challenge: how do you bear witness to these lost narratives and humanize the individual subjects whose suffering taught us how to cure or prevent disease, without getting mired in details? I don’t think the result is fully successful — there were some episodes where I felt the main themes became a little lost in the weeds of names and locations. But the work is excellent for understanding how intimately linked the development of science was with imperialism.

We see similar beats today: the bureaucracy of institutionalized people supports medical advances. For example, the link between the Epstein-Barr virus and Multiple Sclerosis was shown quite definitively only because of the mandatory monitoring and testing of American military recruits (themselves an imperializing force).

Downs contrasts the racism of the British Empire in the 19th century with that of the United States. In general, the British were certainly white supremacist, but more accepting of belief systems that allowed for similarities between races. For example, see Florence Nightingale and some of her peers’ views of racial differences in disease susceptibility:

Although Florence Nightingale believed in racial difference, regarding the English as the finest race on the planet, she did not use race as an explanation for the spread of cholera or other infectious diseases. Even after germ theory became widely accepted, she insisted that unsanitary environments led to disease. She did not believe that the source of disease transmission could be found in innate characteristics of the patient (...). Similarly, while Gavin Milroy and other doctors working in the Caribbean certainly harboured racist beliefs, they too searched for the cause of disease in the natural and built environment. Milroy condemned Black people’s living conditions and blamed their high rate of illness on their failure to maintain clean homes, but he did not focus on racial difference as the cause of disease spread.

Because their economic system depended on enslavement (and later, subjugation and segregation) of the Black race, American doctors approached medicine quite differently, and sought to reify the impact of race in health. The answer to “why is disease more prevalent in slaves?” could not be that they were oppressed, and forced into terrible living conditions, since that was a threat to the social order:

Many doctors in other parts of the world were turning to the physical world and the built environment to understand how disease spread; they observed symptoms in a patient and then turned outward to housing, sewers, drainage, and crowded conditions to understand why patients were sick. USSC surgeons did the opposite. They turned inward to the patient, trying to find the answer to the illness within or on their body. While they considered the natural or built environment, they emphasized racial identity as the cause. 

This approach had a long-lasting impact on the medical establishment: while slavery ended with the Civil War, “the USSC resurrected slave-holding ideologies to amplify racial difference and to contribute to medical knowledge.” These were not the first scientists to seek to justify their pre-existing beliefs with “evidence” and refuse to consider alternative explanations, and they were certainly not the last.

A challenge with books of this sort is where they stop. The British Empire is no more, but the world is still scarred by imperialism. Science has developed into a far more robust practice, but is still often racist, and the fruits of its research are unequally distributed. The author set out to tackle this topic for a reason, and I would imagine it is because he saw similarities between this part of history and our world today. If so, I agree, and I have highlighted some of these themes above. But Downs never goes so far as to explicitly draw out the link, to comment on practices of the twentieth century and beyond. I suppose it is the careful conservative nature of most academics, who don’t dare step outside their field of expertise — but that just leaves me, with my considerably smaller extent of expertise, to apply what I’ve learned on my own.

Review: Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington

 I think this one is a must-read for anyone conducting biomedical research.

Some parts — particularly the first third, dealing with the slavery and reconstruction era of US history — I'd read before in books like Angela Davis' Race, Women and Class. A few parts felt like rather long deviations that I didn't feel added all that much to the central thesis — for example, the chapter on display of Black people at zoos and freak shows, the part on apartheid South Africa's bioterrorism against its own citizens (the US, as Washington clearly demonstrated, has done plenty such terrorism and testing against its own citizens).

Some parts I thought I knew well — the Tuskegee syphilis trials, for example — but I was surprised there were still shady details to learn (for example, the time pressure on the ad hoc Tuskegee investigative committee, the shameful political maneuvering by its chair to soften the language of the report).

The book was written in 2006, and in the intervening 15 years, I think the big new issue we need to grapple with is the role Big Data plays in healthcare. Non-interventional anonymized healthcare data is sold and re-sold so companies can better target their marketing efforts or assess the potential ROI of a pharmaceutical intervention. These companies have data on some 300 million Americans (of 330 million people). This type of use of medical records has minimal benefit to the people whose records are being sold and analyzed, and I think few people know their information is used this way. I don't think it should be tolerated.

