notes
there’s been no shortage of press on this book. i suspect i’ve ingested a fair amount of what’s surrounded it.
given the hype around the book you’d be forgiven for glossing over the trip to dakar and to a school board meeting. i’m not sure that i parse the dakar bits, i’m not meta/cerebral enough to grok what’s going on here. but it doesn’t feel like much. the school board stuff i thoroughly got, but that’s not why i bought the book. also, it’s irksome how he only seems to appreciate this through the lens of his own books. is this marketing?
the spicy bit of the book takes off in the back half. he comes out guns blazing and just starts pointing out left, right, and center the parallels between the jim crow south and the state of the palestinian people in israel. he’s explicitly clear here that he’s not interested in the “justifications” for the behavior, and does a solid job of pointing out the BS on the both-sides-isms endemic in media and how this effectively provides a mechanism for policing the dialog and creating the structure for a preferential story. that said, i find it difficult to believe that he’s been this ignorant of the state of things for so long.
there’s no shortage of examples of either apartheid or jim crow systemic abuses and if you pay attention to any of the interviews surrounding this book (the ezra klein podcast and the daily show hit about 80% of the key ones) you’re likely up to speed on most all of the elements he references in the book.
the disparities and the situation here isn’t a surprise to you if you’ve been paying reasonable attention to the plight of the palestinians over the past 20 years. it’s interesting to note that he also seems blithely ignorant as to the critiques of other black writers on the topic of israel and palestine. of particular note in overlapping space-time, toni morrison.
this ends pretty much where you’d expect it. there are no proposed solutions. coates feels burned/lied to by a profession that has continuously described the situation as complicated. there is an important digression into the linkages between israel and south africa’s apartheid regime. this is a messy arrangement and commingled on israel’s part with an existential need to do anything to ensure the durability of israel as a country. there are a lot of details i wasn’t aware of here.
a new, for me, perspective around the ascension of israel and jews in the hierarchy of whiteness. i’m not sure that i’ve fully digested what goes into this exposition, but it’s not something that i had previously considered in any form.
summary
5/5 would recommend. but it would benefit from some at least nodding at the additional perspectives here. i don’t think there’s any moral justification for the abuses, but some context would be useful for someone who picks this up based on the press and lacks awareness
references and surrounding press
notes referenced in the back of the book
a couple of the better discussions:
- ezra klein podcast (youtube)
- daily show (youtube)