I saw Wesley Lowery, the author of American Whitewash, on television Friday morning and just then and there found the book at Audible and put it on my Wish List.  A few hours later I was tired of reading Poverty, By America (2nd time) so I got Whitelash: downloaded and started in.  

Whitelash is only 263 pages long which translates to 7 hours of audio.  The author, Wesley Lowery, is a television journalist and as narrator of his own book he’s pretty good.    

American Whitelash:
A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress
by Wesley Lowery June 2
Read by the author, 7h 
Rating: 9  / History -Americas 

Lowery explores the overt racism and hate crimes present in the US since our earliest days but the focus is more on the events of our own century.

“We cannot solve a problem we refuse to recognize.”

 The subject then is White Supremacy, to the point that some people believe Blacks are, by their very nature, an “inferior race.”  That is, both physically and mentally, they are “less than” the other races – the White “race” in particular. Now we are coming to learn that there is no such actual thing as “race,” the idea is a social construct. Still, some people have been preaching that Blacks will take over the US (replace Whites) since way before Obama was elected.  They say we will become a majority minority nation and talk about the suicidal stupidity of integration.  

So law enforcement complains they don’t have enough resources to keep an eye on all the terrorist and White Supremacist groups in the US doing what they can with limited funds. Even a simple wiretap approval will not pass Congress in the face of counterterrorism and it’s all on 9/11 Muslim terrorists.  Not much goes to White Supremacists. 

The first two parts of the book consist of history and ideas. The next three parts describe more specific and relatively recent incidents of hate crimes with media attention.  

“The problem goes deeper than dialogue or interpersonal forgiveness.  If we are serious about dismantling white supremacy we are going to have some incredibly difficult soul searching conversations and we’ll have to acknowledge that white supremacy is an inherent part of the history of our country.  We can’t get to the part of the apology where we are making meaningful amends unless we acknowledge the harm we have done. “