The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
(Harper, $27)
Charles Blow has become a radical thinker in the best sense, said Hope Wabuke in NPR.org. In his new book, the veteran New York Times columnist argues that the time has come for black descendants of the Great Migration to return to the South for the purpose of consolidating political power.
“In cogent arguments bound together by his customary incandescent prose,” the Louisiana native argues that the North has denied the dreams of the millions who once fled Jim Crow, subjecting them from the start to violence and social and economic segregation that persists to this day. Black Americans could remain scattered and powerless, he says, or create “a new Africa in America,” concentrating their numbers to produce black majorities that would dominate politics in as many as seven states, centered in the Deep South.
Don’t expect an airtight argument from The
Devil You Know, said Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. It’s “more like a rough thought experiment stretched into book form,” with all of its optimism built upon the simple idea that numbers equal power. Had there been no Great Migration, Blow argues, black people would probably compose majorities in those seven states, essentially controlling the states’ criminal justice and education systems plus 14 seats in the U.S. Senate and 90 Electoral College votes. By the same theory, there likely would have been no Republican elected president in the past half century. Blow deserves credit for reverse-migrating himself, having recently relocated from New York City to Atlanta. But he points to Georgia’s going blue in November as “proof of concept,” crediting the rise of black voter participation and ignoring the harsh reality on the ground: A fierce fight had to be waged to overcome white suppression of black votes.
I, too, “found myself wanting more”— more evidence, more context, said Carole Bell in TheGrio.com. Still, “one doesn’t often expect a work of nonfiction to be this propulsive and exciting.” As Blow points out, black people have been returning to the South for a generation already, and the region is home to most of the nation’s black-owned businesses and 1,000 of its 1,200 black-majority towns and cities. He also generates urgency by warning that because the black population is shrinking as a share of the total U.S. population, a consolidation of power is the only way to prevent black Americans from becoming the nation’s most neglected minority. To Blow, waiting for white Americans to transcend racism is foolish when there’s a more pragmatic option. Whatever its flaws, “The Devil You Know is convincing”—“both as polemic and as proposal.”