My life in books

Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and drawn by various artists, is a self-contained story featuring T’Challa, King of Wakanda battling threats to his kingdom. Though his primary problem is a strange force, manifesting as a huge monster, which causes earthquakes and drains vibranium of its power, he must first face a reborn White Gorilla cult, led by a resurrected M’Baku, and a bitter friend from his youth who has designed a trap for him.

Okorafor completes her run with an alternate universe story about Ngozi, the young Nigerian woman who protects Wakanda as both Venom and Black Panther. Fun adventures to accompany Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful look at governance, power and responsibility in The Black Panther.

Reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells the story of her life to the age of 17. It is a deep look into, not just the circumstances that shaped a woman who would become a gifted and beloved poet, but also into the conditions of life for black Americans in the south.

In her autobiography, Angelou opens up her young life fearlessly, sharing personal details not only of her family and their lives, but her pain, shame and sorrow. At the same time, she paints vivid portraits of Black culture as she experienced it, both negative and positive. We see the grinding poverty and constant threat of white insult and violence in the rural areas, but also the strength of family and community ties. We see ourselves within the rich urban black culture of St. Louis, with its connections to the underworld, and its influence on the life of the city.

Angelou - born Marguerite Johnson - and her brother Bailey were sent to live in Stamps, Arkansas when they were three and four, respectively. Their parents, then living in California, had ended their marriage and neither was in a position to care for the children, so they were put alone on a train with address tags on their wrists and tickets pinned to their clothes and sent home to their paternal grandmother. After several years living in Stamps, they were taken by their father to St Louis, where they lived first with their maternal grandmother, and then with their mother, a woman well connected to the underground gambling scene, and her lover. While there, Angelou was raped by her mother’s lover. The man was convicted, but avoided serving time. When he was found dead not long afterward, Angelou believed he had died because she had lied in court about how often he had touched her, and decided never to speak again to anyone except Bailey lest she kill someone else with her words. Not long afterwards, she and Bailey were sent back to Stamps, Angelou wondering if they had been sent away because of her family’s frustration with her silence.

After several years in Stamps, Angelou and her brother relocated again, this time to San Francisco, where their mother was now living, not that far from their father, still in Los Angeles. It is here that she takes the first steps toward womanhood and independence. School, her first job - as the first black female tram conductress - coming to terms with a father who was too self-absorbed to love her, the growing between her and her brother, her developing sexuality, and, in the final sequence recounted in the book, the birth of her son after a casual sexual interlude undertaken just to see what sex was all about.

Angelou offers loving portraits of those who helped to shape her life, from family to members of the community who introduced her to literature and the power of well-crafted words, to others further outside her circle who, kindly or otherwise, taught her about life beyond her grandmother’s general store (which served both blacks and poor whites) and her mother’s gambling connections. And she connects the events of her life to the condition of blacks in America, showing in a hundred ways, large and small, the strength and resilience of a people oppressed.

Angelou wrote several other autobiographical volumes, something I had not known before, as this volume is the one the everybody talks about. I think I’ll have to find and read the others.

Martin Delany, author of Blake, or The Huts of America, was a free black man, associate of Frederick Douglas, an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier and writer, and an early advocate of black nationalism. He wrote his two-part novel, the first part of which was serialised in the The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Where Stowe’s book urged patience and resignation for enslaved black people, and valorised Christian piety among slaves, Delany tells a story of planning for an armed insurrection of black people in North America, and Cuba and labels Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. It should be noted, although, that by this he means a white-led Christian church which preaches patience and acceptance of one’s fate. His main character espouses instead a form of liberation Christianity in which black Christians will interpret scripture directly and in revolutionary terms.

Delany explains his concept of religion most clearly in this speech by his main character, Blake (known throughout the first part of the book as Henry Holland): “No religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve. The whites accept of nothing but that which promotes their interests and happiness, socially, politically and religiously. They would discard a religion, tear down a church, overthrow a government, or desert a country, which did not enhance their freedom. In God’s great and righteous name, are we not willing to do the same?” .... “Our ceremonies, then,” continued Blake, “are borrowed from no denomination, creed, nor church: no existing organization, secret, secular, nor religious; but originated by ourselves, adopted to our own condition, circumstances, and wants, founded upon the eternal word of God our Creator, as impressed upon the tablet of each of our hearts.”

The full text of the novel has been lost, but Part One and a large part of Part Two survive. [1] It is a fascinating read, being of interest both as a work of African-American nationalist literature, and as an early work of black speculative fiction.

The novel begins with the heart-rending account of the break-up of a black family through the sale of a young slave woman. Colonel Franks, a Southern landowner, is persuaded by Arabella Ballard, a relative of his wife’s, and the wife of a business associate, to sell her Maggie, a house servant trained as a lady’s maid, to accompany her on a trip to Cuba. It is strongly suggested that his decision to sell Maggie - his biological daughter - is motivated by her refusal of his sexual advances toward her. By this sale she is separated from her young son Joe, her husband, known as Henry Holland, an educated black man from the West Indies tricked into slavery when young, and from her mother, Mammy Judy, the cook, and Mammy Judy’s husband Daddy Joe, who are also devastated by the loss.

But where Judy and Daddy Joe try to accept the loss of Maggie with Christian platitudes about suffering and being together again in Heaven, Henry is outraged at the callous destruction of his family and rejects the advice of the others to accept the loss and trust in God. He confronts the Colonel over the sale of his wife, and in turn is sold himself. But before his new master can take possession, he runs away. After arranging for his son to be carried to safety in Canada, he contacts two trusted friends, Andy and Charles, and shares with them his plan, not only to never be enslaved again, but to organise a country-wide slave revolution, a goal that they eagerly agree to support him in.

