Book Review: Why are they angry with us?: Essays on race

Why Are They Angry With Us?: Essays on Race is a stunningly poignant and personal book by an exceptionally thoughtful academic, Larry Davis, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh. It isn’t incidental or inconsequential that the author of this exceptional examination of race in America is a social worker (as well as a social psychologist). Indeed, there is something about the way that Davis is able to see race and racism in contemporary society that demonstrates the distinctive analytical and empathic gifts of social work practice, gifts that he has distilled into eight clear, courageous, and often moving chapters on our country’s ongoing obsession with racial discrimination.

This book gets its title from a question that Davis asked himself when he was still only 6 or 7 years old and growing up in a “thriving Black community,” Saginaw, MI, in the 1950s. “If we were slaves,” his prepubescent self thought, “then why are they (whites) angry with us?” (p. 35). If anything, Blacks should have been the ones seething over chattel slavery. Whites, he thought, had little justifiable right or reason to be angry at descendants of the African slaves they brought to America against their will. Even as a child, Davis could already recognize some of the ironies and inconsistencies of the nation’s racial order.

The book’s chapters represent differently pitched attempts to contextualize and elaborate upon that titular question. Davis boldly cuts across genres and disciplinary formations, using autobiographical anchors to frame a social analysis that tries to make sense of several interrelated aspects of America’s commitment to racial thinking—and to racist practices. Davis takes the time to explain to readers how scholars such as Leon Festinger (cognitive dissonance), Charles Cooley (the looking-glass self), and Kurt Lewin (on group-based self-hatred) provided him with conceptual tools (or the beginnings of tools) that he found particularly handy in his scholarly engagements with the vexing question of racism. Davis offers clear and compelling summaries of these scholars’ theoretical interventions and shows how they proved invaluable to his own thinking as a social scientist—and to his own self-reflective attempt to make sense, political and existentially, of living as a Black man in America.

Davis offers memorable takes on everything from “survivor’s guilt” among the Black middle class to the potential dangers of “the seductiveness of resiliency theory,” from an extended discussion of the rise and fall of a famous African American vacation spot (Idlewild) to a careful unpacking of colorism, past and present, within the Black community. On the latter topic, besides making sense of political figures, such as President Barack Obama, some of the most powerful and revealing passages of the book are about Davis’s mother, a woman who could pass as White, which translated into some very interesting exchanges with the outside White world whenever mother and son traveled together. Davis explains how his mother’s life was an extension of the many trials and challenges faced by her older relatives in southern Alabama, including a White father who was rarely discussed around the house. “Throughout my entire life,” Davis writes,

I never heard anyone inside or outside of the family make explicit note of the fact that my mother looked in any respect racially different than her siblings …. There was complete silence on my mother’s racial identity; it was more than a family secret, but rather something akin to an omission of consciousness. (p. 20)

Davis describes this as “a larger societal conspiracy of silence” (p. 20), one that this piercing little book does its part to help expose and dismantle, showing us many of the ways in which we are each implicated—differently, but decidedly—in this ongoing conspiracy. This is a silence that only works because it is in cahoots with a capacity for rendering our racial logics invisible, too. We use race as a short hand for seeing across difference, but in ways that often mean we can’t actually see one another at all—at least not fully, not as equally and undeniably human.

Well-trained social workers, at their best, can see those members of society usually rendered invisible by logics of racial exclusion, seeing them in three-dimensional ways that don’t reduce racialized subjects to caricatures of cultural or biological inferiority. In this searing new book, Davis shows how and why that social workerly way of seeing can start at an early age and be nourished by a passionate commitment to asking questions that others are afraid to ask—or that they can’t even formulate as a consequence of taking the presuppositions of other, less-inclusive questions for granted. Davis has written a book about race in America that is, page-for-page, a powerful testament to the value of social work sensibilities to antiracist practice.

To hear some tell it, America has recently gone from a nation tormented by “White guilt” to one awash in “White rage,” the alleged consequence of a politically corrected cultural landscape that has Whites (and White men, in particular) feeling dissed and disenfranchised at the expense of “special interests.” Why Are They Angry With Us? does a masterful job of placing such race-based anger in historical perspective while giving readers a sense of how that anger might most effectively be explained and confronted.