White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
166 pages
Published 2016
Read from February 9 to February 21
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
When I was young, one excuse my father scraped up for keeping my brother and I out of public school was a never-defined bogeyman named "busing." The way he spoke of this dread thing made me fear it like a punishment, though to me it sounded a lot like riding the bus downtown with my Grandma, which left me confused -- because what could me more fun than riding the bus downtown with my Grandma? I only learned what busing was much later, by which time I had mostly forgotten the venom in my father's voice and how determined he had been to avoid it.
I never went to public school for more than a few months. Not a few months at a time -- a few months total, out of my entire childhood. Busing was only one excuse. The fact was, my father was delusional and paranoid to the point where he could not function, and me living in a car traveling aimlessly across the country with him was merely an incidental side effect.
Fast forward to 2018, when the entire country is paralyzed and unable to function thanks to the delusions and paranoia of somewhat less than half of the electorate. The America I had glimpsed with my father inside gun shows and Oklahoma gun shops -- what back then seemed like a fringe, with its Deep State conspiracies, toxic hatred and masculinity, military rations, survivalist manuals, and monolithic Whiteness -- now parades openly under the light of a thousand tiki torches, its pathetic sociopathy given a physical shape in an orange would-be dictator whose whinging insecurities are applauded as manly resolve. Despite my upbringing, despite seeing the fetid roots of Trumpism with my own eyes way back in the early '90s, I had been completely floored by ascent of White populism. How could an obvious fascist, with all the charisma and legitimacy of a toy from a Crackerjack box, have swept into power? What happened to the vaguely comforting soft-liberal platitudes of acceptance and progress I had absorbed from cartoons and PBS as a kid, then so scorned from my rarefied Social Democratic perch in my 30s? Growing up in a car, absorbing a picture of American sociology from '90s kiddie pop culture, had sheltered me, hidden the ugly realities of American Whiteness from me until the paranoid gun show crowd suddenly ran every branch of government, and the America I believed I had known turned out to be a Saturday morning fiction.
White Rage is required reading for any of us who entered the Age of Trump with a sheltered, privileged perspective on race. One by one, Anderson picks apart the pleasant myths of Civil Rights progress to show the pale termites destroying the substance behind the façade. Every step of the way, from dismantling Reconstruction to destroying public schooling rather than desegregating, from suppressing the Black vote with poll taxes and literacy tests to suppressing the Black vote with voter ID requirements and gerrymandering, and all the insidious and rarely-questioned "everybody knows" myths of American public policy, Anderson presents a methodical picture of White America's inability to tolerate Black American success and advancement. Each chapter is an emotionally exhausting survey of the evils that systemic, deep-rooted anti-Black racism has perpetrated, climaxing with the triumph of the Southern Strategy, the Nixon-Reagan Supreme Court, and the simultaneous release of crack into the inner city and the criminalization of Blackness under the "War on Drugs." It is horrifying, appalling, enraging. And it makes me despair for any true progress in a post-Trump America.
As with many books about conservation or biodiversity, Anderson closes with a hopeful epilogue musing on the possibility of positive change, if only enough of us would unite to repudiate White rage and build a truly free and inclusive future. And as with all those books about saving the environment, the hopefulness of that epilogue (written and published before the 2016 election) is in a sense more depressing than the litany of horrors that went before it. Right now, at least, it doesn't feel like much will change. Trumpism and anti-Black fascism have been political forces throughout White America from the very beginning; the facile belief that "all of that was in the past," which informed so much of my worldview in the '90s and '00s, was in fact part and parcel of the sociopolitical effort to reframe and minimize the Civil Rights struggle. Maybe things will get better in a generation (assuming some insecure fascist dictator doesn't push a button, on either side of the Pacific), but right now, it's hard to see how.
And that in itself is another vital dose of insight from this book.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Friday, February 9, 2018
2018 read #5: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones.
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
342 pages
Published 1985
Read from February 1 to February 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
In subject matter, Fire and Hemlock fits with the trends of its time, when urban fairy tales like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and modern retellings of old fairy ballads like Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant-Killer, helped reinvent urban fantasy. Yet the comparison I kept coming back to as I read it is an urban fantasy from another era entirely: Jo Walton's Among Others. Which is not to say that Fire and Hemlock is ahead of its time. Wynne Jones repeatedly and appallingly has her adolescent protagonist Polly worry about her weight, even having her muse about starving herself to look thinner for an older male admirer; Polly is subjected to casual harassment from nearly every man in her life, ranging from her mother's new boyfriend to the bookie on the street corner; she mentally takes responsibility for "tempting" them all with her charms. The lechery of the men, and Polly's feelings of provoking their behavior through her temptations, is given scarcely any commentary in-text -- rendering it to all appearances normalized. Especially when you consider that this is (based on its publication history more than anything else) a work of juvenile fiction, it makes for some cringe-inducing reading in the #MeToo era.
Those unpleasant details date the book firmly in its era (or possibly even earlier, to the late 1970s adolescence much of the book describes). Yet much of Fire and Hemlock feels like a prequel to Among Others, which is to my mind quite the au courant post-fantasy. Both novels follow bookish protagonists from the wreckage of broken homes; both devote many pages to the solace of reading books and finding one's own place within their pages, listing formative titles with evident tenderness and reverence. Both books expertly balance their sense of unreality, remaining ambiguous for much of their length about whether anything "fantastic" has actually occurred. Far more so than its urban fantasy contemporaries, Hemlock integrates the fairy story seamlessly with Polly's quotidian adolescence. The Queen of the Fairies appears to be merely a rich, beautiful woman who lives in a mansion, her curses dealt out in phone calls and train stations, their sting found in the barbed words of an abusive parent. The flashy fae of War for the Oaks are largely supplanted by unseen machinations beneath the surface of the everyday world, and Hemlock is all the better for it.