Delany makes the reader look at all aspects of slavery, from the philosophical arguments used to justify the ownership of human beings, to the economics of plantation culture, to the casual everyday cruelty exhibited toward enslaved blacks. He also examines the range of survival strategies used by black people under slavery, showing the ways in which the myths of the slave who is eager to please, happy amusing, slow-witted, childlike, or a comforting ‘mammy’ are all, to some degree or other, masks adopted as means of surviving interactions with whites - with varied results, depending on the skill of the actor and the mood and whim of the target. The real hearts and minds of black people appear only when they speak together, or act out of the sight of whites, in the black-occupied ‘huts of America’ where they can congregate away from the gaze of the master. Even the very real faith of some blacks is exaggerated into a performance of confused and frenzied religiosity - for example, when Mammy Judy uses this strategy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about the whereabouts of Henry and his son Joe. There are no happy plantation stories here.

As Henry travels through the South, spreading the idea of an organised rebellion, his encounters with the workers on different plantations provide a sense of the scope of slavery as a means of cheap labour - the sheer numbers of blacks working to produce the cash crops that drove the economic growth of not only the plantation south but the industrial north - and the ways in which this commodified labour force was treated.

Henry’s travels through the Southern states, rousing the black populace to prepare for a coming insurrection, occupy much of the book; having made this circuit, he returns to the Franks plantation, gathers these closest to him, and leads them to Canada, where he buys land and sets up a community of escaped slaves. Then, his family and friends taken care of, he heads toward Cuba in search of his wife. Thus ends Part One of Blake.

Where Part One was largely an exploration of the life of blacks under slavery, with some detailed advice on the dangers facing escaping slaves due to the Fugitive Slave Act and directions on how to reach Canada - complete with warnings not to expect much beyond freedom on arrival in what was still a very racially stratified society - the early chapters of Part Two examine first the conditions of slavery in Cuba, and then the conditions of the slave trade itself, as Henry’s adventures continue. It is in this section of the novel that Delany’s African nationalism is most strongly elucidated, in passage such as this:

“Heretofore that country [Africa] has been regarded as desolate-unadapted to useful cultivation or domestic animals, and consequently, the inhabitants savage, lazy, idle, and incapable of the higher civilization and only fit for bondmen, contributing nothing to the civilized world but that which is extorted from them as slaves. Instead of this, let us prove, not only that the African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of enlightened countries, as various fruits, rice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, spices, and tobacco; but that in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand, as rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton, from their own native shores, the most extensive native territory, climate, soil, and greatest number of (almost the only natural producers) inhabitants in the universe; and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations on earth, from their dependence upon them for the great staples from which is derived their national wealth.”

In Part Two, Henry, now using the name Gilbert, travels to Cuba in the service of a party of three young white men - Captain Richard Paul, Lieutenant Augustus Seely, and Midshipman Lawrence Spencer - desirous of entering the slave trade, and Cordelia Woodward, a young woman who later becomes Seely’s wife.

Once in Cuba, Henry leaves the party to search for his wife; finding Maggie at last, he gives her the money to purchase her freedom, and arranges for Joe to be brought to Cuba by some of his friends in Canada. We now learn that Henry, who speaks both Spanish and Creole fluently, is originally from Cuba, and that his name is actually Henrico Blacus - Henry Blake. He visits his cousin, Placido, a revolutionary poet, and they agree on working toward an uprising in Cuba. Henry then takes a position as a sailing master on a slave ship carrying arms - the Vulture, commanded by Captain Paul and his associates.

Blake’s journey to Africa, where the Vulture takes on two thousand kidnapped and branded Africans, gives Delany the opportunity to enumerate the horrors of the Middle Passage, the physical and mental torture endured by the transportees, the callousness toward the health and lives of their human cargo.

On his return, Blake discovers that he has been appointed the General of the Cuban Army of Emancipation; the revolutionaries, comprising many of the free blacks and people of mixed race in Cuba as well as soaves, plan for action. The last preserved chapter offers a picture of heightened political tensions between the Spanish administrators, the American platers who seek to have Cuba annexed by the US, and the black and mixed race general population, free and slave. Conditions are ripe for a revolution; but the conclusion of the book is lost to us.

Those looking for a cohesive personal narrative in Blake will be disappointed. This is not that kind of novel. Henry’s travels and exploits are governed, not by the desire to tell a story, but to impart information and promote a cause. Its shape is also affected by the length of time taken to write the work. Delany began publishing the chapters in 1959, before the outbreak of civil war. By the time he finished writing, it was 1862, and the possibility existed that a Union victory might end the rule of slavery in the South, rendering moot his main character’s arguments for a black insurrection. The value of Blake lies in its articulation of a nationalist vision of diasporic Africans, and its contemporary account of the conditions of black people under slavery.


[1] Part One has been published online (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/blakehp.html)

Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.

For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.

I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.

It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.

Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.

The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:

“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”

Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:

“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.

Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:

“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”

Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.

And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.

Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”

Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.

Danielle L. McGuire’s book At The Dark End of the Street, subtitled Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, looks at the role of black women’s resistance to sexual violence at the hands of white men in the history of the civil rights movement. As she notes in her Introduction:

“And yet analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men—the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King confronting intransigent white supremacists like “Bull” Connor. The real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence—has never before been written. The stories of black women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that marked racial politics and African American lives during the modern civil rights movement. If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African Americans’ daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement.”

In her landmark book, McGuire focuses on the history of black women and sexual violence in Montgomery, Alabama - the home of icon and activist Rosa Parks and in some ways the birthplace of the civil rights movement in the South - where in 1944, Recy Taylor’s speaking out about her rape made headlines and brought Parks, then a NAACP worker, to nearby Abbeville to investigate the case. Using Montgomery as a case study for her thesis, McGuire follows the stories of sexual violence and the response of the black community, particularly black women - but she makes it clear that Montgomery is hardly an anomaly, that such race-based sexual violence was and is endemic in America.