Caste and Climate Change in N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth Trilogy

The Broken Earth Trilogy tells a story about caste and dehumanization using anthropogenic climate change as a metaphor. The two topics are perfect fodder for exploration through fantasy, but they are different enough that, at least in this story, the mixing of environmental destruction and racism muddies both themes.

The story opens at a breaking of the world. A man channels massive amounts of power into the heart of the city of Yumenes, blasting the seat of the Empire off the face of the Earth.

And then he reaches forth with all the fine control that the world has brainwashed and backstabbed and brutalized out of him, and all the sensitivity that his masters have bred into him through generations of rape and coercion and highly unnatural selection. His fingers spread and twitch as he feels several reverberating points on the map of his awareness: his fellow slaves. He cannot free them, not in the practical sense. He’s tried before and failed. He can, however, make their suffering serve a cause greater than one city’s hubris, and one empire’s fear.

The Earth of this world is periodically ravaged by environmental catastrophes, however the fallout of this man’s actions promises to be thousands of years of the most devastating environmental destruction the planet has ever seen. We see a little of how society adapts in response, shifting from a mercantile and hierarchical social structure to emergency-ordered communism [1]. But the environmental aspects fade into the background, serving more than anything as narrative impulse to characters to travel or argue over resource scarcity.

Instead, what unfolds in The Fifth Season is a satisfying, layered exploration of the pervasive way institutions and social norms oppress the lower caste: the orogenes, people with a genetically inherited supernatural ability to sense and control rock and metal. Our main protagonist, Essun, finds her son murdered by his own father for being an orogene. Her secret orogene status, synonymous with being subhuman, is also discovered and she is reviled by her neighbors and exiled from her home, just as the apocalypse begins.

Through flashbacks to her childhood and her youth, we learn about the Fulcrum [2], an institution run by orogenes and accepted by the Empire only because the orogenic leaders of the Fulcrum keep their fellow orogenes in check: cowed but ready to calm earthquakes and volcanoes when needed. Its members have little choice; society doesn’t permit them to live anywhere else. It’s an interesting examination of how simply giving power to a few members of an oppressed group isn’t sufficient to emancipate the rest.

The Fulcrum carries out a breeding program to ensure its ranks are populated with sufficiently strong wielders of orogenic power. And, most horrifyingly, they cull their ranks of the unruly or incompetent by lobotomizing them into a vegetative state, retaining just enough brain activity to use their instinctive earthquake-cancelling powers, and installing them at "node stations".

“Drug away the infections and so forth, keep him alive enough to function, and you’ve got the one thing even the Fulcrum can’t provide: a reliable, harmless, completely beneficial source of orogeny. (...) The only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

She has never heard so much hate put into one word before.

Essun, under the name Syenite, learns much of this through Alabaster, a powerful orogene who has begun questioning the social order, spurred in part through his discovery that the Empire has rewritten history to make orogenes appear responsible for the Earth’s unstable tectonics.

“Tell me what other way there is, then.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. She turns to look at him finally, and he’s looking uneasy. “Well…” He edges into the statement. “We could try letting orogenes run things.”

They find their way to a remote island community, Meov, the only example we see in the entire trilogy of orogenes living in harmony with non-orogenes. Syenite and Alabaster find a sort of peace here, parenting their child together, broken only when Syenite uses her orogenic abilities offensively in a pirate raid. Her location thus revealed, the Fulcrum destroys the community and both Syenite and Alabaster barely escape alive. Syenite kills her son to prevent his being captured (“Better to die than live a slave.”).

So ends The Fifth Season. A fascinating world, if rather grim. The second book, The Obelisk Gate becomes narrower in scope. Essun is sheltered from the environmental catastrophe by an unusual community of both orogenes and non-orogenes led by Ykka, an out-of-the-closet orogene. Unlike on the island of Meov, tensions and suspicions between the two groups rise. However, we are prevented from seeing a true resolution or reconciliation of the two factions by the invasion of an enemy force. Essun saves the day, tapping extra power from the mysterious satellite-like “obelisks” and weaving together both orogeny and magic [3] to defeat the enemy [4].

In the final installment, The Stone Sky, our scope widens dramatically again, now spreading across millenia. Hoa, a member of a strange android-like race of people called “stone eaters”, recounts flashbacks of his early life. His world was one of advanced technology: rapid transit, space travel, beds that cure your wounds. This luxurious world was powered through the literal draining of the lifeforce (“magic”) of orogenes, incapacitated and hooked up to pipes much like the humans in The Matrix. Society, unable to keep up with its own energy demands purely through oppression of its orogenes, carry out a centuries-long plan to tap the Earth’s core for magic instead. This plan involves genetically engineering a new race of particularly powerful orogenes: Hoa and a small handful of others, trained to see themselves not as human but as tools.

