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- Also Known As:
- Edition:
- needed to precede following dl
- Language:
- Length:
- 152 pages
- Review Format:
- Book
- Year:
- 2015
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Non-Fiction
- Author:
- Outstanding Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Written as a letter to the author’s teenaged son about the realities of being feared and living in fear of random physical attacks because of one’s skin color - with limited legal redress possible.
- Themes:
- Advertising | Alienation | Art | Atheism | Black people | Christianity | Civilization | Coming-of-age | Compassion | Corporate Power | Courage | Curative | Emotional repression | Empathy | Equality | Ethnicity | Family | Free Speech | Genocide | Guilt | Humanity | Identity | Justice | Loneliness | Love | Loyalty | Mankind | Materialism | Narcissism | Nostalgia | People Of Color (POC) | Personal | Personal change | Political | Political Correctness | Preventive | Propaganda | Rationality | Religious fundamentalism | Republicanism | Role modeling | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Self-Esteem | Self-Expression | Social class | Solipsism | Stereotyping | Totalitarianism | Western world | White culture | White guilt | White people | White privilege | White supremacy
- Similar to:
Excellent, if overly-wordy (a fault shared with the equally-excellent James Baldwin), book about White people which understands that Whites use euphemisms and half-truths in order to live with their guilt feelings about the White supremacist nature of their cultures.
When Whites say People
, they only mean White people; when they say Race
, they claim something science has demonstrated as fact - despite the utter absence of any tangible evidence.
These White delusions spring from the belief that a) nature, itself, is racist; b) that Whites are the only ethnic group able to know this for sure; & c) that the White god has decreed, in advance, who is to be honored and who is to be tortured. Yet, it is recently-invented racism that produces Race - not the other way around; resulting in a superficial people who think of themselves as White - above any other consideration; leaving Whites with no more solid basis for their cultural myths than self-delusion and wishful-thinking.
Black people have never had the luxury of denying White reality by believing in American exceptionalism because they were meant to suffer as scapegoats for the inability of White Americans to achieve the exceptional - and suffering is always self-evident and undeniable. Moreover, Whites decreed that People Of Color existed solely as the basis of White wealth - a wealth Whites pretend came from their hard work when it really came from the hard work of those Whites deem to be untermenschen. For Black people to do otherwise than face reality can only result in the same personally-irresponsible, life-threatening & dream-like schizophrenia Whites wallow in every day of their lives. Thus, White police officers are merely correctly-interpreting the actual legacy and heritage of White supremacy in their openly-racist, Caucasian-accepted & genocidal behavior towards Black people.
An excellent book for Black people to share with one another and to bequeath to their children (like the similarly-themed works of the late James Baldwin) that clearly expresses the reasons for White mediocrity and the social parasitism inherent in a White supremacy based on genocide, looting and rape that benefits all White males, regardless of social class - all because they would much rather exist trapped in the gilded cage of Whiteness than live free as grown men.
