Too often they get skipped in historic nonfiction. It is important to learn more about not just black history, but also black women's history. Now, these two criticisms did not at all prevent me from learning from this book. To suggest that all members of a race would be “good” minus racism is just as racist as to suggest that all members of a race are “bad.”
By this I mean, I am certain that a non-racist society would lead to a larger percentage of happy, healthy families, but it by no means would wipe out all questionable behavior by all members of that race. To wit, I believe Jones falls too hardly on the nurture side of nature/nurture, when psychiatry has repeatedly demonstrated that it actually is a combination of the two that determines an individual’s behavior. Certainly, I am sure that some of these men were simply stressed out and thus abandoned their families, but I’m also certain that some of them were just assholes and would have done so in a completely non-racist society. For instance, every time Jones tells a story of a woman working herself to the bone trying to provide for her children only to have her husband abandon her, Jones excuses the man by saying….”Well….racism,” and moves on. By that I mean, she sometimes presents minorities as super-human or at no fault for their own actions or she’ll ignore negatives entirely. Second, I feel that in Prof Jones’ passion for the plight of minorities in the US, she can sometimes over-compensate the opposite direction. Whereas the early decades (slavery, Jim Crow south) consisted of a wealth of detailed information on individual's lives that truly broadened my horizons, the later decades quickly became pages and pages of statistics that simply do nothing to help me picture life for those people. It felt like I had bit off more than I could chew, and perhaps so did she. Jones attempts to condense and impart a huge amount of information within one book. First, the scope is huge, overwhelming really. I believe this nonfiction work suffers for two reasons. She highlights the ways in which the unique cultural history of slavery as well as being subject to both sexism and racism have impacted black American women’s lives. Professor Jacqueline Jones presents the extensively researched history of the dual working worlds of black American women–at home and in the workforce–from slavery to present.
0 kommentar(er)