Life is sacred in Syl Anagist – as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory. The Niess were not the first people chewed up in its maw, just the latest and cruelest extermination of many. But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There’s not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury. 

Better the earth, Syl Anagist reasons. Better to enslave a great inanimate object that cannot feel pain and will not object. Better Geoarcanity. But this reasoning is still flawed, because Syl Anagist is ultimately unsustainable. It is parasitic; its hunger for magic grows with every drop it devours. The Earth's core is not limitless. Eventually, if it takes fifty thousand years, that resource will be exhausted, too. Then everything dies.

Discovering the truth of the oppression at the heart of this society, at the crucial final moment in which the obelisks would be switched on, Hoa tries to destroy civilization, only to discover that the Earth itself is also human and very angry. 

We were not the only ones who chose to fight back that day. (...) The Earth sees no difference between any of us. (...) We were all guilty. All complicit in the crime of attempting to enslave the world itself.

Locked in a power struggle with the Earth, Hoa realized that to destroy all of humanity would also be to destroy the woman he loves and her child. Hoa dissipates the massive amounts of stored orogeny and magic by blasting a hole in the moon and knocking it off its orbit and initiating thousands of years of unstable climate.
 

This power struggle is mirrored in the present day. Essun seeks to restore balance to the Earth by catching the moon and returning it to its orbit. Her daughter seeks to turn all of humanity into immortal stone eaters in a last ditch effort to save a dying friend she has adopted as a father figure. The two of them fight over the power accessible only through the obelisks, and Essun dies in the conflict. Nassun is moved by her mother’s sacrifice of her own life for the benefit of humanity and for the sake of saving her own daughter, and chooses to complete her mother’s task instead.

Because the world took and took and took from you, too, after all. She knows this, and yet, for some reason that she does not think she’ll ever understand… even as you died, you were reaching for the moon.

This is the way the trilogy ends. So where are we on our themes? The environmental destruction caused by mankind has been solved, but only by returning society to an economy of farmers and artisans [5]. There’s no solar-powered rapid transit, or wind-powered restorative beds, no way to have advanced technology without exploitation of slaves or the Earth. Before learning of the Earth’s sentience, Hoa feels that to maintain this level of technology but without exploitation of orogenes would be tantamount to accepting that enslavement was acceptable.

What we are doing is pointless and Geoarcanity is a lie. And if we help Syl Anagist further down this path, we will have said, What was done to us was right and natural and unavoidable.

If this were the conclusions we should draw about climate change in 2022, it would be a depressing, cynical outlook. But, the story isn’t really about climate change, it’s about the oppression and dehumanization of lower castes.
 

So in what state do we leave relations between the castes? The first encounters between orogenes and non-orogenes resulted in the enslavement of the orogenes at the hands of the Empire [6]. After millennia of deeply ingrained racism, most communities we see show exile of orogenes (Tirimo), uneasy truces between neighbouring communities (Maxixe’s orogenes and their rival non-orogenic raiders), or mixed communities brimming with tension and animosity (Ykka’s community). We see a single example of a people who have truly integrated orogenes and non-orogenes (the island of Meov), but no indication of how to move from say, a Tirimo-like society to a Meov-like society.

“Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society. (...) Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.”

There is such sorrow in her, your little girl. I hope Nassun learns someday that she is not alone in the world. I hope she learns how to hope again.

She lowers her gaze. “They’re not going to choose anything different.”

“They will if you make them.”

She’s wiser than you, and does not balk at the notion of forcing people to be decent to each other. Only the methodology is a problem. “I don’t have any orogeny anymore.”

“Orogeny,” I say, sharply so she will pay attention, “was never the only way to change the world.”

She stares. I feel that I have said all I can, so I leave her there to contemplate my words.