“Montgomery, Alabama, was not the only place in which attacks on black women fueled protests against white supremacy. Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. Civil rights campaigns in Little Rock, Arkansas; Macon, Georgia; Tallahassee, Florida; Washington, North Carolina; Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and many other places had roots in organized resistance to sexual violence and appeals for protection of black womanhood.”

While her focus in examining black activism in response to sexual violence is on the harassment and rape of black women, uncounted numbers of whom were victims of white men who were never punished, McGuire does not ignore the way that accusations of gendered violence were used against black men, thousands of whom were falsely accused of offenses against white women and, if they escaped lynching, found it nearly impossible to convince the courts of their innocence.

However, her central narrative is clear in connecting the growing outrage at the numerous incidents of black women abducted and raped by white men with the impetus to activism. Years before the assault on Recy Taylor, the cause of the Scottsboro nine - nine black youths convicted of raping two white women - brought together black civil rights activists and white progressives to fight for justice; Taylor’s case galvanised protest and resulted in the formation of organisations whose activities would expand and persist.

Despite their best efforts, it proved impossible to win convictions against Taylor’s rapists, who either denied their involvement, or alleged that she was a known prostitute whom they had paid. But the movement went on to take up the cases of other black women, and to broadcast information about these assaults across the country.

Aside from entrenched racism and the belief that the rape of black women was not really a crime, the progressives and activists involved in fighting for equal justice faced serious opposition from another direction: the cold war fear of Communist ‘infiltrtion’ and McCarthyism. Many of those, white and black, who took up the cause of equal justice for blacks were, or had t one time been, involved in groups that the government had identified as communist. In some cases, so many members of civil rights organisations were also linked to socialist or communist groups, that the FBI considered them as Communist fronts. This led to their civil rights positions and actions being discounted as Russian propaganda intended to destabilise and discredit the U.S.

Yet on the other hand, the post-war era had seen many black veterans returning from the theatres in Europe and the Pacific, changed by their participation in the war against fascism. These former soldiers “...returned home with a new sense of pride and purpose and often led campaigns for citizenship rights, legal equality, and bodily integrity. In small towns and cities across the South, black veterans became the “shock troops” of an emerging civil rights movement.”

In the mythology of the civil rights movement, the spark is Rosa Park’s refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. Parks is often portrayed as a woman who simply was too tired, and snapped one day. In reality, the organising had begun years before, around the far more complex issue of violence against blacks, and particularly sexual violence against black women. McGuire draws the connections between this focus and the bus protests. Most working black women could not afford cars; to get to their places of work - many were domestic workers who lived far from the homes of their employers - they had to ride the buses. But the indignities did not end at having to sit at the back of the bus. Black people were often subjected to verbal and physical assault for the slightest indication of disrespect. They could be required to pay at the front, then get off and board at the rear doors - unless the bus driver decided to drive off without them. Bus drivers sometimes beat black riders who sat in the wrong seats, or refused to get up and move further back, or get off if a seat was needed for a white person. The buses were a site of white violence toward blacks.

McGuire’s narrative of the Montgomery bus boycott, and other actions undertaken during the civil rights era to bring public pressure to bear on the rampant discrimination and racism of the Southern US, restore to its place the forgotten role of black women. Parks was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat or defend herself in court; she was just the first woman with a sufficiently impeccable reputation to risk a national news event on. Much of the organising and fundraising during the boycott was done by women. Women organised car pools and drove cars. And in the thousands, women walked, or shared rides, rather than break the boycott, in the face of daiky threats and abuse. Women were charged and arrested for their roles in the boycott, but the media narrative focused on the male ministers, and above all, on the charismatic young Martin Luther King Jr. in making him the hero of the movement, the work of black women was pushed into shadows.

Women were active, organising, marching, working on voter registration, desegregating lunch counters and schools, their work and courage the backbone of the civil rights movement. Women like Jo Ann Robinson and Fannie Lou Hamer gave tirelessly of their energy and time in the movement. Like the men, they risked harassment, loss of employment, beatings, jail, destructions of property snd homes through vandalism and arson, and death. They also risked sexual intimidation, humiliation and rape.

McGuire spares the reader none of the details of the brutal acts that shored up white supremacy, the beatings, rapes, torturings, deliberate mutilations, and murders of black men, women and children for the slightest of imagined offences against the “proper order” of society, for being “uppity” or indeed for no reason at all other than the fear, insecurity and rage of white people. McGuire writes about the civil rights era, the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, but the reader cannot forget, as the horrifying images emerge from the page, that the violence continues.

I have been reading a fair bit lately about race and antiracist theory, but most of what I’ve been reading has been written in an American context, though of course much is broadly applicable to the situation in Canada, too. Much of the Canadian material I have been able to access has focused on indigenous issues. So I was particularly happy to learn of the publication of Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.

Maynard is a Black feminist writer and grassroots community organiser who has been on the forefront of resistance to police violence for over a decade.

“Working with racialized youth in state care and in street-based economies, as well as with adult street-based sex workers, I have been constantly and painfully aware of the gross racial and economic injustices at the fault lines of Canadian society. Though I have not worked exclusively with Black communities, I’ve regularly witnessed enormous and disproportionate levels of what can only be called state-sanctioned violence and concerted neglect of Black people.”

Maynard writes that she began writing Policing Black Lives as a response to her experiences, and to the realisation that little literature on this issue in a Canadian context existed.

