Stephen DUBNER: So, Charles, you have said that you didn’t want to write a “race book.”
Charles BLOW: Yes.
DUBNER: I assume that you would, however, consider this book a race book?
BLOW: Well, the race books that I knew were of specific genre, right? So there was the race history. I cannot write a race history book. I am not a historian. Even the historical portion of this book, I was pulling my hair out and thinking maybe I was getting something wrong and calling every historian I know, making sure that I wasn’t missing something. So I couldn’t write that. And then there were the synthesis-of-our-racism-and-its-deleterious-effects books. And I certainly didn’t want to write one of those. And that’s primarily where my dislike of the genre comes from, which is that I never really felt that those books were ever written for Black people. They were always explaining something that I already knew to someone else. I assumed it was all to white people. And I wasn’t interested in that.
DUBNER: So who’s this book written for?
BLOW: Black people.
DUBNER: How do you feel about white people reading it?
BLOW: Oh, I love you, read it. It’s wonderful, you know, Jane Austen wasn’t writing to me. But I can read those books and they could be wonderful to me, but I wasn’t the audience for those books, so we can read things where we are not the target audience and still appreciate that it was written and the content of it.
Welcome to the latest installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, in which we interview an author and hear excerpts from the book. Today’s author is
Charles M. Blow, an op-ed columnist at
The New York Times.
BLOW: Hello, hello, hello.
And his new book is a manifesto. It says so right there in the subtitle. It’s called
The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto. Here’s a short passage.
* * *
BLOW: Black people fled the horrors of the racist South for so-called liberal cities in the North and West, trading the devil they knew for the devil they didn’t, only to come to the painful realization that the devil is the devil. As Julian Bond once put it, “‘America,’ after all, unscrambled, spells ‘I am race.’”
* * *
We tend to think of
manifestos as relics of the past:
The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels;
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft;
Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. You don’t expect to come across one in 2021. At least I didn’t. But I would argue that anyone who reads Charles Blow’s book will be changed by it, and moved — though in which directions, it’s hard to say.
The Devil You Know is both deeply personal and unashamedly political; it is calmly descriptive one moment and fiercely prescriptive the next. It channels the arguments — and the disappointments — of Malcolm X and James Baldwin and Charles Blow himself. It is a slender book built around a large idea.
* * *
BLOW: It occurred to me that I had been thinking too small, all my life, about my approach to being in the world and conceiving my role in it. I had to remember that a big idea could change the course of history. And, I was uniquely positioned, as a writer, not only to express such an idea but also to push it out into the world.
* * *
The idea grew out of Blow’s reckoning that white supremacy is an enduring feature of America. And what some people accept as progress really isn’t.
BLOW: I simply cannot accept the progress argument, because the progress argument is premised on this: “You should be happy with and applaud the fact that I am inching my way out of oppressing you. And it has only taken 400 years so far and soon, maybe another 100 years or so, we may be finished. My growth may be complete. I may come out of my coc00n and be a butterfly.” That’s crazy to me. I was born into it, it is very likely I will die with these bodycam videos of Black people being killed, because nothing about that architecture has changed. My liberation cannot be contingent on your evolution. I can’t wait for you to grow. It is such a passive position for me to have to take. And I won’t take it.
Blow argues that too many Black Americans have been abused for too long in too many ways, and that too many white Americans pay nothing but lip service to anti-racism. He writes that the Black Lives Matter protests last summer were “a social-justice Coachella” for those “deprived” by the pandemic “of rites of passage, parties, and proms.” He also argues that too many Black Americans have been blinded by personal ambition or co-opted by a Democratic Party that cares about them only during elections. He finds the status quo grotesque, and not worth preserving.
BLOW: It just struck me one night. I said, okay “Let me just write this down.” And I wrote for like five days 25,000 words of a book proposal, a rambling, messy, full-of-grammatical errors thing.
The proposal became a book, and the book contains a plan.
* * *
BLOW: I realize that I am proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country.
* * *
Today on
Freakonomics Radio: what, exactly, is Charles Blow’s audacious plan? How viable is it? And is it already happening?
* * *
Charles Blow was born 50 years ago and grew up in the tiny town of Gibsland, Louisiana. It was situated on the site of a plantation once owned by a Dr. Jasper Gibbs.
BLOW: Having grown up poor, to know that your ancestors were not necessarily poor — it’s a strange thing.
Blow’s first book is a memoir called
Fire Shut Up In My Bones. It was published in 2014
.
BLOW: It didn’t dawn on me until I was writing this book that the entire genealogy of my family are all freed Black men as far back as I can trace it. The great-great-great-great grandfather in Alabama, he’s the one who’s said to have saved up money and bought his own freedom.
Blow remembers once seeing an old family photograph, a cousin of a later generation.
BLOW: I flipped it over and the date the picture was taken was on the back. It was in the middle of the Great Depression. And then the price of the frame, which was extraordinarily high, and then I started like Googling inflation adjustments and like, what Black man in the middle of the Great Depression has the money to spend on this ridiculously expensive frame?
