Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs - Hardcover

Ikard, David

4.71

24 ratings by Goodreads

9780226492469: Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022649246X ISBN 13: 9780226492469

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

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In this incredibly timely book, David Ikard dismantles popular white supremacist tropes, which effectively devalue black life and trivialize black oppression. Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs investigates the tenacity and cultural capital of white redemption narratives in literature and popular media from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help.

In the book, Ikard explodes the fiction of a postracial society while awakening us to the sobering reality that we must continue to fight for racial equality or risk losing the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights movement. Through his close reading of novels, films, journalism, and political campaigns, he analyzes willful white blindness and attendant master narratives of white redemption—arguing powerfully that he who controls the master narrative controls the perception of reality. The book sounds the alarm about seemingly innocuous tropes of white redemption that abound in our society and generate the notion that blacks are perpetually indebted to whites for liberating, civilizing, and enlightening them. In Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs, Ikard expertly and unflinchingly gives us a necessary critical historical intervention.

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About the Author:

David Ikard is professor and director of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism and Blinded by the Whites: Why Race Still Matters in the 21st Century, as well as coauthor of Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama’s Post-Racial America.

Review:

“Ikard’s book is creative and interventive. With quite a bit of ease, he distills for the reader the ways of whiteness—to conjure tropes in the service of black inferiority and white superiority. For this journey, Ikard chooses the literary and everyday life as avenues through which we can best explore the pitfalls of the American landscape. His dealings with texts, in productive and rigorous ways, allow the reader to enter the worlds of literature and to gain richer knowledge of the ways we are ideologically manipulated by historic trends and tropes.” (Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Washington University in St. Louis)

“Ikard delivers a blunt account of white supremacy in American culture, and a searing indictment of those who help to prop racism up. . . . The book is both timely and necessary, serving as an essential wake-up call to all white Americans who are not actively engaged in combating racism.” (Foreword Reviews)

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