“In combing through the world of research for something that would describe the realities that I was seeing, I realized that there was still far too little literature addressing, in one place, the specificities of how criminal and immigration laws, inequitable access to work and housing and other state policies and institutions interact to shape the conditions of Black life in this country. It has become increasingly clear that none of these incidents are isolated; they are part of a larger pattern of the devaluation of Black life across Canada.

I felt compelled to write this book because anti-Blackness, particularly anti-Blackness at the hands of the state, is widely ignored by most Canadians.”

Maynard begins by interrogating the myth of Canada as a place of racial tolerance and multi-culturalism. She argues that anti-Black racism and state violence are endemic, but unregarded, in Canada, to the point that many white Canadians are unaware of the extent to while the various institutions of the state regulate, dehumanise and injure Black Canadians, and that, like institutional racism in the United States, has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade.

As the book’s full title suggests, Maynard starts her narrative of Black experience of systemic state oppression and violence with the often ignored history of slavery in the British and French colonies that would come to be identified as Canada. While not all Black people living in the colonies prior to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire were enslaved, many were. The ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade made stops at ports such as Halifax. During the American Revolution, Black Americans who fought for the English were given freedom and promised land in Nova Scotia - at the same time that white American Loyalists migrated north with their household slaves, who remained property.

One consequence of the existence of slavery and the ideologies that supported it in early Canadian culture is that free Black Canadians were devalued as citizens, denied many of the rights and privileges accorded to other colonial settlers, and subjected to race-based discrimination and sometimes violence. Racism was endemic. The freedom runners who followed the Underground Railway north to Canada may have escaped literal enslavement, but they did not arrive in the mythologised land of racial tolerance Canadians imagine our country to have been.

“The segregation of Black communities — which, like slavery, was a form of controlling Black movement and institutionalizing subordination — was based on the idea that Black people were both inferior and dangerous to whites. Formally and informally, segregation was one of Canada’s foremost strategies for maintaining white dominance across all aspects of society after slavery’s end. In the United States, Jim Crow referred to the de jure segregation of Black from white in the public facilities of the former Confederate states. Canada had its own iteration of practices that separated Black from white in what some historians call “Canada’s Jim Crow.” Canadians produced “their own distinct language and rationalizations” when “propping up white supremacist ideology and practices.” Segregation in the post-abolition period cut across all aspects of society. Public education, immigration, employment and housing were all subject to a veiled Jim Crow-style segregation that either formally or informally kept Black persons in social, economic and political subjugation.”

Maynard discusses the ways in which Black people have been associated with a presumption of criminality, beginning with the presentation of Black freedom runners as criminals who had escaped from their lawful owners. The presence of escaped slaves was used to justify scrutiny by both police and the general public. After abolition, vice laws were used to continue scrutiny of Blacks; assumption about the general immorality of Black people resulted in the frequent use of prostitution laws against Black women in public places, and of drug laws against Blacks, and particularly Black men. Black men were also at risk of accusations of rape committed against white women, while at the same time, it was almost impossible for a white legal system convinced of the sexual immorality of Black women to consider rape against them as a crime.

“After slavery, associations between race and crime, and particularly between Blackness and crime, took hold as an important means of legitimating the ongoing state surveillance and control over Black people’s lives. Beyond prostitution and drug laws, the creation and application of criminal laws in general were used by the Canadian government to manage deep-seated fears and anxieties about Blackness. Tracing the lineage of racism in Canada’s legal system from the 1700s to the present day, Black Canadian legal scholar Esmerelda Thornhill concludes that “the law has colluded — and continues to collude — with race in ways that accommodate and foster ongoing … anti-Black racism”. The data supports this claim. Examinations of court records between the years of 1890 to 1920 found open racism in the sentencing of Black offenders by many magistrates. From 1908 to 1960, Blacks convicted of violent offences would receive far more severe sentences. The result of these court decisions was a consistently disproportionate rate of incarceration for Black people. In 1911, Black males were incarcerated at a rate eighteen times higher than that of white males, while in 1931 they were incarcerated at a rate ten times higher than whites. Incarceration had replaced enslavement as a legal means to literally strip people of their freedom, as well as separate families and inhibit future employment opportunities. Black incarceration was thus highly effective in maintaining Black disenfranchisement and subjugation in post-abolition Canada. The association of Blackness with danger allowed for the policing of Black peoples’ lives by white settler society, law enforcement and immigration agencies — Black emancipation had not yet been actualized.”

The association of Black communities and crime has continued. Black protest is criminalised, with protestors and civil rights activists seen as thugs and hoodlums. Despite evidence that Black people are no more likely than white people to use illegal drugs, the War on Drugs focused on Black communities, with Blacks far more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted on drug offenses. Racial profiling ad carding disproportionately target Blacks, particularly Black youth.

“Though not only Black people were arrested for drug infractions, the increased police surveillance and repression of Black communities mandated by drug law enforcement had direct impacts on Black incarceration in the period immediately following Mulroney’s War on Drugs. In 1995, a large-scale investigation in Ontario documented a massive influx of Black prisoners during the period spanning 1986–1987 to 1992–1993. By the end of this period, Blacks were incarcerated at a rate five times higher than their white counterparts. Though the CSR Report found that Black and white communities engaged in crime at comparable rates in that same period, this period saw the rate of incarceration of Blacks increase by over 200 percent, compared to white persons, whose rates rose by just over 20 percent. Black women, though arrested in smaller numbers than Black men, were found to face even more disproportionate rates of incarceration than men. By the end of 1993, Black women were incarcerated at a rate of seven times that of white women. Admissions at Vanier Centre for Women increased the rate of admission of Black women by 630 percent, whereas white women’s admissions at the same prison went up by 59 percent.”

