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A review by rebeccarennerfl
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson
5.0
A must read. Any review of mine could never do this book justice, so here is a quote from the book itself:
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy. As a political program white supremacy avers that white people have a right to rule. That is obviously morally unacceptable, and few of its devotees will speak its name. But that enfeebled faith is not nearly so insidious and lethal as its robust, covert and often unconscious cousin: the assumption that God has created humanity in a hierarchy of moral, cultural and intellectual worth, with lighter-skinned people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom...
To see beyond the ghosts, all of us must develop the moral vision and political will to crush white supremacy — both the political program and the concealed assumptions. We have to come to grips with our own history — not only genocide, slavery, exploitation and systems of oppression, but also the legacies of those who resisted and fought back and still fight back. We must find what Dr. King called the “strength to love.” New social movements must confront head-on the racial chasm in American life. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
You can read a longer excerpt in the Atlanta Journal Constitution: http://specials.myajc.com/emmett-till/
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy. As a political program white supremacy avers that white people have a right to rule. That is obviously morally unacceptable, and few of its devotees will speak its name. But that enfeebled faith is not nearly so insidious and lethal as its robust, covert and often unconscious cousin: the assumption that God has created humanity in a hierarchy of moral, cultural and intellectual worth, with lighter-skinned people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom...
To see beyond the ghosts, all of us must develop the moral vision and political will to crush white supremacy — both the political program and the concealed assumptions. We have to come to grips with our own history — not only genocide, slavery, exploitation and systems of oppression, but also the legacies of those who resisted and fought back and still fight back. We must find what Dr. King called the “strength to love.” New social movements must confront head-on the racial chasm in American life. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
You can read a longer excerpt in the Atlanta Journal Constitution: http://specials.myajc.com/emmett-till/