Zadie Smith is a terrific writer. Reading her novels can be exhausting. Her creative mind is hyper-active, running in a thousand directions at once. She always manages to pull it altogether in the end, but sometimes, as a reader, I just can’t keep up. Which is why I prefer her essays. The short format forces her to not to wander too far astray, although she will take you to many unexpected places along the way. This piece from the New York Review of Books is ostensibly about Obama, but it is really about the possibility of inclusive politics. As always, her writing entertains, uplifts and inspires.
One aside: her bits on black tribalism apply equally to its Jewish counterpart, which I’ve discussed many times on this blog:
For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community, expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, without real empathy or understanding, should not be repeated by a black politician when the white community is listening, even if ( \especially if) the criticism happens to be true (more than half of all black American children live in single-parent households). Our business is our business. Keep it in the family; don’t wash your dirty linen in public; stay unified.
Tags: US Politics