Charles was the youngest of five sons; his mother worked in a poultry-processing factory before going back to school and becoming a home-economics teacher. His father wasn’t in the picture. He was, as Blow writes, “a construction worker by trade, a pool shark by habit, and a serial philanderer by compulsion.” Charles was a good student; on a field trip to the state capitol during high school, he thought he might like to become governor of Louisiana one day.
BLOW: They took us to the governor’s mansion, and Governor Edwards struts into the receiving room, and I was like, “Oh my God, this guy is so cool.” He was running against David Duke. At one point, he says,”The only thing David Duke and I have in common is we’re both good under the sheets.” I was like, “I want to be this guy.”
He stayed in Louisiana for college, attending Grambling State — a well-known H.B.C.U., or historically black college or university. He wound up studying communications. Even early on, he had his doubts.
BLOW: We had a career day and one of the women who came clearly was unhappy with her work. And she says, “You know, journalists starting out only make” — and I think she said something like $16,000 a year — it was really low. And I remember like excusing myself from the seminar and going to the bathroom and literally throwing up. I just kept thinking, “I cannot have gone to college and be poor. I can’t do it.” So then I just made up in my mind, I said, “I’m just going to be the best at this. And hopefully the money will come later and I’ll be comfortable.”
On that dimension, he has succeeded. He interned at the
Shreveport Times, in Louisiana, and then moved north: a couple years at the
Detroit News and then to the
New York Times, where for years he was part of the team that produces maps and charts and diagrams. He left, briefly, to do similar work at
National Geographic, and returned to the
New York Times in 2008 as an opinion columnist. He has become a star attraction, especially in recent years, as his focus on race and racism has intersected with a broader interest in these topics. But this success came at a cost. As he writes in
The Devil You Know.
* * *
BLOW: I always felt safe in my majority-Black hometown and my majority-Black college town. I never understood how much of a gift that was until I ventured north and that sense of safety was replaced by a stalking sense of dread.
* * *
Blow’s move to the north was an echo of what has come to be called the Great Migration. From roughly 1915 until around 1970, some 6 million Black Southerners moved to destination cities like
Detroit and
Chicago, New York and
Philadelphia. They were fleeing Jim Crow laws and searching for better work; in the beginning especially, a majority of the migrants were single men. This left behind a South that was missing many of its men.
* * *
BLOW: I was born in 1970 in Louisiana at the end of the Great Migration into a world shaped by vacancy. My tiny hometown of Gibsland lost a full quarter of its population between the 1910 and 1920 censuses, during the first wave of the Great Migration. By the time I was born, there were clearly more women than men, and the most recent Census estimates there remain three women to every two men in town.
* * *
DUBNER: So the original sin here is obviously slavery. But can you talk for a minute about how significant, long-term, was the fact that freed slaves weren’t given land that they’d been promised, they weren’t given access to healthcare and education. It seems like that’s what ultimately led to the circumstances that made migration to the northern cities so appealing, yeah?
BLOW: Well, there are a lot of impediments. At the end of the Civil War, in the years after, a quarter of all Black people in America got seriously ill or died. What little healthcare infrastructure they had collapsed with the Civil War. Some of the bigger plantations, just as a way of protecting property, would treat the enslaved people for certain illnesses. They’re displaced from all that. And the federal government’s saying to the states, “You have to take care of these people,” and the states are saying to the federal government, “What are you talking about? We have good white boys coming back limping. We have to get them into the hospital.”
And so no one stepped in. They’re freed into starvation. Into enemy territory. You don’t own anything. Where are you going to go? But somehow, even in the midst of all that, these pockets of survival and prosperity even, pop up, where Black people just say, “No one’s going to help us. We just have to do it ourselves.” And they create economies and communities. Part of the human spirit is that it wants to work, it wants to create something, it wants to be remembered. It wants prosperity, and so it will create it out of nothing. We should all be cheering that story. But that is not the way it happened. And in fact, all of those communities, one by one, got burned to the ground or dismantled in some other way. Because it was a threat to white supremacy. “How dare you succeed with all of this against you?”
The destination cities up North, meanwhile, beckoned with higher-paying work and a supposedly enlightened view on race.
BLOW: It was easy for white people in the North to look down their noses at white people in the South, and say, “You’re behaving boorishly, this is abhorrent.” But when Black people showed up in real numbers in the North and Midwest, they had to put their money where their mouth was. And they ended up using many of the very same tactics that the South had used: housing segregation, educational segregation, massive police oppression.
As Blow sees it, those tactics have created a 21st century that’s less different from the 20th than we’d like to think.
Hell apparently, the current mayor of Newark even used to chill with the Gods and Earths back in the day too so they got a mayor who’s not only For The People and By The People, but he also got Knowledge of Self too just like DC’s Marion Barry (Rest In Power)
You can’t say that about a lot of Black mayors these days. And so many of the murals in Newark are of Black faces too, imagine how powerful of a visual that is for the youth and even adults. Newark may be hood as hell but the community in that small city is very strong amongst us Black folks. Bruh, they even set aside land for you if you’re interested in acquiring some like WHAT!!?? 
