(If you must buy this book, buy it here.)
This book reminds me that I am not the target audience for books about racism, at least not ones like this.
In 2017, a bored Korean-American kid started editing pictures of Black girls in his school in alarming ways. He juxtaposed them with gorillas, photoshopped nooses around their necks, and posted the images on a private, invite-only IG account. Egged on by his (mostly) white friends, it grew until it was discovered and brought to the school’s attention, where it was handled with dramatic incompetence.
The book goes into painstaking detail about these events. I understand why, but it often comes across as trying to explain what racism is and why it’s actually bad. (There’s a whole chapter explaining why gorilla imagery can be offensive, for example.) That’s one reason I feel like I wasn’t the target audience here.
The other reason is that the book centers the feelings and lives of the (mostly white) kids who made and encouraged the account. While the targeted girls get some attention, the lion’s share of empathy, concern, and explanation goes to the Asian kid who started it all, the white kids who kept it going, and the disgustingly successful lawsuits they brought against the school for endangering them. There’s a chilling interview with one smug kid, now a promising debt-free uni student thanks to his settlement, who admits to being an open, unrepentant intellectual racist, knowingly poised to have far too much power, social trust, and credibility in a future near you, coming soon.
Meanwhile, the targeted Black girls (and a Southeast Asian boy who was also insulted) are constantly described using well-meaning but racially coded language. They’re called angry more often than hurt and compared to trains and powder kegs. Their confidence was destroyed, their self-development impaired, their lawsuits largely failed, and they received very little real support or apology from a community that was more concerned with not looking like racists to other white people than with actually caring for the Black people within. Despite the title, there’s no real accountability here, at least not where it should be, and that just isn’t explained enough.
Reading this reminded me of a table I sat at last February. I was attending a conference, joined a discussion, and was subjected to racial and misogynoirist abuse from one of the other attendees. The other attendees–all white–sat and watched me defend myself. When it ended and I went to look for a place to cry, some of the watchers came to tell me how strong I’d been, how brave. Others tried to explain the perspective of the man who verbally attacked me, telling me he was stressed out, mentally incapable, didn’t really mean it. All of those people felt righteous, and so does this book. None of those people did anything to help a real-life Black person struggling with being racially targeted while just existing, and neither does this book.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that despite the need to discuss things like this openly and thoroughly, this book is just for the shallow folks who want to justify their own complicity.
Not a damn thing to Accountable.
(Fellow readers, it’s been a while. I started a new daye jobbe and have been down with another case of COVID-19, so reviews and posts have been a bit thin on the ground. Fortunately, annoyance has always been inspirational for me and this book was annoying enough to get me back in the swing of reviewing things. Don’t buy this book. If you must read it, check it out from the library like I did. But do also check out this booklist for a few selections that deal with racial justice from a more satisfying point of view, and give the Equal Opportunity Bookshop a look whenever you want something good to read. If you buy anything there, we receive a commission and when we receive commissions–we buy more books. It’s a beautiful circle, y’all. Thanks for reading! Peace!)
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