Book No. 32 of 2021
Absolutely phenomenal book that honestly should be required reading for…most Americans. Not only is this a thorough and very human look at one of the most crucial and understudied aspects of modern American history, I also had so many lightbulb moments reading this, at it explains and contextualizes so much about American culture, politics, and society.
Wilkerson takes both a macro view of how the migration of Black Americans out of the Jim Crow South fundamentally shaped modern America and a micro view by telling the stories of individual migrants over the course of several decades. It’s a breathtakingly effective approach: while I learned enough from this to write several papers, it was also such a compelling read that I had a lot of trouble putting it down.
Wilkerson’s sociological approach feels quietly radical: she posits that the Great Migration can be analyzed similarly to the way we analyze foreign immigration patterns, and she uses terms like “sectarian violence,” “caste,” “ruling class,” “pogroms,” etc.—terms we usually apply to “other” regions of the world—to describe conditions for Black Americans in both the North and South. The book is also painfully relevant; it’s both horrifying and weirdly a relief to understand the entrenchment of neo-Nazism, race riots, scapegoating, political posturing, etc. in the fabric of the US. (On the one hand, it’s a relief to know that current political figures did not invent new levels of awful; on the other hand, it’s frustrating to see how deep this rot goes.) Lots of myths get busted here so exquisitely that I would like to just throw this book at certain people’s heads from now on.
Similar Reads
Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half
Afia Atakora’s Conjure Women
Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age
Raven Leilani’s Luster
Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy