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A review by moreteamorecats
From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
3.0
Two interlocking arguments here. The first will be familiar to readers of [a: Ta-Nehisi Coates|1214964|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1300129823p2/1214964.jpg], whom Taylor quotes approvingly: When Black people live poor and die at the police's hands, it means society is working as designed. (Coates, roughly, sees this as an operation of whiteness as such, while for Taylor it's capitalism.)
The second argument is even more pointed: African-American elites' interests are more aligned with White American elites than with poor people of any color, so conventionally successful Black leaders tend to be worse than complicit in poor Black folks' suffering. This case makes up the bulk of the book's history, much of it new to me and very interesting. That said, the history is clearly polemical: Taylor, for instance, describes the Union Army as "led by two hundred thousand Black troops," which describes the USCT's moral leadership well (by war's end Union soldiers were consciously as well as objectively abolitionist) but not their power within either uniformed or civilian war leadership.
The second argument is even more pointed: African-American elites' interests are more aligned with White American elites than with poor people of any color, so conventionally successful Black leaders tend to be worse than complicit in poor Black folks' suffering. This case makes up the bulk of the book's history, much of it new to me and very interesting. That said, the history is clearly polemical: Taylor, for instance, describes the Union Army as "led by two hundred thousand Black troops," which describes the USCT's moral leadership well (by war's end Union soldiers were consciously as well as objectively abolitionist) but not their power within either uniformed or civilian war leadership.