| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Despite being a massive necessary corrective for the common White attitude that Blacks are among us but part of us, this book has something of the House Negro about it.
The author never mentions that the Black troops who fought in the US Civil War were only allowed to be officered by Whites and were segregated from White troops. Here, there is the sense that Blacks have to earn their rights to full citizenship when Whites have rarely had to do this. This issue is not fully explored in the attempt to vindicate human rights when no such vindication is required by virtue of both E Pluribus Unum and the opening of the US Declaration of Independence; namely, that all men are created equal. Thus, Whites have effectively claimed that rights are granted at birth, unless you are Black (Nigger), Jewish (Kyke) or Italian (Dago).
This approach falls into the White trap of assuming that any discussion of Blacks is a discussion of something that is a problem for Whites. The problem of White supremacy is seen differently by the beneficiaries of it and those who are victimized by it, such that the problem is never clearly defined. As Judaism was the Jewish Question to the White supremacist National Socialists, so Blacks were the Negro Problem for the White supremacist United States.
The fact that the book is based on the naive political premiss that Whites understanding Black achievements will make them less racist, proves how little the author understands Whites and their deliberate creation of Institutionally-Racist cultures. In such cultures, intergroup harmony is simply as impossible as Whites wish it to be.
Historically accurate (albeit dully academic) yet delighting in unproven absurdities like 'discrimination against the Negro antedated the need for his labor' when White supremacy has always been used to justify racial slavery. Or, that Whites have 'psychological needs that could be resolved in some measure by holding view of others' when this is not specific to racial slavery.
Being written by a White, the book takes the implicitly legalistic and White approach that racial slavery was legal and so morality can be given short shrift. There is no real sense of the emptiness of White culture that it feels the need to overturn principles it claims are cherished when it comes to non-Whites. Here, White supremacy is presented as though it were some kind of anomaly when in reality it is part-and-parcel of the wider White culture. Big-picture thinking is not part of the remit of this book, hence its lack of perspective and insight; preferring, instead, to drown in a mass of scholarly detail in order to evade the wider truth about the essential degeneracy of Whites.
Benjamin Quarles – White a man who knows his subject but does not understand it.
What the book gets right is the rich and varied contribution to US culture that is beloved the world over along with much of the depth and scope of the White response to the presence of those they fundamentally dislike. Yet Blacks still assimilated and, thereby, transformed the culture in which they lived; largely without becoming a part of the problem of White supremacy.
More than anything, however, this book is aimed at the general reader and avoids, therefore, being a dry-as-dust academic exercise; bringing the history it details vigorously to life.
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