Summer of our discontent The age of certainty and the demise of discourse

Williams (Self-Portrait in Black and White) offers an unsatisfying assessment of how the U.S. abandoned its liberal ideals in favor of identity politics and right-wing populism. Endeavoring to discover why "furious, radical, and sophistic forces" have flourished "on both sides of the political and cultural spectrum"--a rupture which he says became insurmountable in the explosive summer of 2020, when the two sides of the culture wars split into alternate universes that can no longer communicate--Williams looks for answers in the "honeymoon phase of the Obama era" with its "squandered" post-racial promise, and in the subsequent turn toward identity politics through writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. There are some insights to be had here vis-à-vis how the Obama era inculcated its own blowback in the form of a populist Donald Trump, but Williams's analysis is most effective when he takes unexpected angles, like discussing how in France (where he currently resides) "le wokeisme" is rejected as antithetical to the country's "key principles of secularism." However, such keen insights are too often set aside in favor of revisiting notorious examples of cancel culture run amuck that have already been exhaustively hashed out by anti-woke critics. The result is a serious effort to take stock of the illiberalism besetting contemporary American culture that too often gets bogged down in its own anti-wokeism. (Aug.)

Examining the deeply rooted events contributing to the unrest of 2020. Cultural critic Williams has argued that although racism is real, race itself is not. In this set of linked essays, he again voices his hope that one day America will be truly integrated, "not as stereotypes or avatars of broad social categories, but as living individuals, in all our fullness and contradiction." There is much work to do to bring about that possibility, for the summer of 2020 was governed by the twin specters of the Covid-19 pandemic and George Floyd's murder. Both, Williams ventures, fueled the growing need to "revolt againstsomething," right-wingers seizing on the first to protest stay-at-home and masking orders, left-wingers seizing on the second to speak out against institutionalized racism. Yet, he wonders, why did this "mass attunement to racialized injustice" happen in the case of Floyd and not in the cases of, say, Ahmaud Arbery or Trayvon Martin? Williams advances provocative theories, one of which positions Floyd as a twofold figure, the one a man having a very bad day, the other a nearly Christlike symbol who bore the weight of America's original sin by dying as he did. Williams reserves some of his criticism for aspects of cancel culture and left wokeness, such as the "total lack of skepticism" that surrounded actor Jussie Smollett's invented account of being racially attacked in Chicago, a hoax, Williams holds, that robbed the left of a certain amount of moral high ground in the age of Trump. Throughout, Williams keeps a gimlet eye on the American obsession with race and remains optimistic--"I am convinced that the authentically color--blind society is the final destination every Western society must assiduously direct itself -toward"--although he acknowledges the difficulty of arriving at that day. A thoughtfully reasoned contribution to the literature of race and racism in our time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.