The Gilded Auction Block

McCrae, a National Book Award finalist for In the Language of My Captor, exposes how, for marginalized peoples, the America that exists in the white imagination is not the one that exists in reality. This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump, since for McCrae, Trump is not the cause of America’s racism but a hazardous symptom of deep-rooted white fear. In “Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned From Donald Trump,” McCrae equates himself to “A slave on the run from you an Egyptian queen/ And even in my dreams I’m in your dreams.” McCrae is at pains to show how, in Trump’s America, the mere fact of blackness is often a threat to whiteness. Similarly, in “The Brown Horse Ariel,” the horse in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ariel” represents the toxic, complementary relationship between white and black Americas. McCrae equates blackness to “the fear of death,” writing, “Who could not know himself until he knew his rider.” The fourth and final section emphasizes those historical Americans who largely remain nameless despite making the nation what it is, the “murderers” as well as the “nobodies and immigrants and the poor.” In McCrae’s timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims. (Nov.)