The plot climax is a magical reversal of climate change. The climax of the theme of caste oppression comes half a book earlier: Hoa’s discovery that electricity is harvested from orogenes, and that the Earth (and even one of the obelisks) are sentient and exploited too. This climax is never resolved with a solution, it is simply a revelation, and thematically, it is the same revelation encountered in The Fifth Season, when we discover the lobotomized children hooked up at the node stations. Prejudice, colonialism and slavery are horrifying. Be very careful of excluding people from your definition of "human." I agree, as do, I assume, most readers. Okay, now what? The Stone Sky leaves us without answers, just a plucky girl, void of hope, versus a society still rotten with racism.

* * *

Review: Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin

Black Against Empire is well researched and approachable as an introduction to the Black Panthers. As implied by the full title (Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party), it is very much a detailed history of the organization - there is little examination of the philosophy of the organization. The prose is a little functional - unlike, for example, Race, Women and Class, there are no particularly memorable or inspiring or emotionally wrenching passages. The authors aim to inform, not to incite. I think for these reasons, it serves as a good introduction or supplement. But as far as a call to action, or even really understanding what the Panthers were fighting for, it works best in the context of other readings — particularly those that form the philosophical basis of the Panther party, like those by Malcolm X or Mao or Marx.

Still, the authors make a compelling case that the unprecedented political power of the Panthers relied on both their revolutionary tactics of armed self-defense against state oppression and the receptive political context of anti-war activism. They also clearly present how social movements gain power and build community, how the State targets social movements, and how social movements splinter.

The authors conclude:

No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.

At times during the summer of 2020, in the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter protests after the police killing of George Floyd it seemed like perhaps the frustrated, pandemic-stricken public's imagination was seized to create this broad alliance. But now, nearly a year out, change seems incremental — particularly relative to the change effected during the ~2 year period described in Black Against Empire. I feel like perhaps the recipe for success is therefore even more complicated than that presented by the authors, a daunting prospect.

Review: Ain't I A Woman by bell hooks

 Rating: 5/5 stars

In my review of Blackshirts and Reds, I wrote "There are things that I have spent so much time thinking about, that I can speak or write of them in an impassioned and organized way whenever prompted. This book read like that to me." Ain't I A Woman reads with the same cadence. Hooks has identified a very real problem, and presents it clearly, and passionately.

I've commented before that it can be tricky to review foundational books. Ain't I A Woman is forty years old. I've read a lot of feminist theory, and a lot of intersectional feminist theory. The core thesis of the book was not new to me. But I never felt that I was wasting my time revisiting the same old thing.  The focus of this book was, I felt, very much on the internal rationalizations of every-day people, rather than the public speeches of the movers and shakers of a particular time. For this reason, although there was a considerable amount of overlap with Race, Women and Class by Angela Davis, which indeed hooks cites, I view them more as good companion novels, rather than one being a replacement for the other. 

Nor did I feel like society has really changed so much in the intervening four decades that hooks' observations no longer ring true. The following passage, if it were written in 2021, would be just as searingly true as it was when first written:

When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong—and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

Still, I found myself wishing for a follow-up essay - where have we come since?

I wish I'd read this book earlier - perhaps as a chaser to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I really struggled with Malcolm X's misogynist depictions of women (even women he claimed he admired and respected), and hooks' analysis of his position towards women, and the role of women more broadly in the Black Power movement, gave me a sense of closure and healing.

My most recent non-fiction, non-autobiography read was Stamped From The Beginning,  and Ain't I A Woman was a much-appreciated follow-up to that. Ain't I A Woman made it all the more starkly clear the limitations of focusing solely on the writings of academics and politicians and other people of power when trying to understand the experience of those oppressed by colonialism and patriarchy. Stamped From The Beginning also falls victim to its chronological organization gimmick. hooks is far better able to trace the history of racist thinking by following one idea from its roots in slavery to modern reincarnations of the concept, then move on to another idea.

There was one line that made me laugh out loud - "No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women’s movement." I thought immediately of Kate Manne's Down Girl and its questionable use of the murder of Michael Brown to discuss victim blaming of rape survivors.

I liked that hooks did not remove herself from her writing. Academic writing encourages this practice - and I think it is a shame! Research is not carried out in a vacuum from which all subjectivity can be removed. Nor are academics just brains on sticks. When women and/or people of color encounter philosophy that erases them or minimizes their experiences, it hurts. I appreciated hooks relating her reaction to reading and researching these topics.

The writing was approachable, and ideas were presented in intuitive ways. The thesis of intersectionality should be obvious to everyone, but frustratingly (often intentionally, as hooks demonstrates) isn't. Go read it.

