It’s also important because if you’re talking about the Tulsa Race riot for example where white people killed dozens or hundreds of Black citizens in Tulsa while also burning Black businesses, it’s easy to feel that is a product of a different past. That’s not to say that many of his other books have not indeed been histories, but the focus is a lot more analytical, Here’s a long history of important moments in race relations, with a moment tied to a contemporary event as well. There’s a suggestion here that the methods change, but the ideas stay the same.Ī very different kind of Michael Eric Dyson book in that it’s a history book more than analysis. The sadness of these letters is in the sense of continuity of the topics they cover. The structure of the book is in the form of long letters to figures like George Floyd and Emmet Till, but used to discuss contemporary events. It’s interesting, but like all other conversations about cancel culture the free-floating nature of the definition leads to unclear meaning at times. There’s an interesting conversation about “cancel culture” which Dyson links specifically to white supremacy and the tools of suppression that have cancelled Black people in the past (whether literally through murder or more “cancel culture”ly like Colin Kaepernick. This book is specifically positioned after the 2020 election and spends a lot of time with the pandemic, the mass protests of summer 2020, the Trump presidency and other similar topics. What’s interesting about reading the older books is to see both the evolution of the topics surrounding race in America, but also to see the evolution of Dyson as a writer and a thinker. In this book, it’s more like his other common type of writing like in Race Rules or Tears We Cannot Stop, which are almost jeremiads about contemporary topics. That’s not exactly true, as sometimes he focuses on figures like Tupac, Martin Luther King, or Jay-Z in order to talk about broader issues or to focus on a very specific issue. A lot of Michael Eric Dyson books are generally the same, with updated topics and examples.
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