Maynard devotes several chapters to the examination of the ways in which Black women, and particularly Black trans women, are treated by the police ad other agents of the state. Presumptions of engagement in sex work are common for Black women in public spaces. Poor Black women receiving social assistance are often represented as likely to commit fraud, or other crimes, and live under heightened scrutiny in their private lives by agents of social welfare agencies. Verbal, physical and sexual abuse by state agents is common. Black Caribbean women who travel between Canada and their home countries are frequently profiled as drug couriers.

Maynard also examines other aspects of the ways in which Black Canadians are surveilled, regulated, policed and denied privacy and autonomy: the issues of migrant Blacks, including refugees, and the policing of borders and concepts of citizenship; the scrutiny and interference in Black families, pathologising of Black family life and removal of Black children from their families; and the institutionalised racism Black youth face within the educational system.

I don’t often say things like this. But in this case, I think it’s essential. Maynard’s book should be read, and seriously deliberated on, by every white person in Canada. We are far too find of congratulating ourselves for being better than the US on racism. The truth is, we aren’t. We are just further behind on having it out in the open for everyone to see.

In 2014, British blogger Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote a post on her blog entitled “Why I’m No LongerTalking to White People about Race.” In it, she expressed her frustration and exhaustion at trying to explain even the basic facts of living as a person of colour in a white supremacist society, at dealing with white fragility and hostility. I remember reading the post, which circulated very widely in social justice circles, and thinking quite a bit about it.

Now Eddo-Lodge has written a book in which she talks a great deal, and with great passion and patience, about race, and called it, with some irony, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. One welcome aspect of the book for me is that so much of the current work on racism and white supremacy is coming from an American perspective, but this is s problem that crosses borders and has a long and bitter history in all white-majority countries and the countries that have been colonised and exploited by them.

Eddo-Lodge begins with a brief history of racism against people of colour in Britain, providing background I’d known little to nothing about. And much of which, she notes, she herself had known little about before beginning her research.

“Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance, but until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them. I had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police. But I didn’t ask why this was the case. It made more sense to me once I understood that innocent people had died, that homes were broken into with scant evidence for searching them, that teenagers and young adults were frisked in a ritual of humiliation. It makes sense to me now how animosity could brew in that environment, and why some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.

But I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.”

Eddo-Lodge goes on to discuss issues of systemic and institutional racism, white privilege, white feminism, and intersectionality within the context of the British experience. And she explains these issues with great clarity, making this an excellent introductory book for beginning anti-racist activists, and particularly white people struggling with understanding these concepts and explaining them to others. Her words could easily serve as a handbook for every white person who takes up the task of speaking to white people about race, and I’m grateful that she has done this work.

Ibram X. Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, traces the history of thought about race in America, from the earliest days to the present, "... from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets." The book itself draws its title from a statement about race: "... from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. 'This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,' but 'by white men for white men,' Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The 'inequality of the white and black races' was 'stamped from the beginning.' "

Kendi structures his observations into five historical periods, characterising each period as, in a way, a conversation with the ideas on race of five American intellectuals: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. He carefully weaves the development of each individual's thoughts on race into the historical events of their times, comparing and contrasting their views with other intellectuals of their times, showing both the influences on their ideas, and their influence on events and the ideas of others. While his focus is on ideas about racism, he makes a consistent attempt to identify the ways in which gender and queerness intersect with race. This results in various critiques throughout the book of the ways in which racist and heterosexist ideas and practices differently affect Black men and Black women, the ways in which sexism and hetersexism have influenced Black anti-racist thought about women, gender, and Black queerness, and the ways in which feminist movements and thinkers have engaged in racist thought and action.

In exploring the range of ideas about race that have influenced and driven American culture, society and politics, Kendi identifies three general strands of thought - segregationalists, assimilationists, and antiracists:

"But even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group. Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities. During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief; therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Antiracists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals."

Kendi takes aim at the generally accepted belief that ignorance and hatred are the basis for the development of racist ideas, which then are manifested in policies that end in racial discrimination. He argues instead that the self-interest - political, economic, and cultural - of the elite white classes leads to the adoption of policies that discriminate and oppress along racial lines, which supports the development of racist ideologues, which create ignorance of and hatred toward racialised groups.

The precursor to racist ideas, Kendi argues, can be found in Aristotle's justifications for the Greek practice of slavery, which holds that, while al non-Greeks are barbarians, peoples from extreme climates are in particular inferior to Greeks because of the environment they live in. Variations on these ideas - that people from other cultures are inferior, and people from distant places where the physical conditions are different are even more so - were later used to justify slavery in the Roman and Muslim spheres of influence. A second source of racist thought may be identified in the Biblical story story of Noah's son Ham, the progenitor of African peoples and other dark-skinned peoples, who 'looked on his father's nakedness.' As punishment, Ham, his son Canaan, and their descendants were cursed by God. The darker complexions of Africans and other non-Europeans were seen as a mark of the curse and of their inherited inferiority.

Initially, slavery in Christian Europe, like that in Muslim countries, involved both black Africans and
Eastern European Slavic peoples. However, in the 15th century, the pattern began to shift as the sea trade with coastal Africa increased significantly (and the Slavs embarked on fort building to discourage Turkish slave raids), black slaves became the norm and racist justifications for slavery derived from initial idea of the 'curse of Ham' dominated the discourse. With the 'discovery' and later colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, concurrent with the increasing colonisation and exploitation of African nations, the racist narrative of the inferiority and natural role as slaves of dark peoples - both African and indigenous American - became the established thinking on race among Europeans and American colonists.