 

Review: Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi

 Rating: 3/5

It was fine.

It bills itself as "The Definitive History of Racist Ideas," and in all fairness it was a history of racist ideas. It started with recounting how Ancient Greeks thought the climate of Africa was sub-optimal for fostering culture and intellectual development, and ended with Black Lives Matter. 

I suppose I was expecting more argument, more examination of themes to help anchor stories together. Instead, it was largely a narrative. Person A was an assimilationist who did Y. Person B, who was a segregationist, responded with Z. Person C, believing in upliftsuasion, tried to do X. Movie D came out, which critics praised as W, although writer E said V. There was so much mentioned, and yet many things were mentioned so briefly that it seemed more of a name drop or a checklist than an actual presentation of an idea, its roots, its legacy. Paul Robeson was mentioned twice, for example, but if I didn't already know something about him, I wouldn't have learned anything about him except that he existed. And he's a pretty cool figure.

The structural format of telling the history of racist ideas through examination of five particular people felt a little limited to me. Some of these figures, like William Lloyd Garrison took a back seat to their own chapters. Some of the links were so tenuous. "Jefferson might have read this newspaper article, although we don't know what he thought about it or if he did for sure." The chapter on Du Bois was, I thought, the most effective at exploring the change in thinking through the work of the featured philosopher. The chapter on Angela Davis was more disappointing. Having recently read Race, Women & Class and Are Prisons Obsolete it was nice to get a little context of her life, although there wasn't all that much that was new to me. I was hoping to get a deeper understanding of how her thoughts evolved over her life, or who she considers to be intellectually influential to her and how. Actual description of her philosophy was quite thin - you're far better off actually reading something by her. To get just a narrative of her life you might indeed be better off reading her wikipedia page - for some reason, the author kept interrupting the story of her arrest, for example, with tangentially related cultural moments, like about the first actress who sported an afro.

 I wondered what a better framing may have been - perhaps picking eight or ten aspects of racism and exploring the change in philosophical thought through these facets? It could be something like worker's right, notions of beauty, health & medicine, education, voter rights, criminal justice.... All these aspects came up through the stories the author explored, and yet they weren't really linked together.

The definition of "anti-racist" was a little unclear to me. Is there a difference between anti-racist and simply not racist? My intuition is that there is - that it is not simply enough to not hold racist beliefs, but one must actively attempt to right societal and historical wrongs. But if so, I didn't feel this distinction was made either explicitly or through example in the text.

I wondered a little who the audience for this book is - and I think it is an excellent read for a person that doesn't think Barack Obama, America's first Black president, is racist against Black people, but is open to understanding that statement.

Review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

 Rating: 4/5 stars

The Old Drift is a sweeping epic, tracing three family lines through three generations, exploring inter-generational inheritance of the effects of trauma, capitalism and colonialism. Woven into these stories is the history of Zambia, a nation similarly struggling with these wounds. Reading The Old Drift, I get the sense the Namwali Serpell feels both loving pride and intense despair about the state of her country, and has poured so much of herself into her first novel. She has a lot to say - about politics, motherhood, sociology, racism, sexuality, science, disappointment, identity, capitalism, global warming, love..... It's a tall order to successfully conduct such a symphony of ideas, and although I think at times the individual melodies get overpowered or off-tempo, it's still a very impressive book.

The three grandmothers each have some supernatural feature. One woman grows hair all over her face and body at a magically rapid pace. Leaving behind a sheltered childhood in post-World War Italy, raised by a brokenhearted mother who was worried her daughter would be stoned as a monster, she starts a new life in Zambia with her lover. Another grandmother's promising tennis career is interrupted with inexplicable blindness. She, too, makes her way to Zambia with her lover, but her immigration is instead an escape from her parent's disapprobation of her interracial relationship. The third grandmother is Zambian born and raised, and her brilliance and sense of adventure bring her to join Mukuka Nkoloso's team of revolutionaries [The Old Drift is impeccably well-researched - some of this research into Nkoloso went into a great New Yorker article]. She falls in love, becomes pregnant, and is abandoned by all her friends and family. This despair causes her to weep endlessly for decades, the skin under her eyes scarring.

The members of the mother generation escape magical distinction, but struggle to set their roots and thrive in the soil they are planted in by their mothers. They grapple with issues like being treated as a commodity by an unloving and ambitious aunt, sex work and homelessness, forming a sense of identity as an idly rich white woman in the expat enclave, an unfaithful spouse, miscarriage, AIDS, and loneliness. Their stories touch every now and then, but it isn't until the grandchildren's generation that the three storylines really merge.

