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lightreadsA more Beautiful and Terrible History
3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.
I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.
An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s
Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?
Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.
3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.
I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.
An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s
Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?
Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.
Intriguing
Date: 2025-07-08 03:23 pm (UTC)I recently finished Imani Perry's May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem; Keyonni James does an excellent job narrating.
Perry recalls the thousands of occasions where "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was performed in its century-plus history, naming these contexts as "Black Formalism." The overlap with Civil Rights stories and Negro History Week are inevitable (as well as the turn away from Lift Every Voice between 1963 and 1993). The song's hymnal style makes it a close fit for decades of respectability politics; Perry also points out the long tradition of grass-roots reactions to that approach's limitations.
Not as focused as Theoharis's work, but it does parallel these events.
Re: Intriguing
Date: 2025-07-08 04:11 pm (UTC)Interesting! I will put that on the list.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-08 07:27 pm (UTC)The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.
FOR REAL. Maybe especially in this case because it's so recent and easily disproved, but I still remember a professor when I was 19 who casually informed us that kissing exists in every culture. He was teaching English, not anthropology, but I knew for a fact (thanks to my mum, who studied anthropology at SOAS) that this was absolutely untrue, and I felt my intellectual respect for him drop like a stone. He was also a creep and pretty homophobic but I didn't know that yet.
And when I read Sapiens, you can trace every time he says something I know for a fact is untrue or just a very weird/irrelevant framing by the irritability of my marginalia.