As slavery became a necessary institution for the provision of cheap labour in the colonies, the previously existing racist idea of African peoples as barbaric and hypersexualised was extended, with stress on the sexual aggressiveness of black women. This served to excuse the rape of female slaves. Kendi notes that the law - which in British tradition had long held that a child takes on the social status of the father - was explicitly reversed, ensuring that children born of such rape were seen as slaves, and hence additions to the available cheap labour pool, like their mothers. At the same time, sexual contact between white women and black men of any status was prohibited.

European law at the beginning of the colonial period held that Christians might be indentured, but could not be enslaved. Thus at first there was little pressure to convert slaves to Christianity, and much resistance. Indeed, many slave-owners and segregationalists in general argued that for various reasons - barbarism, lower intellectual capacity, even the presumed lack of a fully developed soul, Africans could not by their natures become Christians. Christian assimilationists, wanting to save black souls without threatening the economic status quo, began to argue that Africans had been brought by historical necessity into slavery so that their masters might convert them - thus making them more docile slaves. Laws were passed that explicitly stated that converting someone already a slave would not change their legal status in any way; Virginia's 1667 statute declared that "the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.”

With the approach of the Enlightenment and he beginning of 'scientific' thinking about race, two opposing theories of human origins, monogenesis and polygenesis, emerged. Monogenesis - usually associated with assimilationist thinking on racism - held that all humans had the same origin. On the other hand, polygenesis - a clearly segregationalist narrative - put forward various theories concerning the origins of the different races; the one consistent element of these theories was the idea that Africans did not share an origin with white peoples - indeed, they often argued that Africans and great apes shared an origin.

Repeatedly, "altruistic" attitudes toward African slaves - the idea, for instance, that despite their presumed barbarism, their souls were capable of salvation - were advanced, only to be countered by either segregationalist narratives, or laws that ensured that no degree of altruism might interfere with the economic interests of land/slave holders. Slavery was cast as both legal and permissible under Biblical precedent - thus criminalising any black person who sought their own freedom. "No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers."

As the abolitionist movement grew, both in England and in what would become the United States, new ideas entered the public discourse on race. Abolitionists put forward the argument that while Africans were inferior - thus supporting racist perceptions - it was so because of the conditions of slavery. Pro-slavery voices expanded upon the concept of polygenesis, giving reason upon reason for their conviction that black people were of a different species altogether from white people. Kendi pays particular attention to Thomas Jefferson's writings on both the justification for the American revolution and his support for the continued enslavement of Africans in America. The notion of colonisation - creating a new nation in Africa for free American blacks (as Britain had done in Sierra Leone) added further nuances to ideas about the nature, capabilities and potentials of black people, and the possibility of a state in which free blacks co-existed with whites.

As the middle of the 19th century approached, with the Civil War still some decades away, the multitude of positions on black Americans included wholehearted advocates of slavery, 'gradual abolitionists' who wanted a slow end to slavery, those who wanted to immediately abolish slavery but limit the civil rights of blacks until they were 'ready' to exercise them, those who demanded immediate abolition and full enfranchisement, and those who supported abolition only if free blacks were deported to the new African colony of Liberia.

Kendi demonstrates how new developments in scientific understanding consistently came to be used against the possibility that blacks and whites could be equal. Darwin's Origin of Species may not have addressed human evolution, but even while it provided the means of dismantling the popular theory of polygenesis, it was used to argue that whites were superior to blacks due to natural selection. Sir Francis Galton's work in mathematics led to the understanding of statistics, but his strong pro-nature stance in the nature vs. nurture debate led to the creation of eugenics as a sociopolitical position, and Sir Herbert Spencer's championing of Darwin's theories resulted in the concept of 'social Darwinism' - two ideas that were easily used to counter any attempts to 'improve' the situation of slaves or free blacks in America. When Darwin at last turned to the subject of the evolution of the human species, his thinking on race was sufficiently ambiguous that "Both assimilationists and segregationists hailed Descent of Man. Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction."

Kendi does not shy away from critiquing the positions of Black intellectuals or the Black elite - middle-class or wealthy, often Northern, educated professionals and entrepreneurs - on the issue of race. The 1890s were a time when Black public intellectuals began to have a greater voice in the national conversation on race in America. Sadly, many members of the Black elite were assimilationists who had internalised racist thinking about themselves, or about 'lower class' blacks who needed to be 'raised up' from the state to which they had descended during slavery.

The 'voice' chosen by Kendi to frame the conversation on race during the late 19th and early to mid 29th century is W. E. B. Du Bois, whose own understanding of race changed significantly during that time. In the 1890s, when Black intellectuals were gaining prominence, W. E. B. Du Bois was a young man whose anti-racist vision had not yet matured. Du Bois had studied in Germany and, on returning to the US, at Harvard, and, as Kendi explains,

"He had grown more accustomed to meeting “not white folks, but folks.” He mentally climbed in Germany and stood on an equal plane with White people. But his new antiracist mind-set of not looking up at White people did not stop him from looking down at supposedly low-class Black people. It would take Du Bois much longer to see not low-class Black folks, but folks on an equal human plane with him and the rest of the (White) folks.

Du Bois accepted a position in 1894 teaching Greek and Latin at the A.M.E. Church’s flagship college in Ohio, Wilberforce. He was determined 'to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro.' Somehow, some way, he maintained his faith that American racism could be persuaded and educated away. 'The ultimate evil was stupidity” about race by “the majority of white Americans,' he theorized. 'The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.' "

The preeminent Black voice of the period was Booker T. Washington, "the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, [who] wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans. ... In private, Washington supported civil rights and empowerment causes across the South throughout his career. In public, his talking points reflected the New South racism that elites enjoyed hearing.
At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the 'Atlanta Compromise.' He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers 'to dignify and glorify common labour.' So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, 'It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,' they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, 'the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.' "

It is interesting to note that anti-racist thought seemed to be most fully developed among Black women who had entered the realm of the public intellectual. Speaking about Booker T. Washington's assumption of the mantle of premier Black intellectual on the the death of Frederick Douglass, Kendi says: "Ida B. Wells would have been a better replacement, but she was a woman, and too antiracist for most Americans."

