The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

  • Downloads:8736
  • Type:Epub+TxT+PDF+Mobi
  • Create Date:2021-01-27 04:18:49
  • Update Date:2025-09-06
  • Status:finish
  • Author:Charles M Blow
  • ISBN:9780062914668
  • Environment:PC/Android/iPhone/iPad/Kindle

Summary

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: San Francisco ChronicleO, the Oprah MagazineTime OutTown and Country, Lithub

From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy。

Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact。 The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one。 After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves。

Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book。” But as violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans。 He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America。 Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms。

So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power。 The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country。 This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom。

Editor Reviews

01/11/2021

New York Times columnist Blow (Fire Shut Up in My Bones) proposes a radical path toward Black empowerment in this impassioned call for “as many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible” to return to the South “with moral and political intentionality。” This mass resettlement, Blow argues, would allow African Americans to “colonize and control the states they would have controlled if they had not fled them。” He paints a devastating picture of how white liberals have failed to match rhetorical support for Blacks with action, and buttresses his political arguments with painful personal experiences of racism, including the time a cop pulled a gun on his son, a student at Yale。 But Blow doesn’t discuss potential challenges to his plan, including the likelihood of increased gerrymandering and voter suppression by Republican lawmakers to blunt the impact of such a demographic shift, nor does he offer much support for his belief that the Republican Party would be forced “to court not the Negrophobe, but the Negro” in order to win the presidency or control the Senate。 Though Blow’s provocative call for action contains much food for thought, readers will wish for a more realistic way forward。 (Jan。)

Publishers Weekly

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