The End of Blackness

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY DEC 1, 2003

In order to make progress possible, blacks have to give up on the past that's the core argument of this inflammatory, cogently written book. Dickerson, a lawyer and journalist, continues the examination of black self-reliance that she introduced in her first book, An American Story. This time, however, she leaves her own experiences out of it and focuses on breaking down racial myths, social concepts and prejudices with the help of statistics and citations by such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. Racism, according to the author, "is compounded by black cooperation and by fruitless black jousts with intransigence, while winnable victories are ignored because they do not center on whites and because they are unglamorous." Dismissing Afrocentrism as "self-eliminative and isolationist," Dickerson encourages blacks to focus on their own talents and ignore the expectations of whites and other blacks. She fearlessly condemns the black community for defending the actions of O.J. Simpson and Marion Barry, and for scorning "Uncle Tom" figures like Julian Abele, a black architect who designed Duke University in the 1920s despite its whites-only policy preventing him from ever visiting the campus. "The great architect never got to see his creation, but those for whom he left it in trust knowledge seekers of all races and nationalities do. Thank God he was an Uncle Tom," she writes. Few of the book's assertions are new or groundbreaking, but Dickerson updates and expands the arguments by using references to current television sitcoms, mass-mailed Internet jokes that reinforce stereotypes and the emergence of hip-hop artists as individualistic thinkers to back up her statements. Addressing an incendiary issue in a straightforward and un-self-serving manner, this polemic is likely to provoke thoughtful discussion.