"Wells knew that immoral constructions about Black women hindered them from fully engaging in the burgeoning women’s club moral movement that cascaded across the 1890s. 'I sometimes hear of a virtuous Negro woman, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me,' wrote an anonymous 'southern White woman' in The Independent. Oberlin graduate and teacher Anna Julia Cooper took it upon herself to defend Black womanhood and encourage Black women’s education in A Voice from the South in 1892. Like Wells, Cooper wrote in the antiracist feminist tradition. 'The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,' Cooper explained. 'She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.' And yet, Cooper did espouse some class racism. She praised, for instance, the 'quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity' of the Protestant Episcopal Church, while demeaning the 'semi-civilized religionism' of low-income Black southerners.

Southern white men were 'shielding' themselves 'behind the plausible screen of defending the honor [of their women]' through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in Southern Horrors, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. 'The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,' she declared, 'the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.' "

Throughout much of the first half of the 20th century, the predominant thinking about race remained either segregationalist or assimilationist in nature. Du Bois, disenchanted by his efforts to raise the condition of Blacks through education and 'suasion,' slowly came to realise that racism had to be confronted directly, that nothing Blacks did to become 'more like Whites' was going to change the engrained white supremacist position. Other anti-racist thinkers - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin - joined him in rejecting assimilationism and the notion that Black people had to 'improve' themselves in order to earn equality with whites.

Post-war America found itself in the position of presenting itself internationally as the beacon of freedom while domestically still in an era of Jim Crow and deep racial inequities. It became a matter of national image to at least give the impression of moving towards racial equality and civil rights for all. Gestures such as school integration were attempted, provoking serious opposition in the South. Civil rights activists began staging demonstrations to draw attention to the need for action. In 1964, the US government went ahead with civil rights legislation, but in many ways the effects were superficial, and did not result in deep, systemic change. Kendi marshalls a powerful critique of civil rights 'gains' during this period: "... as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and progression of racism at the same time."

In this post-war environment, new voices emerged to take up the national conversation on race: Elijah Mohammed and his protege, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and the black anti-racists who would become the leaders of the Black Power movement, including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Kendi follows these and other Black voices, and those who sought to diminish or silence them, through to the grassroots antiracist organising of BlackLivesMatter.

As his account of ideas about race moves forward through American history, Kendi examines each new stage in racial/racist thought with reference to the events which both contributed to and were bolstered or opposed by it. His research is detailed and exhaustive, making for a book that is immensely informative but best explored slowly and thoughtfully. Looking at American history through this lens of its ideas about race is a difficult but important experience for the white reader. Events we thought we understood, at least in general, take on different meanings and perspectives; backgrounded events take a new and more prominent place in the national narrative.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those who truly seek to understand the roots of racism in America.

Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi's novel Homecoming is both compelling and difficult to read. Its scope is vast, encompassing two centuries of the African Diaspora and multiple elements of the transAtlantic slave trade and its consequences in both America and Africa, but its focus is always personal, each chapter forming a link in a double chain of protagonists telling uniquely personal stories. The novel follows the descendants of the two daughters of Maame, a West African Asante woman in the late 18th century. Maame, who is both a slave and a secondary wife of a Fante farmer, gives birth to her first daughter during a disastrous fire. Fearing that she will be blamed for the ill fortune, Maame runs away. Her first daughter, Effia, is raised by a malicious and abusive stepmother, but grows up to become the 'bush wife' of British officer James Collins. Effia's people, the Fante, are middlemen in the slave trade, acquiring captives of other tribes, sometimes by purchase, sometimes through raiding, from inland, and then selling them to the British slavers based in the fort where Effia comes to live as a new bride.

Meanwhile, Maame has made a new life for herself, marrying a 'big man' of the Asante. Her second daughter, Esi, is raised lovingly in the heart of her extended family, but is taken from her hime and people in early adolescence by raiders, traded by the people her sister is raised by, passing to a life of slavery in America through the very fort her sister lives in.

In one narrative line, Gyasi's characters deal with colonialism and its many effects on the culture and political landscape of West Africa, while in the other, they survive slavery, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, segregation, and life as marginalised people left out of the American Dream.

The chapters that tell the story of Esi and her descendants are much harder to read than those featuring Effia's descendants, capturing as they do the soul-destroying experiences of slavery and racism in America. Unfortunately, if there is a weakness in the book, it lies in these very American-centred chapters. Somehow, Gyasi's American characters, particularly as the novel approaches modern times, seem to be more archetypes than living characters, representing categories of African-American experience rather than real people who live through circumstances reflective of the lives of Black Americans. Her African characters seem somehow freer to be themselves. But this is a small flaw in an ambitious, and largely successful narrative.

Michelle Alexander's book on the carceral state, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is rightfully on most lists of essential books to read for an understanding of race in America. It is a masterful indictment of the ways in which the American justice and penal systems continue the job of the former "Jim Crow" laws, of keeping black Americans in the role of second-class citizens, with limited rights and reduced access to everything from jobs to participation in the political system. As Alexander notes in her Introduction,

"The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race."

She goes on to say that " ...despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)."

In The New Jim Crow, Alexander demonstrates with overwhelming evidence that mass incarceration is indeed a racial justice issue, and one that should he at the forefront of the social justice agenda.

"This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system."

