Back to home page
ISR Issue 49, September–October 2006
R E V I E W S
Abusive relations: Democrats and Black America
Walter Mosely
Life out of Context
Nation Books, 2006
112 pages $13
Review by KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR
“Economic globalism has pressed many lives out of context. It's about time we pushed back.”
WALTER MOSLEY wants the world to change and wants to change the world. Mostly known for his crime-fiction series that features Easy Rawlins as the central character, Mosley has now written a part political call-to-arms, part cynical lamentation, and part cathartic rant about the state of the world and the state of American politics.
His book, Life Out of Context, is only 104 pages, but is written with the quiet humility of someone really trying to figure out, or contextualize, what's gone so wrong in the world that produces war and racism. The tone is not what one expects from a literary celebrity. In his own admission of confusion about how to articulate a political framework that can both make sense of the world today as well as provide a guide to action, Mosley says:
I am living in a time that has no driving social framework for a greater good. There are many, many disparate notions about how to make a better world, but these are just so many voices singing a thousand songs in different keys, registers, and styles-a choir of Bedlam.
Instead of singing to this “choir,” Mosley strikes out on his own to come up with his prescription for social change. Coming up with answers means beginning with the questions about what went wrong in the last period of social upheaval in the United States-when fundamental, transformative change seemed to be within grasp of those willing to reach for it. When writing of the civil rights movement, in particular, but the sixties in general, Mosley says:
that fuse fizzled, and the inexorable domination of the wealthy became even more powerful. It became apparent sometime in the eighties that we would never displace the rich and reactionary foremen of our democracy's infrastructure with our songs and righteous complaints. Our shadow leaders, like some evil wizards of Oz, give out grants and Grammys, Oscars and lines of tenure, and magically our revolutionary thinkers became grousing members of the establishment.
Mosley thinks that part of the shortcoming of the civil rights movement stems from the narrow “context” within which all Americans-but particularly Black Americans-view their lives and problems. He argues that this narrowness continues to be a problem.
Today little has changed in our community. We still believe that our problems arise from our struggle with white America. We are still, in our minds, separated from the wide world…that…renders any meaningful relationship with the world at large inconsequential.
Mosley attributes many of these lingering problems for Black Americans to a decades-long abusive relationship with the Democratic Party,
The majority of Black Americans have been Democrats for at least the fifty-three years that I've been alive. What have the Democrats done for us in all that time? We have the lowest average income of any large racial group in the nation. We're incarcerated at an alarmingly high rate. We are still segregated and profiled, and have a very low representation at the top echelons of the Democratic Party. We are the stalwarts, the bulwark, the Old Faithful of the Democrats, and yet they have not made our issues a priority in a very long time.
Mosley calls vaguely for the formation of a “Black Party”-focused on Black issues-to draw African American votes away from the Democrats. It's not a well-thought-out idea, since a great portion of this small book is spent excoriating the Black political elite.
But the significance of this book is not in its prescriptions. When so much of the broad Left continues to cave in to the pressure of the Democratic Party, it is refreshing that Walter Mosley is resisting that conformity and calls for an independent alternative in its place. In much of Life Out of Context, he is still figuring out what and how to replace “this vast Religion of Capitalism” known as American society. He takes a stab at it in the spirit and camaraderie of debate. A book highly recommended.
|