The stories of the grandchildren stretch from the 2010s into the 2020s, and revolve around several fictional technological advances and how these inventions impact a developing country: smartphone successors surgical embedded into the palms of the user (exploited by the government for spying on and controlling its citizens), vaccines against AIDS (tested on brown, poor bodies without their consent), tiny drone swarms (exploited by the government for warfare, spying, controlling its citizens, and used by anti-government revolutionary forces).

The story concludes with intentionally loose ends - the final chapter literally ends halfway through a sentence. I suppose this conveys that history is never over; the offspring of the grandchildren will still be fighting the aftermath of colonialism. Still, I found that I hadn't quite had time to get invested in the final story arch, in which the grandchildren, in a move of rebellion against the government, attempt to take down the dam built by one of their grandfathers. And so the abruptness of the book ending where it did didn't quite have the impact it could have. Nor did I feel fully satisfied by the last sightings of all the mothers and grandmothers.

Parts of the book are incredibly depressing. Every relationship, no matter how strong they started, fizzled or rotted. It's a bleak look at love in general, and particularly one in which the central conceit is that each main character must have a child to narrate the next chapter. I found myself dreading the pages where the characters started to fall in love or found out they were pregnant. Beyond that, some characters - Matha and Sylvia in particular - have so much horribleness thrown their way that I found myself wondering what the point of showing so much misery was. 

Still, beyond these issues, I loved the writing. There were some lyrically beautiful passages:

Can mosquitoes and humans live peacefully together, can we forge an uneasy truce? Hover around each other enough and symbiosis sets in. Over moons, you’ll grow immune, and our flus will move through you – a mild fever and maybe a snooze. This balance can even come to your rescue, defend you against rank intruders. As Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe once said, the lowliest creature, the tiny udzudzu, is what kept the imperialists at bay! Thus when the whites first swooned to the tropics, they saw that the blacks never fell: the raging calenture that gripped the bazungu passed over the huts of the bantu. This place was The White Man’s Grave. But it wasn’t bad lands that caused their downfall – it happened on the seas as well. They say La Amistad’s crew caught a fever, while the black mutineers were spared it. Was it African skin or sweat? It was neither. It was us, and a matter of time. Reckon the wars, how a battleground festers: the British armies in the American South, the Japanese in the Pacific. Even the fall of the Roman Empire was due in part to our diseases. In every case, the nature of grace is that one side is simply more used to us. Call it invasion or world exploration: either way, it upsets this balance. Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to befalls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will; the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.

Other passages were just perfect little needles:

She was mainly struck by how small she looked in her reflection. She didn’t feel that small from the inside.

What sort of preparation, what sort of entertainment does a dying man want? Last things? Joseph had no idea what those would be – he was still obsessed with first things.

All she wanted was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.

During his time at university, Ronald had learned that ‘history’ was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground.

But Sibilla’s marriage had long felt like a handbag that she had neglected to empty out, that she still carried around even though she kept her money, handkerchief and comb elsewhere on her person. 

The baby started to cry again. Matha had never considered that being female would thwart her so, that it would be a hurdle she had to jump every time she wanted to learn something: to read a book, to shout the answers, to make a bomb, to love a man, to fight for freedom. She had never thought Ba Nkoloso, Godfrey and Nkuka would each abandon her in turn to poverty and lone motherhood. Matha bounced her baby in vain. Go to sleep, baby, she whimpered. Shut up, baby. She had never imagined that to be a woman was always, somehow, to be a banishable witch. Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly – weeping was just what she did now, who she was – Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied

Each character had a distinct voice - not an easy task for a novel with nine main characters. 

Many of the dialogues were fairly in-depth discussions of big concepts. Capitalism versus Marxism. Racism. Free tuition. The right way to effect societal change. These Socratic dialogues feel like characters naturally exploring a topic shaping their lives, rather than the author attempting to argue her own views. (Indeed, at times, I wish the author came down a little harder on what she believes.)

