Mychal Denzel Smith

if nothing else, the title of this book gives me so much to think about. i could sit in that space - of black men's invisibility while simultaneously being scrutinized - for a good long while. (it comes from a mos def song.) i appreciated his honesty. (as a parallel: he talks about his difficulty with gayness, and really owns that he is trying hard to overcome his prejudice; when mitchell s jackson tried to do something similar in survival math regarding his view of women, he only managed to come across as a total misogynist who wanted props for not being even worse. this was a nice contrast. he has growing to do, but he's aware and he's trying, and it seems he is honest about who he is and the work he is doing.)

i feel like this book made me finally understand some of the critique i've been reading about barack obama. i don't know if it was hearing it a certain number of times or the way he explained it, but it made more sense to me this time around.

this came at a really interesting time. he mentions so many people in this book who are back in the news now (dave chappelle, bill cosby, kanye west) for different reasons. i really wonder what he'd think of chappelle now. his explanation for chapelle's comedy from years ago did make me almost see chappelle in a different light. (but i just can't discount the hurt he is causing now.)

this is an interesting book and it's well done.

"You don't need to hate black men in order to believe ... [the stories white supremacy has always told about black boys and men in America]. Black men's humanity only need be invisible to you, so you never question where these stories came from and why they exist."

"When you're introduced to a martyr as a result of their death, they aren't a whole person. They are a name and a story. They ar ea set of symbols and projections. Their lives are flattened for our consumption..."

"Anger is what makes our struggle visible, and our struggle is what exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fashions itself a moral leader. To rise against the narrative and expose the lie gives opportunity to fhose whose identity depends on the lie to question and, hopefully, change."

"For public relations purposes, it would be ideal if eery victim of injustice was a person of unimpeachable character. If everyone was caught at the wrong place at the wrong time and was a rebuke to racist descriptors, half the work of reclaiming the victim's humanity would already be done. But the system isn't filled with a bunch of doe-eyed innocents, and that doesn't make them any less worthy of justice.They shouldn't be discarded as people on the basis of their mistakes."

"...we [need to] recognize that liberation for black men based in patriarchy and male dominance is liberation for no one, least of all black women, but not for black men either. It turns us into the very oppressors we claim to be fighting against. It makes us deny parts of ourselves in service of an idea of masculinity that does more to destroy than build."

"We shouldn't be seeking the respect of an unjust system that will not respect us on the basis of our humanity alone."… (altro)

In Stakes is High, Michael Denzel Smith states that he intended to write a book without mentioning Trump but that he was unable to get past the first sentence without doing so. He argues that Trump is not an aberration in the system but the end result of years of systemic racism, misogyny, inequality, and beliefs and policies that have led the country here:

Donald Trump is the inevitable result of holding tight to the American Dream. He was inevitable in 2016 and, barring a revolutionary turn...he will be inevitable in our future. He is the end result of allowing the delusion about our history, of making freedom synonymous with capitalist accumulation, of unearned arrogance and untempered individual ambition...he is all the things that create American culture , whether they are acknowledged or not.

Using history as well as an unflinchingly clear analysis, Stake is High is, in fact, a call to arms. He looks at the roots of racism by showing the many small indignities in Black neighbourhoods, including the lack of garbage bins on corners compared to white neighbourhoods, that add up to huge inequalities. He also talks about his own ancestor born into slavery and denied the right to learn to read and write meaning that he left no record of his life.

He examines, unflinchingly, systemic racism as well as misogyny and toxic masculinity; the failures of the justice and political system; police brutality and how the purpose of the police has, from its inception, been to protect private property; and he lays out the lie behind the myth of the 'American Dream'.

He argues that it is all inextricably tethered to 'white supremacist patriarchal capitalism", that he once believed that, although he would not see its end in his lifetime, his friends' children might live in a world without it. But that belief changed on November 8, 2016 and that is why he wrote this book:

I hope you already know, already feel, or if you don't, I hope I can convince you to feel along side me: stakes is high. Our very survival is on the line....[b]ut that something can be done about it. Revolution must be swift and uncompromising; it will be scary and potentially violent. Before it can be any of these things, it must be thought of as possible

This was not always an easy book. Many, no doubt, will agree with his analysis of the causes of the state of the nation but reject his conclusion. But, given what is happening right now in the United States, it is an important book and I recommend it highly.

Thanks to Netgalley and Perseus Books for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review… (altro)

A very good call to arms and critique of the state of the nation. It's not pretty, but Smith's wide-lens view is smart and lays out the root of American problems succinctly, shining a hard light on endemic racism, toxic masculinity, capitalism, the justice system, politics, and the longstanding delusion labeled the American dream. There are no easy answers or binary rhetoric, which makes this a good book to read right now. How we got to this place—or the place we were at when Smith wrote the book, which is just short of this even harsher point in time—is not easily answerable, but it is understandable, and he does a good job of making the case for a broad and deep revolution.… (altro)