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Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America

by Review-a-Day, March 31, 2006 12:00 AM

Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America by Cynthia Carr, a review from Washington Post Book World by Jonathan Yardley.

"In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life." Read the entire Washington Post Book World review.

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5 Responses to "Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America"

Cyril Hinds April 2, 2006 at 10:07 PM

Based on this reveiw I certainly hope the author of this travesty of a book will have the honor to go and hang herself. A white person has no business whatsoever attempting in ANY manner to deal with their eternal guilt in regards to all things Black. I won't burden you with any further of my pathetic ramblings as I too am white and am now honor bound to hang myself as well for even attempting to commment on this matter. May God somehow forgive me.

Up2noGd March 31, 2006 at 12:41 PM

I have to say, I really enjoyed Yardley's review. I think that the topic of racism and white-guilt is obviously a very important one, but it does sound to me, from what Yardley excerpts, that this writer is approaching the topic in an irritating and self-centered manner.

Eunice K. Riemer March 31, 2006 at 10:07 AM

This review is mean-spirited and tiresome. Yardley complains about the author's inserting her feelings and reactions into her book, but most of his review consists of his own reactions to it. He calls her opinions "banal and gratuitous." His are more so. He complains that white people who write about injustice to blacks in their families' past are "self-serving" and "self-congratulatory", that their work is ultimately about themselves. These descriptions perfectly describe his review.

Richard F. Tompkins March 31, 2006 at 08:56 AM

This is tiresome. Is there on the face of this country anything more racist and persecutory than what is being done to the blacks who live and work in Washington D.C. and are warehoused in the Public School System there in DC which is run by the administrators of the NEA each and every one acting like a plantation supervisors from the old South. This is such a scandal and disgrace show casing the hypocracy of the demo crap heads who claim sanctimony and blessing for their bleatings about race. And thier model is KKK Byrd, a high ranking Kleigel that should have been expelled years ago. And what is far far wose is the MSM and the New York Times and those vile Sulzbergers who have their own NEA slave schools in New York City.

Rev. Jack Zylman March 31, 2006 at 08:14 AM

We need the written histories of the struggles and the racism that was a tool for the oppression of blacks and poor whites alike. Diane McWorter's "Carry Me Home" is considered by those of us who were in the stuggle of that period to be an excellent history. It should not be lumped with other "white confessions" books the way Yardley has done here. As a white youth and then adult in the civil rights struggles, I understood the racism that enspirited white American, all of it. My struggle (I was kicked out of what is now Rhodes College in 1957 for bringing blacks onto campus to play an intengrated softball game and went on to any number of actions later) was not to self-righteously liberate blacks, but to liberate all of us. However, it is important to understand the everyday, low-level racism that was the primary enforcement of everyday life in the South. "Good people," as well as bad, participated. Discussion of this can open us up to an understanding of the ways that racism and its partners in oppression work. Today, patriotism, sectarianism, and classism in the form of capitalist ideology are operating in the same way. The pressures to support this government as it moves to a form of America that mirrors the racist South of the 50s and before are enormous, and operate in everyday life. The way children are brainwashed with patriotism, its use at sporting events and concerts, and the use of flags as tools of capitalist merchandizing is appalling and clearly reflective of the old Southern white mindset. Listen to McWorter (I haven't read the book under review). We need to understand. And we need to reject the present nationalist reflections of the era of slavery and Jim Crow. Yardley's review reminds me of so many self-righteously writers who stand above the crowd in some kind of elevated morality. I think he can do better, and humility is a good place to start.

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Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America

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