‘The protests,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy right now. End-times shit.’ She laughed so hard that it rocked her onto her back. ‘Are you joking?’ she asked the sky. ‘That’s why I wanted to go! They’re frikkin trying to do something! Fight the power and that!’ ‘How about fight the power cuts?’ He was surprised to hear himself echoing his grandfather. ‘Why make free education a priority when people still don’t have food or electricity or running water?’ ‘They did it in Chile!’ she exclaimed, sitting up again and crossing her legs. ‘They made it completely free. Uni for everyone, paid for by those corporate oil companies and shit.’ ‘Are you sure you want to use Chile as the example of democratic progress?’ ‘Who said anything about democracy, men? Democracy’s bankrupt. People from the West shout “democracy” but they’re vampires, sucking our resources. Bloody capitalist stooges.’ ‘Stooges?’ he chuckled. ‘You really are Zambian. So what, you give all your money away?’ ‘I’m Marxist,’ she said with disgust. ‘I’m not stupid.’

 I opened the book knowing almost nothing about Zambia, and I closed it having been inspired to read up on its history, its traditional clothing, its cuisine, its language. Serpell did a fantastic job at painting the country and its people. The books hold on me didn't end upon putting it down; various parts of the book have rattled around in my mind since I read it. And I think that is the mark of a successful book.

Review: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

 Rating: 4/5 stars

While others squabble about racial sensitivity training for cops and corrections officers, or body cams, or what the appropriate amount of educational/vocational programs for felons is, in Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis zooms out and questions the role prisons play in society entirely.

Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?

(...) First of all, we think of the current system, with its exaggerated dependence on imprisonment, as an unconditional standard and thus have great difficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with the more than two million people who are currently being held in the country’s jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigration detention centers.

She points out the strange assumption at the heart of most criminal justice reform movements - that some form of locking people away must always exist. As in Race, Women & Class, Davis does a fantastic job at cutting to the heart of the issue, and showing the intersectionality of race, sex, and capital versus the working class. 

Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun.

She then traces the origins of the current American prison industrial complex, from the "Enlightenment" philosophy that drove the current structure of the institution through the role of the prison in perpetuating oppression of Black Americans.

It was after these first few phenomenal chapters that I found the book wavered a little for me. While the chapters on reform and on gender weren't uninteresting or bad, I felt like it could have been a little more data driven. However, she did a good job at humanizing the men and women who have been disproportionately abused by the system - and perhaps if it had been exhaustively founded in numbers and statistics my critique would have been that she left out the human element. She also makes an excellent point that to use statistics - which come primarily from the very prison industrial complex itself - one must in some ways adopt the same injustices, such as lumping together in one number those who have been imprisoned for possession of minor amount of drugs with those who have raped and murdered and ignored those who have committed state-sanctioned crimes.

The chapter on the prison industrial complex is excellent. Angela Davis carefully demonstrates how closely tied the prison system is with the rest of the economy, and convincingly makes the case that those that wish to reform or abolish the prison system must expand the scope of their activism to target corporations and the capital class more broadly.

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison.

The final chapter, on what abolition of prisons would look like, is also fantastic. The solutions she proposes include expansion of mental health services and addiction services free of charge, decriminalization of sex work and drug use, and changes to how punishment and force are used in educational systems. Many of these same solutions tie in with the current (Summer 2020) calls to abolish the police. Interestingly, she doesn't discuss abolition of the police or reform of the court system - but I suppose she left those similarly weighty topics for another book.

She ends on the following quote, by Peter Biehl, the father of a murdered woman.

“We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen? ’ instead of simply reacting.”

What would it mean to have a plan to make things better, rather than just reacting to things that go wrong? That same question could be applied to medicine, to economics, to psychology, to politics, to software engineering at most companies. It makes me wonder what exactly it is about humans or society that makes us so ill-equipped to tackle this question.

Review: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

 Rating: 4/5 stars

There were parts of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that I really struggled with, but overall, it was an interesting peak into a fascinating man whose premature death was really a loss for the world.

I wish that I had known before reading it that the autobiography was written during the years before and after his split from the cult-like hate group Nation of Islam, and about how much his views and rhetoric changed during the last couple years of his life. I found the surprisingly uncritical chapters extolling the virtues of Mr Mohammad/Nation of Islam to be rather tedious while I was reading it; but the later chapters, written after his split from the NoI and after his trip to Mecca (and his shifting viewpoints as relayed by Alex Haley in his epilogue) more than redeemed these chapters. Malcolm X was a thoughtful man with a lot of integrity and an admirable and assiduous capacity for reflection and change and the humility to admit error. This autobiography captured this period of dynamism beautifully.

