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Rating: 
Summary: A disappointing effort
Review: Sure, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But so is the road to mediocrity. Kennell Jackson's question-and-answer "America Is Me" is a fresh, spirited effort to make black history lively and accessible. But Jackson's book, modeled on Kenneth C. Davis' wonderful "Don't Know Much About History," suffers from arbitrary inclusions and exclusions, a tendency toward feel-good revisionism, and, worse, a consistent failure to link events of different eras, to show how one movement or character inspired one decades later. There's a striking lack of long-range vision. Jackson never addresses, directly or indirectly, the overriding questions about black America: Why hasn't black advancement mirrored that of other ethnic groups? Why did the civil rights movement fail to achieve economic equality for African-Americans?The reader who makes it through "America Is Me" -- which reads quite easily despite its failings -- will have trouble reconciling Jackson's chronicle of achievement with the enormous difficulties facing black America. Problems begin early in the chronology, as Jackson, a Stanford University associate professor of history, appears to accept the implausible claims of historical Afrocentrism: "[N]ew evidence suggests that ancient Greek thought owes a debt to Egypt and, hence, to Africa," he writes. "It is now clear, for instance, that Greek gods derived from Egyptian deities. And the Greek language owes some of its vocabulary to Egyptian." Those casual assertions are flatly untrue, writes classicist scholar Mary Lefkowitz in "Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History," a slim, authoritative book (that appeared the same month and from, ironically, the same publishing house as "America Is Me") that shows precisely how some modern black scholars -- the same ones Jackson quotes and cites -- deliberately misinterpret and invent facts to claim Egyptian credit for Greek thought and culture. You'd think that an impartial history book would, at the least, re! port Afrocentrists' assertions as dubious. But Jackson (qualifying the claims with only the occasional "Sharp clashes of opinion have erupted over these points" and the like) assimilates a broad range of Afrocentrism, for instance listing Hannibal and Saint Augustine in a register of "great male movers and shakers of Old Africa." Lefkowitz explains that these North African natives were Carthiginian or Roman, not black. Far more damaging than this type of misinformation is Jackson's frequent omission of an issue's historical significance. "Nixon and Blacks were never on the same wavelength," he writes, citing the president's failure to appoint black officials or support integration efforts. Not a word about how Nixon's campaigns and governance pitted whites ("us") against blacks ("them"), driving a divisive wedge that Republicans continue to exploit. A cursory reference to a 1995 book on repairing black-Jewish relations highlights the absence of discussion of those relations elsewhere in the book. Jackson mentions Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" remark, calling it "morally reprehensible," but provides no context for the controversy. Elsewhere the most interesting information is left out. "During his first term, Reagan named only one Black to a high post -- the outstanding lawyer Samuel Riley Pierce Jr. as secretary of housing and urban development," Jackson writes, neglecting to note that the only achievement of the "outstanding" Pierce (who was so invisible to Reagan that the president greeted him as "Mr. Mayor" at a 1981 public function) was to escape indictment for creating the late-'80s HUD scandal. And Jackson spends two and a half pages debunking "The Bell Curve" without addressing a far more provocative question: Why has the political climate shifted so much that discredited questions about race and IQ have become more legitimate? A few times Jackson assigns *too much* importance to events and characters: Many characters are introduced as "one of the greatest --- in American history." For example, ! a page is devoted to Olaudah Equiano's 1789 slave narrative (for some reason, Jackson omits Equiano's English name), calling it "an eighteenth-century classic that would become as influential as Voltaire's 'Candide' . . . and Benjamin Franklin's 'Autobiography.'" Now, it's one thing to call a book interesting and important -- which the 1789 memoir was -- and another to make a hyperbolic, patently false claim for it. Isn't it enough that the book was popular and influential when published and is still occasionally cited in current texts? And "America Is Me"'s haphazard distribution of facts -- a cascade of trivia on one topic, virtually nothing on the next -- belies a general carelessness. Lynching gets just seven paragraphs, immediately following six on a turn-of-the-century bicyclist. Only three paragraphs discuss baseball's Negro Leagues -- and there's nothing at all on how Jackie Robinson's ascent to the majors signaled black baseball's sad demise. Jackson devotes a page and a half to Terry McMillan's novel "Waiting to Exhale" but gives only a cursory mention of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple." "America Is Me" isn't a total loss. There's a need for books with a non-narrative approach to history, and Jackson does ask some incisive questions ("What is the status of the word *nigger* today?" he asks, citing its use in "Pulp Fiction" and rap music). But Black History Month deserves a cleaner, more comprehensive book than this.
Rating: 
Summary: Award Winner
Review: The Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) chose this book as a 1997 Nonfiction Honor Book. The awards recognize excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors
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