Backlash
What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America
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Narrated by:
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George Yancy
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By:
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George Yancy
About this listen
When George Yancy penned a New York Times op-ed entitled “Dear White America” asking white Americans to confront the ways that they benefit from racism, he knew his article would be controversial. But he was unprepared for the flood of vitriol in response.
The resulting blowback played out in the national media, with critics attacking Yancy in every form possible - including death threats - and supporters rallying to his side. Despite the rhetoric of a “post-race” America, Yancy quickly discovered that racism is still alive, crude, and vicious in its expression.
In Backlash, Yancy expands upon the original article and chronicles the ensuing controversy as he seeks to understand what it was about the op-ed that created so much rage among so many white readers. He challenges white Americans to rise above the vitriol and to develop a new empathy for the African American experience.
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Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights.
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Humane Advocacy in Law and Life
- By Patroclus Menoetius on 07-27-20
By: Kenji Yoshino
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Cunt (20th Anniversary Edition)
- By: Inga Muscio
- Narrated by: Inga Muscio
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fully revised anniversary edition of the classic testament to women's empowerment, Muscio explores with candidness and humor such traditional feminist issues as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women. Sending out a call for every woman to be the "Cuntlovin' Ruler of Her Sexual Universe", Muscio stands convention on its head by embracing the provocative and celebrating womanhood.
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Best book ever
- By Paula Daniels on 07-28-19
By: Inga Muscio
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Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching
- A Young Black Man's Education
- By: Mychal Denzel Smith
- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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How do you learn to be a Black man in America? For young Black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of Black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years.
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History through a Young Black Man's Eyes!! Perfect
- By Patricia Hambsch on 08-31-16
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The Death of Right and Wrong
- Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values
- By: Tammy Bruce
- Narrated by: Tammy Bruce
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A woman of contradictions, "a gun-toting, lesbian, feminist, voted-for-Reagan activist", Tammy Bruce is standing in line to become the next Ann Coulter. The "left wing" is engaged in an enormous conspiracy to make moral values relative, to undercut pride and patriotism in our country, to destroy Christian ideology at any cost, to pollute the minds of our youth by means of leftist professors who rewrite history, and to hijack the justice system through morally bankrupt trial lawyers.
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A thoughtful analytical review of moral relativism
- By Book and Movie Lover on 07-26-04
By: Tammy Bruce
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The Way of the Heathen
- Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
- By: Greta Christina
- Narrated by: Greta Christina
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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So you're an atheist. Now what? The way we deal with life - with love and sex, pleasure and death, reality and making stuff up - can change dramatically when we stop believing in gods, souls, and afterlives. When we leave religion - or if we never had it in the first place - where do we go? With her unique blend of compassion and humor, thoughtfulness and snark, Greta Christina most emphatically does not propose a single path to a good atheist life. She offers questions to think about, ideas that may be useful, and encouragement to choose your own way.
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Navigating the world outside of church
- By Scott Bresinger on 01-21-17
By: Greta Christina
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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The Opposite of Hate
- A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity
- By: Sally Kohn
- Narrated by: Sally Kohn
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences, learning how to talk civilly to people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Famously "nice", she even gave a TED Talk about what she termed emotional correctness. But these days, even Kohn has found herself wanting to breathe fire at her enemies. It was time, she decided, to look into the ugliness erupting all around us.
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Profoundly insightful, important, and digestible.
- By Scott on 04-24-18
By: Sally Kohn
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Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody
- The Making of a Black Theologian
- By: James H. Cone
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this powerful and passionate memoir - his final work - Cone describes the obstacles he overcame to find his voice, to respond to the signs of the times, and to offer a voice for those - like the parents who raised him in Bearden, Arkansas, in the era of lynching and Jim Crow - who had no voice. Recounting lessons learned both from critics and students, and the ongoing challenge of his models King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, he describes his efforts to use theology as a tool in the struggle against oppression and for a better world.
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You need to understand Cone to get his Theology
- By Adam Shields on 02-11-20
By: James H. Cone
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Notes of a Native Son
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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Masterful Essayist
- By Andre on 09-30-16
By: James Baldwin
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The Atheist Muslim
- A Journey from Religion to Reason
- By: Ali A. Rizvi
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Struggling to reconcile the Muslim society he was living in as a scientist and physician and the religion he was being raised in, Ali A. Rizvi eventually lost his faith. Discovering that he was not alone, he moved to North America and promised to use his new freedom of speech to represent the voices that are usually quashed before reaching the mainstream media - those of Atheist Muslims.
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An honest book
- By Naeem Rahim on 11-28-16
By: Ali A. Rizvi
What listeners say about Backlash
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Adam Shields
- 02-07-19
Many do not want to talk about racism.
Backlash that was written in response to the writing a 2015 editorial on racism at the NYT. The book opens, after a forward by Cornell West and an introduction by Yancy with that original editorial. Backlash is the type of book I needed to read. And while I think it is a book that many would benefit from, the editorial is much shorter and worth reading on its own. So even if you are not particularly interested in reading book about racism, I encourage reading the editorial.
