The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

New York Times columnist Blow (Fire Shut Up in My Bones) proposes a radical path toward Black empowerment in this impassioned call for “as many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible” to return to the South “with moral and political intentionality.” This mass resettlement, Blow argues, would allow African Americans to “colonize and control the states they would have controlled if they had not fled them.” He paints a devastating picture of how white liberals have failed to match rhetorical support for Blacks with action, and buttresses his political arguments with painful personal experiences of racism, including the time a cop pulled a gun on his son, a student at Yale. But Blow doesn’t discuss potential challenges to his plan, including the likelihood of increased gerrymandering and voter suppression by Republican lawmakers to blunt the impact of such a demographic shift, nor does he offer much support for his belief that the Republican Party would be forced “to court not the Negrophobe, but the Negro” in order to win the presidency or control the Senate. Though Blow’s provocative call for action contains much food for thought, readers will wish for a more realistic way forward. (Jan.)