Hemlock is far from perfect; aside from the aforementioned problematic elements, I found that certain chapters ran a bit overlong with at times tedious verisimilitude. (As with other young adult works, I might be less bothered by this if I were within the target demographic.) But I found it absorbing, moving, and at times edge-of-my-seat tense all the same. Definitely among my new favorites.
342 pages
Published 1985
Read from February 1 to February 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
In subject matter, Fire and Hemlock fits with the trends of its time, when urban fairy tales like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and modern retellings of old fairy ballads like Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant-Killer, helped reinvent urban fantasy. Yet the comparison I kept coming back to as I read it is an urban fantasy from another era entirely: Jo Walton's Among Others. Which is not to say that Fire and Hemlock is ahead of its time. Wynne Jones repeatedly and appallingly has her adolescent protagonist Polly worry about her weight, even having her muse about starving herself to look thinner for an older male admirer; Polly is subjected to casual harassment from nearly every man in her life, ranging from her mother's new boyfriend to the bookie on the street corner; she mentally takes responsibility for "tempting" them all with her charms. The lechery of the men, and Polly's feelings of provoking their behavior through her temptations, is given scarcely any commentary in-text -- rendering it to all appearances normalized. Especially when you consider that this is (based on its publication history more than anything else) a work of juvenile fiction, it makes for some cringe-inducing reading in the #MeToo era.
Those unpleasant details date the book firmly in its era (or possibly even earlier, to the late 1970s adolescence much of the book describes). Yet much of Fire and Hemlock feels like a prequel to Among Others, which is to my mind quite the au courant post-fantasy. Both novels follow bookish protagonists from the wreckage of broken homes; both devote many pages to the solace of reading books and finding one's own place within their pages, listing formative titles with evident tenderness and reverence. Both books expertly balance their sense of unreality, remaining ambiguous for much of their length about whether anything "fantastic" has actually occurred. Far more so than its urban fantasy contemporaries, Hemlock integrates the fairy story seamlessly with Polly's quotidian adolescence. The Queen of the Fairies appears to be merely a rich, beautiful woman who lives in a mansion, her curses dealt out in phone calls and train stations, their sting found in the barbed words of an abusive parent. The flashy fae of War for the Oaks are largely supplanted by unseen machinations beneath the surface of the everyday world, and Hemlock is all the better for it.
Hemlock is far from perfect; aside from the aforementioned problematic elements, I found that certain chapters ran a bit overlong with at times tedious verisimilitude. (As with other young adult works, I might be less bothered by this if I were within the target demographic.) But I found it absorbing, moving, and at times edge-of-my-seat tense all the same. Definitely among my new favorites.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
2018 read #4: The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs.
The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs
153 pages
Published 1969
Read from January 29 to February 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
What I loved about this book was its wonderful atmosphere, which mingled creeping, half-seen, corner-of-your eye horror with charmingly fussy details and an almost children's-book whimsicality. It's a balance that anticipated Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or, perhaps, the Fairyland books by Catherynne M. Valente. I won't say it's ahead of its time, exactly; one can well imagine it being a contemporary of A Wizard of Earthsea or Lord of Light. But as a work of fantastic fiction, it certainly feels more polished and aesthetically-purposeful than most novels published in the ensuing decade. Or heck, most fantasy novels published to this day.
What I didn't like so much about this book was how the characters themselves seem to have wandered out of a children's fantasy novel. John Bellairs apparently spent most of his career writing young adult works, and while The Face in the Frost is considered "for adults," everything about its central duo, from their names (Prospero and Roger Bacon) to the way they caper about and throw snowballs makes them seem like middle school friends or brothers who are detectives, rather than top-tier wizards who are getting on in years. At one point, Prospero, in mortal peril, having been pursued across half a kingdom by faceless terrors and separated from Roger Bacon, finds himself in a village where nothing feels right, where mirrors seem just a bit off, where the people in the pub keep having the same conversation, and his only response is to shrug and make nothing of it. The scene's payoff is satisfyingly creepy, but if the only way to make it work is to have a cunning wizard overlooking clues that even my D&D players would have picked up on, it just isn't worth it. Frost shows its age in the creaky joints of its storytelling.
153 pages
Published 1969
Read from January 29 to February 1
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
What I loved about this book was its wonderful atmosphere, which mingled creeping, half-seen, corner-of-your eye horror with charmingly fussy details and an almost children's-book whimsicality. It's a balance that anticipated Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or, perhaps, the Fairyland books by Catherynne M. Valente. I won't say it's ahead of its time, exactly; one can well imagine it being a contemporary of A Wizard of Earthsea or Lord of Light. But as a work of fantastic fiction, it certainly feels more polished and aesthetically-purposeful than most novels published in the ensuing decade. Or heck, most fantasy novels published to this day.
What I didn't like so much about this book was how the characters themselves seem to have wandered out of a children's fantasy novel. John Bellairs apparently spent most of his career writing young adult works, and while The Face in the Frost is considered "for adults," everything about its central duo, from their names (Prospero and Roger Bacon) to the way they caper about and throw snowballs makes them seem like middle school friends or brothers who are detectives, rather than top-tier wizards who are getting on in years. At one point, Prospero, in mortal peril, having been pursued across half a kingdom by faceless terrors and separated from Roger Bacon, finds himself in a village where nothing feels right, where mirrors seem just a bit off, where the people in the pub keep having the same conversation, and his only response is to shrug and make nothing of it. The scene's payoff is satisfyingly creepy, but if the only way to make it work is to have a cunning wizard overlooking clues that even my D&D players would have picked up on, it just isn't worth it. Frost shows its age in the creaky joints of its storytelling.
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