George Yancy (a philosopher at Emory and not George Yancey, a Sociologist at University of North Texas, notice the difference in spelling of the last name) draws a parallel between his own participation and benefit in sexism because he is a man and the participation and benefit that all Whites receive because of racism in the US. He is making an explicit argument that racism (and sexism) are systemic and cultural. That the very best we can do is become anti-racist racists or anti-sexist sexists. We never stop being racist (or sexist) because at root racism and sexism are not individual positions, but cultural and systemic positions of the world around us. As much as we can work to decenter whiteness and try to be personally anti-racist, we will still do and think racist things (or sexist things) because that is the culture we swim in.
That basic point of the editorial I think is important here. We have not and will not ever ‘make it’ to be a perfectly safe or good white person. We will always have more to correct and work on. But also we will always be at least partially dangerous to the people of color around us. The danger to minorities around us is developed more fully in his fourth chapter of Backlash. I did not fully grasp this point prior to this book. I was able to grasp the historical damage of racism. I was able to grasp the theoretical cultural damage that systems place on minorities in the US. I was not able to see how that damage of racism also was current and personal to my own body. (The development of this needs to be read, I am not going to recreate the argument here.)
Short summary of the book: Chapter 1 is the essay and an introduction to what he is attempting to do. Chapter 2 is a recounting of the racist backlash he received. There is a real and significant trigger warning on this chapter for people of color. I am not sure I would recommend any non-white people read chapter 2, but I think pretty much all White people need to read it, because of how bracing and full of uncomfortable language it is. And there is a lot of language. If you listen to this on audiobook, do not listen to it without headphones if you are in public or around children. Chapter 3 breaks down the racist rhetoric of the second chapter, moves it to a broader context and helps explain it culturally, historically, linguistically, and philosophically. Chapter 4 is the where do we go from here chapter. It is the fourth chapter that he makes the point that we are still always at best anti-racist racists. But also that we cannot give up, because there is benefit in trying to continue to be anti-racist racists. The book is only about 170 pages. I spent four days reading it, but not because it was difficult to read the works, but difficult to process the content.
Yancy is a Christian, but this is not a book that explores faith, this is a book that explores racism. He claims hope and he calls for love, but those are not made as explicitly Christian arguments, although I believe from hearing him talk outside of the book that the hope and love are rooted in his Christian faith. Yancy is a Christian that lives in a world where sin has corrupted the world and where racism is not going to fully end.
I did not read the original essay prior to reading the book. I heard about the book and Yancy first from a podcast interview with Kristin Powers and Jonathan Merritt’s podcast FaithAngle. I put the book on my watch list, but only picked it up after a talk that Yancy gave in 2017 about the book at Wheaton College was contrasted with a pro-life talk by Ryan Scott Bomberger at Wheaton in November 2018. If you have not heard about the controversy, the student newspaper (The Record) gives details. The complaints contrasting Bomberger’s talk and Yancy’s talk, especially by Julie Roys really do serve to prove Yancy’s main thesis in the book, that regardless of our intentions, society is still rooted in racism and we cannot fully remove ourselves from it.
Roys focused not on the reasons for the complaints about Bomberger, that Bomberger explicitly denied that racism has any real power today. Nor did she pay attention to the main point of Yancy’s talk, about the racist backlash to his editorial, instead she focused on the use of expletives by Yancy. Yancy language was primarily quoting emails, messages and phone calls that he received in response to his editorial. Roys was not really concerned about the actual racist response, just that Yancy used expletives in a talk at Wheaton and that the theme of the book and talk was that racism is a systematic problem and not an individual one.
That response, focusing on racism as solely an individual problem really does need to be dealt with theologically by Christians, especially White Evangelicals. John Fea detailed some of the response to Jemar Tisby’s new book, The Color of Compromise. The response that Fea was detailing, followed very similar lines, objecting to racism as a systemic and cultural reality and not a concept rooted in individual animus against minorities. Bomberger, himself Black, reportedly said in an unrecorded Q&A that racism is not a significant problem any longer because the KKK was disorganized. That idea, that because cross burning are rare, so racism is no longer important, is hugely significant to how we, especially the corporate we of the Christian church, respond to racism.
Backlash is probably not the first book I was recommend to read about race. I would probably start with a less bracing book like Tisby’s Color of Compromise or So You Want to Talk About Race. But Christians believe in sin, and that sin in scripture is not solely individual. The Old Testament prophets are almost always talking about corporate sin. And the letters to the churches in Revelation are also addressing corporate sin. The conflict of the early church as detailed in the book of Acts is talking about cultural issues of sin as well as ethnic and cultural conflict between groups within the Christian church. If the only voices you are reading about racism are ones that are assuring you that you are doing just fine, or that there isn’t really a problem, you need to be reading a more diverse set of authors.
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- David B.
- 12-24-20
An unfortunate essay
Dr. Yancy’s gift to white America suffers from two weaknesses:
His personality blinds him to the limitation we all share as human beings - that ours is the correct and only perspective.
Although he makes an impassioned argument, it is built on a premise that I do not accept, and I suspect I am not alone.
He states his gift is delivered with love, but surely it is an essay delivered with unloving rage.
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