THE MATTER OF BLACK LIVES

Exemplary gathering of writings on Black history, arts, politics, and culture in America.

Not all the writers in this New Yorker compilation are Black—e.g., Renata Adler, Calvin Trillin, Malcolm Gladwell—but the most compelling of the pieces are drawn from lived experience. As Cobb writes, “in its early decades, [the magazine] largely kept the subject of race at a distinct remove from its readers.” However, in 1962, as the civil rights movement grew in strength and intensity, the New Yorker published an essay that resounds throughout this book. Called “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin’s piece angrily denounced a system in which “the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account,” one in which Black people “are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world.” In the following essay, Toni Morrison recounts an attempt to write about race in such a way as “to defang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself.” Politicians come in for close scrutiny, with Barack Obama called into question for avoiding overt questions of race while addressing Black audiences with “veiled dispatches and surreptitious winks,” while forgotten heroes get their due. For example, Kathryn Schulz praises Pauli Murray, whose “law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her,” both for her brilliance and foresight: In 1944, she prophesied that within 25 years, Plessy v. Ferguson would be overturned (it took a decade). Rappers, artists, curators, and scholars all get their say. Most urgently, the final section of the book addresses the emergence of an ever more organized Black resistance following the murder of George Floyd. Other contributors include Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hilton Als, Stanley Crouch, Zadie Smith, and Edwidge Danticat.

An essential volume for readers interested in the Black past and present, as all readers should be.