Bill Cosby
Once upon a time—what seemed like a hundred years ago even in 2022—Bill Cosby was one of the ultimate iconic symbols of how racial divide could be crossed on an individual level and applied to the collective concept of America. Cosby had been the star of the number-one rated television show in the country for most of the 1980’s and his laid-back gentlemanly character seem to reflect the actor himself. Cosby’s ultimate downfall became the stuff of legendary collapse of titans, but the tide actually began to turn against him in the era outlined in the essay “This Is How We Lost to the White Man” in which, beginning in the early part of the millennium, Cosby commences on a series of public attacks against members of his own race would were and continued to be echoed routinely by the whitest and most conservative of radio and Fox News pundits.
Michelle Obama
The title of the essay “American Girl” refers to Michelle Obama, the first African American First Lady of the United States, wife to Pres. Barack Obama, and a force of nature in her own right. The focus of what might otherwise be a routine celebrity profile in one of the country’s most successful periodicals was the almost literally instantaneous transformation of Michelle from empowered professional to Angry Black Woman at a political rally in which she asserted, “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country…”
Malcolm X
Truth be told, Malcolm X pops up as a character through reference throughout this book. This comes as little surprise since the controversial civil rights activist at the time of the composition of these essays was quite possibly at his most famous since he died and his most popular ever. This is a fact which is reflected in the title of the essay which puts Malcolm front and center: “The Legacy of Malcolm X: Why His Vision Lives on in Barack Obama.” And, of course, the title itself pretty much indicates the subject of said essay.
Civil War Storytellers
In “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” the author elliptically answers his own question: because so many of those telling the story of the Civil War leave the slaves over whom the war was fought—accept it, already—almost entirely out of the tale. The individuals who make up this collective concept of character is not limited merely to historians, though they take their lumps as well. The storytellers that come under the hammer range from the creative talents involved in producing The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to the narrator of Ken Burns PBS series The Civil War—Shelby Foote—to Bruce Catton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who for decades was considered the dean of Civil War historians.
