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laurenkd89 's review for:
Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
by Ijeoma Oluo
This book hits a bit different after that cute little almost-coup the U.S. had last night, where hundreds (if not thousands) of armed white male Trump supporters gained entry to the Capitol building while Congress was certifying election results, looted government buildings including Nancy Pelosi's office, took photos with defaced historical objects, and faced virtually zero consequences. For BIPOC individuals watching this unfold, watching police officers basically open the gates for "protestors" (read: domestic terrorists), watching police officers take photos with these people, seeing a distinct lack of arrests, tear gas, pepper spray, and all of the militarized police violence that protestors marching for racial justice and equality faced - oh boy, does it feel like a slap in the face and a perfect example of what white men can largely get away with, what people of color and anyone without this level of privilege have to suffer.
That being said, this book obviously does not address the events of January 6, 2021, and instead spends a lot of its pages on history much further back - from Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling "scalping" show to men like Eastman and Dell being pseudo-early-feminists to the dismissal of Shirley Chisholm's political work and presidential campaign. Sometimes I felt the book was a little all over the place, organized into "themes" rather than historical timelines, jumping back and forth between the present and the past and general historical movements to specific political trends.
So, I treated these more like a collection of essays. Some of them really caught my attention and made me think/stew/boil - such as the essay on Bernie Bros, almost the whole section on higher education, and almost the whole section on women in the workplace. I felt that some of the other sections were a bit meandering, getting too lost in giving the history and context that it lost the thesis of the book.
My one criticism of this book is that she treats white men as a homogenous bloc, when I think the real two-headed monster is patriarchy and white supremacy, these two plagues that go hand-in-hand and support each other through thick and thin. Something rubs me the wrong way about saying that white men are to blame for every problem in the world, although I kind of know that to be true, there are some white men who aren't like this, and it's not productive/constructive to blame high-level, personless concepts like patriarchy. I don't know.
The epilogue of this book is amazing and leaves you ending on SUCH a high note. Oluo starts by describing an unlikely relationship she developed with a young woman named Carrah Quigley. After the August 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso (committed by a man who murdered in order to address "the Hispanic invasion of Texas"), Oluo tweeted about how we need to do better in addressing white male terrorism. She received an email from Quigley, who said that she's the daughter of a mass shooter and wanted to be of assistance in Oluo's new book. Although Quigley and Oluo have pretty different opinions about this topic, this quote really stuck out to me:
If you are a liberal, I think you'll enjoy this book. I'm not sure you'll enjoy it if you don't agree with Oluo's politics (I'm not sure that it's one of those books that can change hearts and minds for people whose hearts and minds need to be changed). Thank you to the publisher for the ARC!
That being said, this book obviously does not address the events of January 6, 2021, and instead spends a lot of its pages on history much further back - from Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling "scalping" show to men like Eastman and Dell being pseudo-early-feminists to the dismissal of Shirley Chisholm's political work and presidential campaign. Sometimes I felt the book was a little all over the place, organized into "themes" rather than historical timelines, jumping back and forth between the present and the past and general historical movements to specific political trends.
So, I treated these more like a collection of essays. Some of them really caught my attention and made me think/stew/boil - such as the essay on Bernie Bros, almost the whole section on higher education, and almost the whole section on women in the workplace. I felt that some of the other sections were a bit meandering, getting too lost in giving the history and context that it lost the thesis of the book.
My one criticism of this book is that she treats white men as a homogenous bloc, when I think the real two-headed monster is patriarchy and white supremacy, these two plagues that go hand-in-hand and support each other through thick and thin. Something rubs me the wrong way about saying that white men are to blame for every problem in the world, although I kind of know that to be true, there are some white men who aren't like this, and it's not productive/constructive to blame high-level, personless concepts like patriarchy. I don't know.
The epilogue of this book is amazing and leaves you ending on SUCH a high note. Oluo starts by describing an unlikely relationship she developed with a young woman named Carrah Quigley. After the August 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso (committed by a man who murdered in order to address "the Hispanic invasion of Texas"), Oluo tweeted about how we need to do better in addressing white male terrorism. She received an email from Quigley, who said that she's the daughter of a mass shooter and wanted to be of assistance in Oluo's new book. Although Quigley and Oluo have pretty different opinions about this topic, this quote really stuck out to me:
"'So much of what makes a white male angry is the climb and the hierarchy.' But I think it's more than just the climb. It's the expectation that many white men have that they should haven't to climb, shouldn't have to struggle, as others do. It's the idea not only that they think they have less than others, but that they were supposed to have so much more. When you are denied the power, the success, or even the relationships that you think are your right, you either believe that you are broken or you believe that you have been stolen from. White men who think they have been stolen from often take that anger out on others. White men who think they are broken take that anger out on themselves."
If you are a liberal, I think you'll enjoy this book. I'm not sure you'll enjoy it if you don't agree with Oluo's politics (I'm not sure that it's one of those books that can change hearts and minds for people whose hearts and minds need to be changed). Thank you to the publisher for the ARC!