Read These Books About the Black Experience
New York Times | John McWhorter
FAIR Advisor John McWhorter recommends “three books about the Black experience… Each enriches (or will) an understanding of our moment and our ongoing discussions about race in America.”
He recommends and discusses two books with Harvard affiliations—The Oxford Dictionary of African American English, a forthcoming dictionary edited by Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power, a new book by FAIR Advisor and Harvard alum (MBA ‘93) Ian Rowe. The third recommendation is American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America by journalist Leon Wynter published in 2002.
The Oxford Dictionary of African American English— “Black English is a legitimate form of speech with its own rules of grammar and usage…[now it will] have a dictionary recognized in the academy and beyond as a definitive source.” The volume “will be a historical dictionary along the lines of the Oxford English Dictionary. Entries will be chronicled with examples from texts, recordings and performances over time, illustrating the dialect’s lexicon as situated both in time and geographical space.”
Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power— Is an “accurate rendition of… my perspective… that while racism and obstacles certainly exist, we overplay their power and tend to assume that Black Americans have less agency than we actually do… Agency…is an eloquent argument to this effect… [Rowe] proposes that Black America could truly overcome via a framework he titles with the acronym “F.R.E.E.” — family, religion, education and entrepreneurship — stressing an overcomer’s mind-set within which we work from a mantra: ‘We can do hard things.’”
American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America—“If you were to chart what was important in Black American history between the founding of the Black Panthers and the presidency of Barack Obama, what would you focus on?…one thing that forged a new sense of life experience for all of America happened…under the radar: the “browning” of American culture that accelerated in the 1980s… This was masterfully covered in a book now 20 years old… Wynter chronicled different ways that the culture was browning, noting how refreshingly unremarkable it was that in the 1990s… The browning has continued apace since the early aughts.”
