In the new issue of SF mag, I review the new book from Leon Litwack, longtime UC Berkeley professor and one of the smartest voices on race in America:
As always, Stephen Colbert put it best. “Racism is over,” TV’s favorite faux right-winger declared after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first African American president. If only it were so. In this fluid retelling of the civil rights struggle from Reconstruction to Katrina, Leon Litwack, a Pulitzer Prize winner and UC Berkeley professor emeritus of history, shreds any notion of a feel-good narrative. Peppering his argument with quotations from freed slaves and fiery protesters, bluesman CharÂley Patton and rapper Chuck D., Litwack charts both the fight for black equality and the white pushback–from SouthÂern poll taxes to Northern white flight–that accompanied each civil rights victory. While the “mechanics of repression” have changed over the years, he concludes, the ground truths have not. In other words, the lynchings are over, but subtler discrimination remains–for example, in the yawning disparities in our schools and courts (black Californians, he notes, are more likely to end up in state prison than at a state college). None of this stuff is revelatory, exactly–at 140-odd pages, the book could be an expanded version of one of Litwack’s popular lectures–but it offers a powerful corrective to the purveyors of truthiness who insist (sans irony) that we’ve fixed our race problem.