Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Errata:
"Repeating Laura’s name like a mantra, he ensured her" - I think maybe 'assured' her?
"Thirty-three-year-old Mary and her husband, Hazel “Hayes” Turner..." is fine, but the way Kindle mangled this book, 'Turner' was on the next page and indented like it was a new paragraph! Amazon will do that to you. That's why I don't do anything with them. Clearly Amazon's intention here was to split Mary and her husband, thereby making the author's point! LOL!
"T his severing of Black families..." - the gap after the 'T' was in the text. It may have been because the book had drop caps. That's a big no-no when Amazon is going to kindle your book. I use kindle in its original sense. Amazon can only handle plain vanilla text with any reliability - and forget pictures!
"h isTorically, The fear of..." - again mangled by Kindle. Several words had the letter 'T' capitalized for no apparent reason other than this is what Kindle does to your work. This one also had the initial letter not capitalized!
"...but never laid eyes on her husband after the county sheriff and two accompanying police officers first courted him off to jail." Hardly courted! I suspect the author meant 'carted him off'.
“due to the unanimous feeling on the part of the staff and board that there were more work 107 opportunities for Negro women” - the number 107 is actually a page number that Kindle integrated into text
“T he deleTerious impacT” - Another exmaple of Kindle mangling the text.
“taking long-distance trips to see her fianc[é] through a glass.” I don;t understand the use of the square brackets. This was perhaps another Kindle mangle. Kindle sucks, period.
This book was hard to read and not because it was academic or because it uses a lot of big words - it doesn't, nor because Amazon had done its usual job of dicing and julienne-ing the text, but it does tell horrifying stories of how the African American community has been treated through its all-too-often tragic history on these shores. It's a history that both continues in far too many ways today, and can be understood from the roots it has, which extend all the way back to the forcible capture and enslavement of free Africans.
Further, it extrapolates from that long history and puts in perspective the fact that "more than 70 percent of Black women in America are unmarried." Reading this book will remove any surprise you may have as to why that is. Slavery wasn't the only oppression. There has been a history of suppression and oppression, of keeping people down and of treating people unfairly, and the heaviest burden of all of that has always fallen on the black community.
The book explores slavery, the Reconstruction, the Great Migration north, nd the continued history of abuses right up through modern times. It talks about welfare under which - and contrary to disparaging lies that are spread about it - the African American community seldom fares well, and which rather than encourage couples to marry and take joint responsibility for children, it very effectively mandates "that women remain single in order to receive government support." It discusses the modern repercussions of this unfair and unequal treatment including what the author labels "the prison-industrial complex," which unfairly targets people of color and thereby removes them from the pool of potential partners for black women.
Well-researched and unfortunately full of disturbing anecdotes from the people who have been abused by these various systems, this book tells a horrifying tale, but one that needs to be heard and internalized. I commend it fully.
