These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault sat down for a debate in the early 1970s. You can watch the whole thing here. The transcript, along with some related essays from both Chomsky and Foucault, is available to buy as a book. It’s known as the Chomsky-Foucault debate.
I wasn’t new to either Chomsky or Foucault when I watched and read the Chomsky-Foucault debate. And the short debate format has its clear limits. But I did come away with a few impressions and lessons learned.
Samantha Allen is a trans woman and ex-Mormon who lived for a time in Provo, Utah. She recently wrote a book called Real Queer America. The basic idea is to take a road trip through red states, chronicling the LGBT communities therein. She drove from Utah to Texas to Indiana to Tennessee to Georgia.
Her premise is that the red state American crucibles produce unique LGBT spaces. These are spaces where LGBT people have to overcome differences and find common ground, avoiding the kind of arcane squabbling found in New York or San Francisco, where communities are large enough to divide into warring subgroups.
The book itself is pretty good. It’s a worthwhile travelogue, and it does show how smaller places can be as radical and beautiful as larger ones. Not that I don’t have any quibbles. She organizes the book more around legislation than movements, and there are thorny issues of gentrification and homonormativity that she sometimes overlooks.
But this post is less a review of Real Queer America than a reaction to one of the stops on Allen’s road trip. She visits Bloomington, Indiana, where I lived for 6 years.
Let’s start here: It’s hard to write a book about your own failure. And that was Hillary Clinton’s task in What Happened. Silicon Valley and the business press are full of schlock extolling the virtues of failure, but that’s shit people write after they’ve succeeded. They look back at how they learned from failure. Lessons from the road, and other nonsense.
That’s not the kind of failure Hillary Clinton is writing about in What Happened. What Happened is like writing a book about that time you hit a home run in Game 7 of the World Series, but you got thrown out because you inexplicably forgot to touch first base on the way in. Then your team lost. And then you retired.
Al Gore made a movie after he lost the presidency, and he forged ahead with a new career in stopping climate change. I don’t see a tomorrow for Hillary Clinton’s political career, even on the scale of Al Gore. It’s all the day after November 8. The presidency was supposed to be it for her: the defining moment of the career of the first woman president.
So that’s the kind of failure she’s writing about in her book. I’m not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s politics. I didn’t caucus for her in the primaries or vote for her in the general election. And I’m not interested in revisiting that debate. I’ve said what I have to say on those issues.
But I do think it took some chutzpah for her to write about the election, especially so soon after it. What Happened is supposed to be the story of how that event…well, happened.
Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and International Relations and Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, D. C. Most of his work covers 20th century racial justice movements, from the student activism of the 1960s to current activism. He’s the author of the recent book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.
Stamped from the Beginning is rather sweeping and ambitious. Kendi places the entire five or six century history of racist thought into a consistent historical narrative. He also takes steps toward assessing the relative importance of racist ideas to American life. The project is historical, sociological, political, and philosophical.
He works at the crowded left-liberal intersection, where we can find so much phooey. But Coates’s work isn’t phooey, which vaults him to the upper ranks of this crowd. He brings something new, I think particularly (though not exclusively) to white audiences.
I recently read We Were Eight Years in Power. It’s a collection of Coates’s essays from The Atlantic, placed into a common narrative. The common theme of Coates’s essays is black power and white backlash. This post is about his book, and I’ll include some page numbers in case anyone’s interested in following along.
But it’s not just about Coates’s book. I think it’s worth reading Ta-Nehisi Coates alongside one of his hardest-hitting critics internal to black political debate.
Coates is probably familiar to anyone in intellectual or political circles. But who’s Touré Reed?
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