Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Reviews tagging 'Racial slurs'

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

5 reviews

crybabybea's review

challenging informative slow-paced

3.5

Detailed cultural analysis of the Reconstruction. I was a little bit thrown off at first as I was expecting a historical retelling of the era, but this is more than that; Henry Louis Gates, Jr. tackles the common culture of the time, from science, to politics, to popular media. In doing so, he examines both "sides" of the era, from the freed Black people's struggle to gain rights and regain their power, to the extreme lengths white people went through to prove the moral correctness of their racism and desire to return to slavery.

I found this book to go well with what I learned from other reading like Stamped (Ibram X. Kendi) and Medical Apartheid (Harriet A. Washington). Gates explains how white people used racist caricatures and eugenics to justify their racism and desire to keep Black people separated, which Harriet Washington wrote about at length. Later, he tackles the issues faced within the Black community, specifically of northern Black people's classist disdain for the newly freed Southern Black people, as Ibram X. Kendi talks about in his upliftsuasian analysis of popular figures at the time.

There is a lot of information packed into this, the writing was definitely heavy on the academic side which made it hard for me at times. Certain parts were collections of quotes followed by quotes followed by more quotes; super useful when doing a research project, but hard to follow as a casual reader/listener. I do appreciate the deconstruction of what most of us were taught in school (which is to say, absolutely the bare minimum) and what actually happened during the time period.

I did feel like the lens of Black women of the time was missing.

I picked up a physical copy just to see the photos included in each section, which thoroughly horrified me and helped solidify the realization that racism was and continues to be so blatant and such a huge part of American history.

A great book to pick up if you are interested in learning more about the general culture at the time of Reconstruction, and I definitely recommend picking it up as a follow-up to Stamped.

Content Warnings