I found Malcolm X's rhetoric towards women to be off-putting; towards the end of his Harlem period, I found it so pervasive and unquestioning that I considered putting down the book. At the encouragement of a friend, I sought out some writing by Black feminists to see how they interpreted the paternalism, sexism and misogyny of Malcolm X. I read several essays that helped me feel less alone and frustrated in struggling with this part of his autobiography, and contextualized his opinions. For example, at the time of his death/autobiography, Malcolm X was a devout Muslim, and it's likely he wished to portray publicly the (hierarchical) family structure recommended by his religious beliefs. However, Betty Shabazz's recollection of their marriage was far more equal than Malcolm's recount:

We would have little family talks. They began at first with Malcolm telling me what he expected of a wife. But the first time I told him what I expected of him as a husband it came as a shock. After dinner one night he said, "Boy, Betty, something you said hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I've been going along having our little workshops with me doing all the talking and you doing all the listening." He concluded our marriage should be a mutual exchange.

Still, it is always odd to see someone so good at identifying power imbalances and stereotyping and the impact of a lifetime of oppression on someone's behavior and psyche..... so unable to translate those insights from one social justice issue to another.

Malcolm X's curiosity about the world and his impressive ability to identify social dynamics and deftly argue his opinions shone through this book - particularly in the first few chapters about his upbringing and the final third of the book about his disillusionment with the NoI and his visit to Mecca. Many of his observations were not entirely new to me; there has been a ton of fantastic writing about the overt and subtle ways racism manifests in America in the five-and-a-half decades since the writing of this autobiography. Many insights were just painfully relevant to 2020 discourse:

[W]hite people have created a benevolent image of themselves as having had so much “good-will toward our Negroes,” every time any “local Negro” begins suddenly letting the local whites know the truth—that the black people are sick of being hind-tit, second-class, disfranchised, that’s when you hear, uttered so sadly, “Unfortunately now because of this, our whites of good-will are starting to turn against the Negroes….It’s so regrettable…progress was being made…but now our communications between the races have broken down!”

In a [press poll after the March on Washington], not one Congressman or Senator with a previous record of opposition to civil rights said he had changed his views. What did anyone expect? How was a one-day “integrated” picnic going to counter-influence these representatives of prejudice rooted deep in the psyche of the American white man for four hundred years?

 

Where the really sincere white people have got to do their “proving” of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities; America’s racism is among their own fellow whites. That’s where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

Malcolm X, circa 1964/1965, would probably be the first to caution against holding any one human being up as an ideal, and he was certainly a flawed person. Still, I came away from the autobiography just incredibly frustrated at how he has been portrayed in the years since his death, and saddened that he wasn't allowed a few more years on this world to change it.

Review: Race, Women & Class by Angela Y. Davis

 Rating: 5/5 stars

I am so glad I read this book. Women, Race & Class does exactly what the title suggests it would: thoroughly investigates the interplay between race, gender and class at key moments in American history, from slavery and the abolition movement, through the women's suffrage movements, to modern issues like birth control. Davis identifies structural and systemic issues, and pulls no punches in pointing out the failures of the labor movements and the feminist movements and how these stumbles harmed people at the intersections of race, gender and class.

Davis' Marxist-Leninist angle adds so much to the examination of race and gender. It was exactly the gap I wanted filled after being disappointed in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, a yearning that was mollified somewhat with the delightfully data-driven yet philosophically-limited Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. I've often found myself frustrated at the presentation of "women's issues", where women are assumed to be white middle- or upper-class women, with little more than an acknowledging nod towards women of colour. It was such a relief to find this book, and to read about how this rich-white-women-first philosophy has impeded social progress historically.

It's a 40-year-old book now, and I imagine it has shaped the views of many writers whose work I have read elsewhere. There were no new earth shattering revelations here, nor blazing hot takes. Still, Davis does a fantastic job at boiling issues down to their essence. In the intervening 40 years, we have progressed despairingly slowly on issues of race, sex and class, and I think this book is still very much worth the read.

It is organized into 13 chapters, which can be read as 13 separate essays. My favourites were: 

• Chapter 1. The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood
• Chapter 2. The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights
• Chapter 3. Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign
• Chapter 4. Racism in the Women's Suffrage Movements
• Chapter 10. Communist Women
• Chapter 12. Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights