Book #56 of 2022:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by C

Book #56 of 2022:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint SmithA deeply-moving account of author Clint Smith’s visits to sites across the country (and one abroad, in Senegal) that have links to slavery, from former plantations like Angola Prison and Jefferson’s Monticello estate to a Confederate cemetery and Wall Street. There’s a lot of information on the ‘peculiar institution’ in this book — often rendered in visceral, unflinching detail that centers the human cost of its ongoing atrocities — but the writer is a sociologist rather than a historian, and so his primary focus is less on the facts and more on how contemporary people grapple with them. To that end, he interviews tour guides and his fellow guests, seeking to draw out their understandings of the subject, and how that fits with their sense of American history more broadly.Understandably, he encounters a lot of ignorance among the white folks that he talks to, and although he pushes back against that in-person and is even clearer in his text where they’re wrong, it’s disquieting to see the extent of the stubborn conviction behind such long-disproven claims (like the idea that the Civil War was fought over the noble ideal of states’ rights in the abstract or that the majority of enslaved persons were not treated cruelly by the class who bought, sold, whipped, raped, and orphaned them). Smith is remarkably empathetic with his interlocutors and notes for us how centuries of propaganda have shaped and cemented these narratives, but in reading over their insistent misconceptions, it is hard to imagine how we will ever get to a point of universal education and acknowledgement of such matters, let alone begin to seriously redress them.If I have one complaint regarding this project, it’s that it feels designed to say big, important things about our society, and yet the author seems to place a great deal of emphasis on what a few particular presenters have had to say on the occasion of his appearance before them, reifying and enshrining their attitudes into more than perhaps they ought to be taken as. In my opinion, that sort of individualized and diary-like approach can sensationalize either a good or a bad experience when a more holistic representation might have proved more neutral. Still, this is altogether a strong and recommended read on race and racism in America.[Content warning for racial slurs, lynching, and gore.]★★★★☆Like this review?–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!https://patreon.com/lesserjoke–Follow along on Goodreads here!https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler–Or click here to browse through all my previous// reviews!https://lesserjoke.home.blog -- source link

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