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nuhafariha 's review for:
Thank you to Perseus Books and NetGalley for the Reader's Copy!
Now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Indie Bookstore.
While intriguing as a concept, I found Jane Dailey's White Fright to be ultimately essentialistic. Through a series of historical analysis, Dailey serves to build the premise that the fear of black sexuality has been the main motivation for racial tension between Black and White communities. She particularly relies on examples of misconduct in the military, contrasting the treatment of hypersexualized Black males to their white counterparts.
The premise laid out in this book is nothing new - fear of sex is the basis of any Puritan society as Howard Bloom tried to prove back in the 1990s. There's no nuance, for example, in differentiating the different Christian communities, only that God fearing white Christians in the South fear black men. Where do non Black POC males like Asian Americans, Latinx or Indigenous folk fit into the conversation? Where do Black and non Black POC women fit into the conversation?
What if we reversed the conversation and discussed the vitality of Black power and Black love and Black community? That Black folk in the US have continued to thrive despite these constant "fears"? What if we talked about White Mediocrity as Ijeoma Oluo does, white insecurity? I felt like that would be a much more interesting conversation.
Now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Indie Bookstore.
While intriguing as a concept, I found Jane Dailey's White Fright to be ultimately essentialistic. Through a series of historical analysis, Dailey serves to build the premise that the fear of black sexuality has been the main motivation for racial tension between Black and White communities. She particularly relies on examples of misconduct in the military, contrasting the treatment of hypersexualized Black males to their white counterparts.
The premise laid out in this book is nothing new - fear of sex is the basis of any Puritan society as Howard Bloom tried to prove back in the 1990s. There's no nuance, for example, in differentiating the different Christian communities, only that God fearing white Christians in the South fear black men. Where do non Black POC males like Asian Americans, Latinx or Indigenous folk fit into the conversation? Where do Black and non Black POC women fit into the conversation?
What if we reversed the conversation and discussed the vitality of Black power and Black love and Black community? That Black folk in the US have continued to thrive despite these constant "fears"? What if we talked about White Mediocrity as Ijeoma Oluo does, white insecurity? I felt like that would be a much more interesting conversation.