Metaracism

Starred review from January 22, 2024
Sociologist Rose (The Hip Hop Wars) demonstrates in this astute critique how the mainstream idea of racism as rooted in individual bias masks a complex system of oppression. Highlighting the dynamic interplay between laws and informal practices that together lead people to get “caught up in the system,” Rose traces interconnected anti-Black policies in housing, schools, banking, criminal justice, and media. She identifies the “metaeffects” of these policies as a trio of functions—containment (via segregation and redlining), extraction (the removal of wealth and assets, including the government seizure of over 16 million acres of Black-owned farmland since 1920), and punishment (such as when minor infractions are enforced against Black people that are not enforced against white people). Examining three highly publicized cases of contemporary racism—the slayings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the jailing of Kelley Williams-Bolar for lying about her address so her children could attend a better school—that were largely presented in the press as grounded in the racist behaviors of individual malefactors, Rose tracks the broad policies (such as generations of discriminatory housing and lending) which served as backstories to these events. Marshalling extensive evidence into a lucid and powerful narrative, Rose provides an essential new look at American inequality. Even readers well versed in the topic will have their eyes opened by this cogent analysis.

Starred review from January 1, 2024
An academic exposes the inner workings of systemic racism in accessible, concrete terms. Throughout her three decades of experience teaching about racism, Rose--director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University and author of Black Noise and The Hip Hop Wars--constantly heard others denying the existence of the racist systems that she had experienced throughout her life. She began to suspect that these denials were part of a larger system that denied Black people's realities. "Compelling stories that expose the workings of systemic racism were not...simply missing," she writes; "they were created and then disappeared over and over." In her frustration, she "half-jokingly" told her husband, "I wish there were a handbook on systemic racism," and her husband encouraged her to write it. The result is this highly structured, deeply practical analysis of systemic racism. After defining a system as "an interdependent, interconnected group of components, parts or elements that work as a whole," Rose explains that the "metaeffects" of American systemic racism are the "containment, extraction, and punishment of Black people." The author illustrates each of these metaeffects using case studies, beginning with Trayvon Martin's murder, which the author connects to both redlining and the media's "role in reproducing and tightening the connection between Black people and criminality while simultaneously overrepresenting whites as victims and defenders of law." Particularly interesting is her analysis of Kelley Williams-Bolar, a Black woman imprisoned for "stealing education" after she falsified her address so she could enroll her children in the school serving her father's neighborhood. Throughout this trenchant book, Rose's analysis is rigorous, insightful, and lucid, and her language glimmers with lyrical clarity. She infuses every page with passion and expertise, backing up each argument with an impressive amount of research. A brilliant guide to a systemic malady that cannot be denied.

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