Alexander begins her argument with a discussion of past 'racial caste systems' - slavery and the Jim Crow - and how the same results are created again and again by changing social structures and institutions: "... there is a certain pattern to the births and deaths of racial caste in America. Time and again, the most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have succeeded in creating new caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole. This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste system in the United States: mass incarceration."

The essence of Alexander's argument is demonstrated through detailed historical research. She shows clearly how, almost from the moment of emancipation following the civil war, unjust laws and prisons that are little more than enforced eork camps have been used to perform the same social functions that slavery did, to deny human rights, civil rights, and the rights of citizenship to black Americans, and to coerce their labour to support the economy to the benefit of white Americans. Of the Reconstruction Era, she writes that "... tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release. With no means to pay off their “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South. Death rates were shockingly high, for the private contractors had no interest in the health and well-being of their laborers, unlike the earlier slave-owners who needed their slaves, at a minimum, to be healthy enough to survive hard labor."

The Jim Crow era - the name is most likely derived from a popular minstrel show character - stretched from the Reconstruction to the post-WWII period, when changes began to appear, sparked by the nascent civil rights movement, the growing presences in politics of blacks in the North, and a desire to actualise the American ideals of freedom and equality which were made much of during the war. Of the Jim Crow era itself, Alexander notes that "By the turn of the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. Politicians competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent, oppressive, and downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together). The public symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites remained largely unchanged."

But even as Jim Crow laws were challenged and civil rights were - at least formally - gained for American blacks, the development of a 'law and order' focus that would ultimately lead to today's carceral state had begun. In federal and state legislatures, the strongest supporters of law and order platforms were the same politicians who opposed civil rights legislation. Initially, race-based arguments were openly used by the 'law and order' proponents - they pointed to lower crime rates in the south where segregation remained the unwritten law of the land and referred to civil rights protestors as criminals.

Later, the racism in the law and order platform because implicit, with the concept of a 'culture of poverty' which led to crime standing in for a direct association between being black and being more prone to criminality. This 'colourblind' language became the norm among conservative politicians by the time that Reagan sought office:

"In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the “excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse” and thus built on the success of earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race. Condemning “welfare queens” and criminal “predators,” he rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites—poor and working-class whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights agenda. As one political insider explained, Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the ideological fervor of the right wing of the Republican Party and “the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.” To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “colorblind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964—he assured the crowd “I believe in states’ rights,” and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar—arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language."

With the introduction of the "war on drugs" the pieces were finally in place for a massive increase in law and order funding to provide more police and more prisons. Signalling its true goals with clarity, the federal budget for law enforcement grew in the wake of the war on drugs while spending on drug prevention, education and treatment programs was cut. At the same time, urban black men - most of whom had traditionally worked in blue collar jobs requiring minimal education - were facing an employment crisis due largely to globalisation and the shift from an industrial to a service based economy. Poverty, unemployment, the introduction of crack cocaine into urban centres, increased policing, welfare crackdowns and a 'tough on crime' policy among bith conservatives and liberals set the stage for mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of black Americans.

"The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly hegemonic two decades later. By the mid-1990s, no serious alternatives to the War on Drugs and “get tough” movement were being entertained in mainstream political discourse. Once again, in response to a major disruption in the prevailing racial order—this time the civil rights gains of the 1960s—a new system of racialized social control was created by exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and working-class whites. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

Alexander examines in depth the ways in which the 'war on drugs' has been used as a justification for massive investment in policing and prisons, changes in the execution of laws which make arrest and conviction easier, and incentives from grants to military equipment to asset seizures which motivate police departments to focus their resources on drug-related crime. Starting with the legal processes of warrants, search and seizure of evidence, she follows the trail through to incarceration and disenfranchisement, and the denial of access to employment, housing, education, professional certification and other essentials of living to released felons, showing the coded racism of anti-drug and anti-crime propaganda, legislation and police action, and demonstrating the ways in which the system operates to disproportionately target black communities.

In the final section of the book, Alexander addresses the massive challenge posed by any attempt to end this prison-centred system of racial caste control. The end of the carceral state requires first the end of the War on Drugs and the ideas that black communities are the primary centre of drug activity, that black men are the primary actors in the drug trade. The first principle of change, then requires an "understanding that any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control." In order to achieve this understanding, Americans must be willing to give up the false ideal of 'colourblindness' and look at - and have a national conversation on - the realities of race.

In considering the factors that have worked against the development of a clear consciousness of racial inequity, Alexander makes an interesting argument for the end of affirmative action:

"Racial justice advocates should consider, with a degree of candor that has not yet been evident, whether affirmative action—as it has been framed and defended during the past thirty years—has functioned more like a racial bribe than a tool of racial justice. One might wonder, what does affirmative action have to do with mass incarceration? Well, perhaps the two are linked more than we realize. We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve “cosmetic” racial diversity—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness."

She goes on to itemise the specific reasons behind this proposition: "... (a) it has helped to render a new caste system largely invisible; (b) it has helped to perpetuate the myth that anyone can make it if they try; (c) it has encouraged the embrace of a “trickle down theory of racial justice”; (d) it has greatly facilitated the divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration; and (e) it has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public now (wrongly) assumes that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations." Alexander makes a strong argument that, by facilitating a small number of success stories that showcase 'black exceptionalism,' affirmative action actually supports the continuation of the carceral state by seeming to say that 'if these black individuals can succeed, that means the failure if most to do so is rooted in personal choices and decisions, not systemic racism.'

Her closing thoughts on the path to an end to the carceral state and the beginning of a society based on social justice for all look back to the shift that Martin Luther King Jr. was moving toward when his life and evolution as a leader for social change was brutally ended. As he said in introducing the idea of the Poor People's Campaign, "I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society."